Dreaming of 4000

I dreamt my brother and I were in some sandbox-like video game, like Grand Theft Auto — or at least we were in a world that behaved that way. We entered an abandoned building via some odd roof entrance and looked around. The walls had been whitewashed years ago but the place was still a mess.

One section of wall behind an old vending machine hadn’t been fully painted, and I saw some old text there that betrayed what this building used to be: a prison. Somehow I knew that would trigger a plot point, where a lone insane escapee in a skull mask would come up an old gated elevator, attack us, then warn his gang and start a chase sequence.

But this was still a real-enough world where I thought, “there’s no reason to wait for that to happen. We should just leave and avoid all that.” But no matter how much I insisted, Kurt wouldn’t come along. He was locked into the NPC role of triggering this event.

We escaped the prisoner, but as foretold, the chase began like one of those sequences in Gears of War or Call of Duty: enemies rode alongside our car and had to be shot before they could open fire. One enemy used a weapon that was part taser, part still-living beaver. (Electricity sparked between its teeth.)

My brother had finally overworked himself to the point that he was losing his mind. We had gone out to eat when he started to do some incredibly childish things, like releasing the parking brake when we were both sitting in the backseat of the car eating (I had to steer us into a wall to avoid other parked cars) and quoting Soupy Sales sketches to cashiers and others who had no idea what he was talking about. I got really worried about him and tried to get him to snap out of it, and he just became distant and muttered. Then it returned. I told my parents about it and they cried.

We got lost on UCLA’s campus, which became this sprawling, multi-leveled concrete hike, with many tiny pavilions and stores built at odd angles off of too-steep and too-narrow stairways. Still lost, we passed athletes training for summer games. We had to walk through a sandy volleyball court to continue. We almost interrupted the game, but they were able to continue despite our presence. I was relieved when the coach cheered his players because it meant he had ignored us.

My brother parkoured over a dangerous wrought-iron fence with spines on the top rail, and I yelled at him that I couldn’t follow. Luckily there was a ridiculously pitched concrete stairway that circled the fence to a gate, which he found and opened. The stairway didn’t meet the seam in the concrete walkway at all and I had to leap across it. Through the crack you could see the tops of clouds and the city far below.

We ended up in a museum where I lost track of my brother. I wandered into a butterfly and fish exhibit where tiny glass bowls held exotic fish much too large for them. I wanted to touch them but was afraid they’d panic and leap from their tiny home onto the floor.

The walls of this wing of the museum were alive with small pink mating butterflies. Slowly, the male and female butterflies’ wings would fold to meet each other, then fold sectionally up like an umbrella or origami, revealing the undersides of their wings which weren’t pink but opalescent and dark. Their wings would bend upon each other until their bodies were lost within them, and suddenly they would twirl and twirl. Then they relaxed and it started again. It never looked the same twice.

I ran into a female friend in the wing and in greeting I kissed her on the lips, thinking immediately after that I shouldn’t have done that.

My brother reappeared and the three of us left the museum down an impossibly-narrow flight of stairs made of stacked cement bricks or blocks designed to look just like books. As you descended, a poem that was written on the spines of the books could be read. I thought I recognized it, but upon waking I do not. We got to a verse about falling “down, down, down” and I thought about my brother’s mental collapse and cried. The books were loose. A crowd of people was coming up the narrow stairs as we went down. I didn’t think it would hold all of us. My alarm went off.

Last night I had a dream inspired by Halo 3: ODST and probably a little of Penny Arcade’s Automata. It was a future in which holographic interfaces were so prevalent that they were more or less accepted as other people, and stories about people falling in love with holographic AIs were not terribly fringe anymore. Those people had to overcome similar prejudices as gays or minorities.

My dream centered around a woman hologram who was being accused of a crime it was impossible for holograms to commit. I was a detective.

It was the end of the world. Most of Earth seemed deserted; maybe everyone else was dead, but I didn’t see many other people at all. I remember cars parked in — or wrecks littering? — a football stadium. The silence was sporadically pierced by looters, either alone or in small groups. Scott was with me and I was furious that this was all that was left of humanity. One man tried to break the window of an electronics store. He was going to steal a television even though there hadn’t been signal in months. I tried to get in front of him, to clothesline him as he ran up, but I was weak, powerless. I couldn’t lift my arms, I couldn’t open my eyes fully.

The scene changed. I was lying diagonal on the floor of some white box apartment. There was the lip of an extended windowsill, coming out of the wall, more than a few feet wide. Reclining on this lip was a girl who looked like Linda Blair from The Exorcist, in the same white nightdress. She hissed at me. I blinked to look away.

The scene didn’t change. I was still lying on that carpeted floor. In the far corner I saw light dancing — a TV on, perhaps a small fire in the room. The girl’s head had changed. Now she was this shrieking, white-haired thing with pinhole eyes and the wrinkles and complexion of a bleached, dried apple doll. She stared and stared, screaming without sound. I forced myself awake.

This weekend I was introduced to the idea that what I’m experiencing aren’t nightmares, but night terrors. Last night, just as I hit the edge of unconsciousness, I heard someone in my pitch-black room loudly brushing their teeth. Brushing isn’t scary in and of itself, but I knew it was in the room, and that it wasn’t real, and that I couldn’t move to dispel it. I think I moaned and tried lifting my head with great effort, but that only made the sound louder and seem closer.

Leonard, an unnamed girl and I were all friends living in New Zealand. There had been a series of zombie attacks in our metropolis, but rather than evacuate or take military action, the overwhelming response from the population was to demonstrate against the zombies with picket signs and rallies. The zombie infection wasn’t as catching as it is in movies, where whole cities can turn in a matter of days — here it was much reduced, and it was as if we all believed zombie-ism was spread by lack of understanding.

Zombies existed in three stages. Stage one was infection, which worked much slower than one would expect: it was possible to be infected and function perfectly normally for weeks. Your appearance would deteriorate, but those who knew you might think you just weren’t taking care of yourself. You’d probably have the same feeling, until you started to notice zombie-like cravings.

Stage two was full-on zombie, as you’d see in movies, although a little faster-moving. You were crazed and presented a bodily threat to anyone around you, although mere injury (even bite wound) from a zombie didn’t mean guaranteed infection. It was more like 1 in 25.

Stage three was a barely-mobile creature, accompanied by putrefaction. This worn-out skeletal zombie, noticeable by its cover of swarming flies, would push deeper into civilization if not stopped, and find a place to hide. Its body acted as a pheromonal beacon to encourage other zombies to press onward into inhabited areas. This zombie was only dangerous if disturbed, but was easy to kill due to its rotted state. Otherwise it wouldn’t move from its curled-up position in attics, basements, rooftops, etc.

Our crazy cubiform city (that resembled a Lego set more than a real city) had rallies and marches going on round the clock, made of thousands and thousands of people with banners and signs. Businesses had all closed, and the streets were clogged with protestors, making it impossible to leave.

A small contingent of zombies (maybe 40 or 50) was approaching a park downtown, and this was a good place for a stump speech, thought our mayor, who happened to look like Nichelle Nichols from Star Trek V. She talked about civic pride and not giving up, and also passed out some pain medication in case anyone was injured — I guess with the idea that it was better to spend your last minutes doped up, if it got to that point. (I took my pill right away, thinking I didn’t want to wait 20 minutes for it to take effect while I bled to death in 5.)

The zombies appeared over a hill and charged. Lines broke, there was hysteria. It wasn’t solvable with protest signs, but people found out too late. Leonard and I made a break for it and crossed wide, deserted areas surrounded by madness: parking lots, people’s yards and backstreets. I complained about the distance, and Leonard said, “try doing this in wool underwear. I thought it was going to be cold today.”

We finally got to Leonard’s car and started threading our way through back roads, trying to leave the city, but it was always either blocked by picketers or stampeding crowds. Finally we broke through, and I thought, “oh no. We got away… but I’ve seen the trailer to this movie, and there’s way more to it than this. There’s a part where I have to fight one of the rotted ones. So this isn’t over yet.”

Of course Leonard goes, “We have a car, so we can leave whenever we want. We have to go back and find ______,” our friend. I argue with him, but realize if he wanted he could take the car and leave me stranded in the city, so I have to help him.

I think the dream just skipped forward to another scene, where I was lurking in some clutter-choked attic, calling out our friend’s name. I don’t know where Leonard was. Then, behind some old chairs and a trunk, I heard buzzing, and saw a cloud of flies illuminated by my flashlight. I knew I needed to kill what was behind there, to prevent more from coming. As I approached, I saw it was the remains of a young teenager, maybe 15 years old, and it rapidly stood up when I saw it. Instinctively I grabbed its neck, thinking the fastest way to stop it would be to tear its head off, but I found it was much less rotted than I assumed it would be — this was like fighting a regular, healthy kid wearing gray body paint.

I woke up and checked Twitter to see if anything like the apocalypse had happened in real life.

I dreamt I went back to LA and re-befriended everyone I left behind there because of arguments in the past. I cried. My other ex was there too, and her response to me coming back was a fist-pound.

Kurt was sitting there with all of them at a picnic table, at a Starbucks.

Last night I had a lot of anxiety for some reason. There is a muscle that contracts in the ear — I’m doing it right now — that makes a sound of blood rushing. For whatever reason you have to have your eyes closed to flex it. That blood rushing sound was keeping me awake last night. Whenever it happened, it was just so loud. And it seemed to happen right as I was losing consciousness.

As is typical for those kinds of dreams, I’m lying in bed with the covers over my head and I can’t move. And I’m hearing something I don’t want to, or I’m aware of a unwanted presence or compulsion. At first it was a buzzing, then there was something in the room — I was close enough to being awake that what I was seeing was taken directly from the last thing I saw before closing my eyes. So it seemed very real.

My brother and I were in New Orleans, in a plantation mansion adjacent to a bog. We were joking around in one of the bathrooms: the toilet was a large metal bowl set into the floor in the doorway. Above, in the door frame, was an inverted metal bowl with holes — a shower head. There was nowhere to sit, you just stood in the floor bowl and let it fly.

A commotion outside interrupted our fun. In the streets, people were running away from something. Kurt and I looked out the window to see three or four zombies lurching towards the runners. They hadn’t noticed the mansion yet, but there would be more of them.

Kurt and I raced around the gigantic house trying to barricade it, but as is so common in dreams, the details fail you. Doors were missing, one wing of the building hadn’t been completed yet so whole walls weren’t yet in place, and the whole mansion happened to face the swamp itself, the likely origin of the zombies.

I started thinking of ways to at least barricade the finished parts of the house, but we’d run out of time. The only consolation was that we knew the zombies would enter on the swamp side, so at least some of the hallways and stairs would make good chokepoints.

When they finally came, and we fought, there weren’t that many of them. I think I only saw three, and they went down relatively easy, but again there was a scramble for weapons. All I had was a fireplace poker. I felled a zombie behind an antique-looking padded sofa, and its head skittered off, sliding on the marble floor before coming to rest.

An overlay appeared in my vision, text, saying something about how this was a “spitting skull” and that you have to watch out for these. As if to demonstrate, the skull forced about a pint of saliva or water out between its clenched teeth, which sprayed everywhere in a wide cone.

Last night I put my powered nightmare armor to the test. If I’m lucid dreaming and I start to have a nightmare, I envision myself encased in an eight-foot-tall mecha-style suit. I could not sleep last night at all — there’s a dream state where I’m semi-controlling the dream, but it always goes in directions I don’t want it to go, and that’s where I was last night.

I started dreaming about this man made up like a clown, with a broad smile and pointy chin so exaggerated that the lower half of his face looked like a huge letter T. When he appeared, he did so with a violin flourish, and proceeded to shake the bejeezus out of someone in the scene, to shake them so hard that eventually their neck broke.

I was getting to the phase of sleep where that was going to be what I dreamed about with no control over it, so I put my armor on. The entire building turned on me then, and what originally was a collection of monsters invading the apartments turned into this amorphous, tentacled sea of ichor and shining eyes. The armor had lots of tricks built in to keep things off of me, but the floor gave way, and then the earth itself, and I started flying up and up.

I ended up in low Earth orbit, flying higher and higher, as the entire planet revealed itself to be this dark mass in space with a gigantic, accusing face on it. Nowhere was safe anymore; there were no stars, and everything was cast with this dim red light. As I flew away I thought, “what’s the endgame here? I’m going to get exhausted. Eventually I’m going to be unable to avoid this nightmare and actually have it.”

I imagined myself flying towards another object, a swirling void, with an impossibly huge man at the center. It was Azathoth! I would have to jet into the open end of his mad flute and destroy it from the inside! With the image of his pale, greedy eyes on me, I went out a shockwave that shattered his flute, and at that point forced myself awake while I still had the power to do so.