The Sleep of the Dead

Apologies to George Romero if I've just nicked the title of his next movie, but this is a post about yet another of my zombie dreams, so it's kind of appropriate...

The weirdest thing, within one of these dreams, is that I'll sometimes have a moment of realisation - not just that I'm dreaming, but that I'm dreaming something again. When this happens, I immediately resolve to do something differently, just to see what happens. And it's moments like that which lead to some seriously weird stuff.

I may or may not have previously mentioned that my dreams often slip between 'reality' (that of the dream itself, at any rate) and 'videogame' or 'movie' of the same setting... So, one minute I'm experiencing these events myself, then next I'm watching them on a screen, occasionally directing events as the player (one could say that's actually a sad reflection on videogames today, in which you spend about as much time watching cutscenes as you do actually playing). Every so often, the dream will flip between the two even as it switches between being 'real' and 'unreal', which can make it even more fun or even more confusing.

Anyway, before I go too far on that tangent, last night's main feature revolved around that old favourite, zombies in and around a large shopping centre. I don't remember how it began - all I can remember now is what happened from the point at which the zombies broke in, and the people tried to escape. Evidently all these crowds of people had been quite happily living in the shopping centre for a while - making use of the restaurants, in particular, as the world figuratively burned outside - so, when the zombies found their way in, the crowds stampeded in every direction.

The moment of realisation was that I was pretty sure that I'd had this dream before... though, upon reflection, I'm still not sure whether I, or the version of me in the dream world had dreamt it. Everyone was going to head toward the lift shafts and attempt to climb to the top of the tower part of the shopping centre in the hope that, even if the zombies could climb after them, they'd be easier to pick off at a distance in the shafts.

Quite a sensible idea... but one which didn't take into account the fact that these were the oh-so-fashionable fast zombies, as seen in 28 Days/Weeks Later, and the more recent instalments of the Resident Evil and the '...of the Dead' movie franchises. Not only could they climb, but they were faster and more assured (or perhaps less concerned for their own safety) than the living flesh they were pursuing.

Part way up the tower, I saw an alternative exit. Knowing that everyone who climbed the tower was going to be caught and killed, I decided to leap out and make a run for it. Someone else had the same idea and, after a brief parkour sequence - jumping over the rooftops and avoiding zombies - we were on the home straight into town and away from the current centre of zombie activity.

At this point, I knew I was in a videogame... not least because I could switch from 'Third Person, Over the Shoulder, Forward View' to 'Third Person, Over the Shoulder, Backward View' at the touch of a button... And this was quite a useful feature as the name of the game was 'Outrun the Zombies'. It was very much like one of those RE4 quicktime events where - in the Wii version, at least - you must waggle the controller to help Leon outrun a boulder.

But the dubious fun didn't end there. Imagine if there was a zombie outbreak in Grand Theft Auto. As you're running away, you spy a nice-looking vehicle. You jump in, you drive off... mowing down zombies along the way. The other player picked out a nice, sporty car, but I thought I'd seen something better.... Somehow, though, when I started driving my chosen vehicle, I realised it was nothing more than a motor scooter. Not exactly ideal for escaping hordes of the (fleet-footed) undead.

After a brief bit of confusion where I tried to find the other player, to ensure we were both heading in the same direction, only to find that my preferred direction led to a large stone wall, we headed off, out of the city and on to the next part of this adventure...

...At which point, I woke up.

It looked like a bright, sunny day when I first got out of bed but, almost immediately after my shower, the skies had turned dark and grey. Whenever the rain lets up for a while, there are more stretches of blue sky, but they don't seem to last long, and the rain has been pretty torrential... Mind you, April is always like this...