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Brother D and Miss Bren talking about zombies and Ghostbusters reminded me of a reoccurring zombie dream I had when I was younger that featured the Taxi Driver Zombie/Ghost from that movie. Has anyone else ever had a zombie nightmare?

I’ll share mine first.

When I was a kid, I watched Ghostbusters A LOT. My cousins and I had the movie memorized, line for line, and we would act it out on weekends with props.  I was always very scared of the Taxi Driver / Ghost zombie. (this guy: http://img443.imageshack.us/my.php?image=800pxtaxidriverghost.png)

As a child, I was also very afraid of my basement because once you got down a long flight of stairs, off to the right was my Dad’s work shop which was always very dark because there were no windows. A big dark room, with a concrete floor, and power tools everywhere. Normally I’d turn left to the TV / Playroom, but that meant my back was always towards that dark, ominous room.

In my reoccurring zombie nightmare, I have to go down into that basement while wearing gumboots (which makes running very difficult). When I get to the bottom of the stairs, a large coffin-like freezer opens and the Taxi-Driver Ghost hauls it’s rotting frame out of the freezer and on to its feet. Although I had not seen Return of the Living Dead at this point in my life, the zombie moved a lot like the Tarman.

In my dream, I attempt to clamber back up the stairs, but the boots make it difficult to run and in the logic of the dream world, I’m moving in slow motion while the zombie slowly catches up to me. I’m about half-way up the stairs when the zombie grabs me by the ankle and bites into my calf.

I would wake up at this point with a terrible pain in my calf (probably just growing pains in my muscles).

I used to have this dream again and again until one night, on a camping trip, the ending of the dream changed. Instead of getting bitten, I turned and kick the zombie back down the stairs. After that, I never had the dream again.

Still, whenever I watch Ghostbusters, I get creeped out by that Taxi Driver ghost.

I’m averaging one a month.  Normally, I’m securing a house, trying to board up things.  They finally make it in, and I’m hiding, looking through a crack in a wall or door as they mill about.  One finally see’s me, and I wake up breathing heavily.  I only remember getting “turned” once.  Not fun.

I also have the run like hell dreams.  Looking for a place to secure or hide, but no luck. 

I think I have ZPTSD.

O’Day

I have this reoccurring dream where I am walking up a mountain road to a remote European village. It’s set at night and there is thick snow on the ground but when I get to the village the whole place is deserted and an eerie silence fills the air. I start to look around and soon notice an old well in the village centre but just as I look down I somehow slip and fall inside. At this point zombies (which I am guessing were the villagers) start falling in after me and as each one falls I manage to smash its head with a large stone I have found at the bottom of the well.

In no time the bodies start piling up which I climb to make my escape but upon climbing out of the well I’m surrounded by hordes of the undead. At this point I have a long pole in my hand (no idea where that came in the dream from but perhaps I had an erection at the time!) which I use to cut through the zombies. The dream ends with the snow turned dark red and me stood in a circle of corpses screaming manically as the rage overcomes me.

Had that dream a good dozen or so times now, I likes it.

I also used to dream of getting bitten by Tarman from Return of the Living Dead when I was a kid. He would somehow break into my old house and I would run to my bedroom at the end of the corridor but just before I’d close the door he’s always grab and bite my arm. I hate him.

O-Day - 25 July 2009 08:34 PM

I’m averaging one a month.  Normally, I’m securing a house, trying to board up things.  They finally make it in, and I’m hiding, looking through a crack in a wall or door as they mill about.  One finally see’s me, and I wake up breathing heavily.  I only remember getting “turned” once.  Not fun.

I also have the run like hell dreams.  Looking for a place to secure or hide, but no luck. 

I think I have ZPTSD.

O’Day

You know I’d never wish you any physical or mental anguish, O’Day, but you ARE the guy I look to for tips on how to survive the undead. So, in some shameful way, I’m glad you have these nightmares. It means you’re keeping yourself on your toes with unconscious worst-case scenarios.

No worries.  However, there is also the dream where I go out to meet the zombie horde, and I’m naked.  Then they start to laugh at me, and I run in shame.

O’Day

This is really sad…

I tend to dream about code. Active projects that I’m working on, stressing about new/upcoming projects, and nightmares in the form of dreaming about projects that I worked years ago.

This is also why I keep a notepad on the nightstand, as I often come up with what I think are amazing ideas late at night.

In the morning - by the light of day - it’s a 50/50 on whether it was a good idea or not.

Once dreamed there was a thing in the basement. It was skinless and had a skeleton head and snapped and bit a lot. Not a standard zombie, but definietly a dead thing in the basement.

Also, I had a “zombie” dream that was not standard zombie fare at all. In fact I always thought it was inspiration for a movie or book I might write. It involved an American and russian scientists who were on a submarine when nuclear war breaks out. They are killed, and the world is thrown into a new dark age, but because of chemicals on board the sub they reanimate as zombies with full memories, but rotting bodies. They spend decades rebuilding the ship and their bodies are preserved in diving suits full of the fluid that animates them. Eventually they make it back to civilization only to learn it’s lost all history and technology, and everyone are savages. So they take it on themselves to rebuild the world, but they have to decide what is the best way to shape this new world. So in this “dream” the zombies were the “good guys.”

Well I have never had a zombie nightmare, but I have a dream that features zombies about once a month or so. (in the vain of an action movie or a super hero movie.)

My nightmares are normally mundane. I get to have fun when zombies show up in my dreams!

I dream of zombies and the PAW quite frequently but never what I would consider a nightmare.

Guess I’m just too desensitized.

—For reasons Zed cannot identify, a zomb-mare finally came to me.
Recounting dreams always steps into the surreal to me, so here’s hoping i can make this make sense.

In this dream, i was in the drivers seat of the biggest ‘70’s American car you can imagine.  It was avocado green.  It was night.  I was parked in front of a convenience store, which was lit but I feel that it was not open.  Sitting in the passenger seat was the sister of a girl i ‘dated’ in high school.  She had given me a form to fill out, and i was unclear if it originated from her mother or her sister. 

With me so far?

The form was all about the tools i use in my so-called-day job, except that they were not the tools i use now, but the more chump-esque ones i used when i first entered the industry.  And they were all broken.

While i was filling out the questionnaire, The doors and windows were all open, and the tools were spread all over the floorboards and the tarmac just outside of the door.  I thought to myself that this was a bad idea….....

Just then a Mexican midget hailed the sister of the girl i used to ‘date’  I said something like Hey- wtf!? whereupon the Mexican midget became a zombie and attacked me.  It was a fast moving Mexican zombie midget.

ms. zed tells me i woke up at this point yelling and hyperventilating.
good fun, eh?

I had a new Zombie dream the other night. This one started off as a standard “Romero” style zombie outbreak, and it was spread on through infecting bites. The zombies started slow and dumb, and we were taking care of them one by one. Mostly by hiding and occasionally taking one out. The problem is that the virus that caused the zombie outbreak seemed to be evolving and highly adaptive. Every successive generation of zombie seemed to be smarter, faster, could talk, leap, started to get claws, make plans, see in the dark. It kept evolving until we had a couple “super zombies” who ruled the original hordes as their footsoldiers. We ended up fighting these super zombies with mech suits we found in the basement of a robotics designer who had died and become a zombie. Funny thing is each suit had designs of a different loony tunes character on the side. My mech suit was based on Elmer Fudd, and had a big shotgun for one arm to “kill da Zombies!” There was also a Foghorn Leghorn suit with nasty claws, that I recall.

When I was really young (around 5 or 6), my babysitter let me watch Night of the Living Dead. And then she proceeded to tell me that it was filmed about 20 minutes away (I grew up in Western PA, about 40 minutes from Pittsburgh). That night I had a dream that the zombies shuffled across the wind swept field across the road. Zombies were slowly emerging from the tree line surrounding the valley I grew up in. They converged on our house. The zombies were pounding on the windows and managed to break the window into my little brother’s room. They drug him out of bed and ate him right in front of me. And then I woke up. For the next six months, my parents would get up and find me sleeping on my brothers floor. Somehow, I thought I would be able to protect him.