Hmm,
Other than the obviously implied reasons, I wonder why hyper-vivid frightening predation/being hunted-type dreams are so common?
I mean if you believe some of the pundits here, we're separated by an insurmountable gulf of time from the thoughts, reactions and feelings of our primitive ancestors, and it certainly isn't anything most of us actually experience in reality...
Is the "genetic memory" of being prey/competing with fellow predators really so strong that we relive it some nights? If so, what determines whether or not a dream will be hazy/abstract, hyper-vivid/realistic, or lucid "Oh I know I'm dreaming"?
One of my most frightening dreams was vaguely similar to the beginning of Resident Evil 2. I dream I wake up in a basement, the smell of vomit, piss and old sweat gaggingly thick in the air. My head has a golfball sized knot on the back of it, and I find myself going up the basement stairs and out into a commercial building-type lobby to get some fresh air, but the place looks like WW-III was fought inside it. I find a dead security guard with his pistol still in its holster and immediately liberate the entire belt and cinch it around my waist, then check the magazine of the 9mm. Finding it full, I pick up the Maglite lying next to his body (dunno why, there's bright light shining in every window), and cautiously slip out the front door.
The street in front of the building I woke up in looks like a snapshot of the LA riots. Overturned & crashed vehicles, including multi-car pileups and many vehicles just abandoned with doors open and some of these with streaks of blood on the windshield or driver's side windows. Small fires are smoldering here and there, and the air reeks of burnt tire and burning oil/unidentified car fluids. The buildings looks relatively untouched, but here and there there's a vehicle crashed through a large store window, or a broken glass door.
So at this point I normally focus obsessively on the near-total lack of noise. Other than the odd pop or hiss from a smoldering fire, or the rare fragment of glass falling out of broken windows/doors once in a great while there's NOTHING. No vehicle sounds, no voices, no machinery...notta. Not even a damned dog barking or pigeon cooing. No sign of any either, which I ALWAYS find nearly inconceivable (as anyone who's ever lived in a large city would. Pigeons are as endemic as flies on shit)
Then the dream usually shifts up-tempo a bit. I hear something moving somewhere deep inside one or two of the buildings whose open yawning doors I pass, but instead of thinking something like "Hey, maybe I should call out. Could be someone who can tell me WTH IS GOING ON", or "Maybe I should go try and find who's making that noise?" I don't so much have a concrete thought so much as an overwhelming feeling, screaming at me that I do NOT WANT TO BE NOTICED. The rustling, crunch of broken glass, squeak of doors moving gets more common as I pick up the pace and pass more buildings, but still don't see anything. I reach a large intersection full of mangled cars and long lines of abandoned cars stretching off into the distance down each of the 4 streets meeting. Always end up going straight ahead, and slightly uphill (no clue why)...
After an indeterminate amount of walking I'm passing a large motionless/abandoned vehicle (sometimes a van, sometimes a commercial truck, sometimes a big rig.) Basically anything you'd have to make an effort to look in and see the entire interior. Inevitably there's a strange-ass sound from inside. Strange enough I'm always completely confused/baffled as to what/who is making the sound. Sometimes its a sort of gurgling hiss, sometimes a mewling congested noise, sometimes a low growl or even a quiet whimper + sobbing-like noise.
Of course I crane my head to look inside, more curious than on edge. The sound is just so damned strange I'm like "What the HELL is making that noise?" The windows are always rolled most of the way up, with just about an inch/inch and a half at the top open. That's when the fucked up, bulging-eyed, fish-belly white with tear-like streaks of dried blood at the corners of the eyes, ears, nose and mouth face smacks itself against the glass, pressing up against it like a kid pressing their face against glass to look inside somewhere. For some reason the slightly familiar motion and slightly mashed pressed-against-the-glass face freaks me out more than how screwed up the face is. I just stand there like an idiot for a couple of seconds. Until the "screwed up guy" starts smacking his head against the glass, over and over and over until it starts to crack. No grasping pounding or clawing hands, no major body movements, just the side of the head hitting the glass with a solid meaty kind of thud almost in a rough beat.
That's when I always notice "the guy" is buckled in his seatbelt, and is flailing and kicking uselessly, unable to figure out how to free him/itself. That's when I start hearing a major chorus of similar sounds. Several dozen heads hitting windshields and side windows. Many mewling, gagging, hacking and wheezing noises all mixed together. I of course bolt, but always remember passing a plump black woman sawing her neck back and forth on the broken glass of the driver's side windows. Her skin's chalky and the huge uneven gashes in her neck and chin aren't bleeding. That's usually when I hit a dead run.
Normally the dream sort of fast forwards here a bit. Not enough to break the sense of it being real. Just a vague impression of running a long time down the road, chorus of freaky noises and being afraid. Then I find myself on the fringes of a conflict between what looks like a few gangbangers + cops + 1-2 guys in army fatigues and several dozen/a hundred zombies of all shapes/ages/sizes.
The carnage is awful. I always gag, sometimes so vividly I wake up sort of heaving. If I don't wake up though I find several of the zombies start staggering towards me, and an overweight white or latino cop shouts at me to get my ass over to them and help. I crash into a couple of zombies, feel my balls try to crawl up into my body cavity as I can FEEL clammy slimy cold hands grasping at me, with one or two getting a half-assed grip momentum carries me out of, until finally I get to the wooden sawhorses they're using to create a crude perimeter, put one hand on the top and vault it like the chain-link fences we use to jump in my old neighborhood all the time (everyone's back and most of the front yards were surrounded by them).
The battle isn't cool, it isn't fun, can feel the heavy cue-ball in my stomach. Have to keep wiping my hands on my shirt so I don't drop my gun, and almost have a heart attack from my heart trying to beat its way out of my chest the first time shaking hands have to change to a fresh clip.
Sometimes (rarely) at that point I realize I'm dreaming. If so I sorta have a sick sort of fun with whats happening until I'm inevitably confronted with what would be a fatal endgame and wake just before I'd get killed. More often I don't and this desperate, frantic-ass battle in which I'm being sustained by my furious frustration with the idiot gangbanger shooting their pistols sideways, and the cops insisting on pumping round after round into the oncoming zombies torsos, despite me and the 1-2 military guys yelling at them to shoot them in the head, and demonstrating only headshots drop them.
Finally we're almost completely surrounded, my bullets are more than half-gone, all the gangbangers and half the cops have been dragged over the barricade and the zombies begin fighting over the still-alive victims who are screaming/begging/crying for help...which switches to begging for us to kill them in a few seconds.
One of the military guys generally yells at me and the handful of other survivors to run for the Pawn Shop a bit down the street. He wedges a grenade next to a car's gastank by the flap over the nozzle-entry and pulls the pin, then runs like hell to catch up with us. The car explodes, the guy goes down, (not sure if its the force of the explosion or cuz something hit him fragment-wise or something)...but he gets dogpiled before he can get to his feet. The other military guy wants to go back for him, but the couple of cops hold him back. Between the zombies swarming the bodies at the barricade, those holding their arms up as if protecting their faces from the flames of the car and backing off from it, and the few on our side of the burning car being occupied eating the military guy, we manage to get into the pawn shop without just "busting a window" like one of the cops suggest, then lock it up behind us.
Normally the dream ends here, if not it goes on and on in this vein. Or it switches to me trying to get home, no matter how insane that is.
So thats my hyper-vivid zombie dream.
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Originally Posted by bassman
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