Dreams: journal update
Dream Journal
9.11.07
New moon, depressing dreams. The hounds of Anubis were passing over the dream world, and like ghosts, they froze everything with their presence. I warned my family, and we brought all our animals inside before the weather hit 0 degrees and the windows frosted over. We lost our mother when she went outside to check on things, and we found her, frozen solid once morning had come. It was a devastating storm, all over town, anyone or anything that had been caught outside froze to death. The next-door neighbor lost their oldest son (Passover reference, anyone?) and the stable down the street lost some of their horses. Only a few of us knew what had happened, and had seen the giant black jackals of Anubis running in the night.
9.27.07
I was a ghost. I’ve been dead in dreams before, but this one was uncomfortable. My death had been violent, but my family didn’t know how I had died. Anyway, I trailed them and tried to communicate, but I mostly just ended up creeping them-and myself-out.
10.20.07
I was in a ritzy hotel somewhere on the islands, and two volcanoes started to explode. I ran into Ronan from VNV Nation, lounging calmly by the pool. Everyone else was freaking out, running around and screaming, falling into the pool from the higher stories or jumping to their deaths. “So, do you think the world is ending?” I asked him, and he shrugged and seemed noncommittal. We continued to talk about music and the end of the world, while around us panic ensued.
10.26.07
Recurring Dream: I’ve had this one twice, or visited the same place twice in dreams. I don’t think I’ve ever been near this place in person, but if I have, it’s on the Big Island.
There’s an underground pit somewhere on the islands, and its native guardian spirits. I went in again, and was amazed by the power of whatever god or goddess was there. In the dream, I recognized it from another dream I’ve had. It’s connected to the moon, to sacrifice and nature, but this time it turned into a trial and quest, and I had to go through all kinds of physical contortions to make it back to the surface of the earth. I knew it was some sort of test symbolizing birth, but nobody told me anything other than that.
11.4.07
Stormy night. No sunrise to wake me. I dreampt of being, or being companion to a beautiful black-haired man with black wings. I alternated between seeing from his eyes and seeing him from another perspective…when I was not him, he reminded me of some of my friends. We were traveling through the mountains to get back to our home, and it was very cold.
11.21.07
My mother went crazy and tried to kill my father with a knife. She said I was the only thing she valued, but I wanted to get away from her. I went with her until we came to something called a House of Retribution. A number of minor prophets and some old daemons and elementals lived there and took pity on me. They told me they would help me get away, no matter how tenacious her hold on me, and so I did, and they messed with her mind.
12.7.07
I was in a boat on the ocean, and there was a great white shark. It turned into a sort of competition, with the shark trying to overturn the boat, and me trying to run the shark onto land. Eventually I did run it aground, and the shark turned into a woman. The hunt began in earnest then, because land was my domain. I stalked her through cultured ladies, pearls, purses and beautiful things, all material and sexual in nature. I eventually found her, and seduced her before letting her know who I was…and then I killed her. But isn’t that the summary of a life in excess…ecstasy, agony and then death?
12.28.07
Phantoms in a dystopian world full of grey. They sucked the life out of people, and left them a hollow husk. It was the servant class that developed a way to fight them, and had great success. I was a doctor, and it was very satisfying to rehabilitate the minds of those who had been paralyzed by fear, and to help them live again.
12.31.07
I was a devout member of a church, probably the Catholic Church. There was a beautiful girl, who I loved, but it had to be in secret because I was also a woman. The dream went back and forth in time, and at the beginning I saw her die. I thought at first that she was executed because she tried to tamper with the system and was disobedient to the chief enforcer, but then I went back and things became clearer.
I was an enforcer in training, which was much like being an inquisitor. I was also an advisor to the younger students in the Church. She asked me to come to the woods with her because she knew how I felt about her, and she trusted me. We talked, and kissed, and then the Chief Enforcer showed up and read her death sentence. She was calm…she always was. I, however, was at once furious and passionate. “I swear to you, I will live for you, and I will finish the job which you started.” I kept telling her that I loved her, kissing her arms, her hair, her face, as my heart broke. I knew I was safe…because I had a dirty little secret of my own. I had been named already as the Chief Enforcer’s heir and successor, and the decision was irrevocable. “You can’t touch me, old man, and it must break your heart, that a lesbian will succeed you. You can’t kill me because you are old, and weak, and one day I will take your place. I am the only one who can…one day I might become you, and you need that too much. But I tell you this, I will never forgive you. You are taking away the one thing, aside from the Church, that gives me a reason to live and makes me human. Don’t think I will ever forget that you killed the woman I love.” And his eyes widened in something that almost looked like fear…and he turned away from me. But I could not stop them from executing her, and so after three days, she was killed.
1.28.08
Two lovers, tragically beautiful, who were destined to never be together. I saw her poetry on the walls of my dream world before I met them. “My life, reflected in the future: Diamonds, tears, and blood.” It ended in a surreal landscape of glass spires and towers like diamond shards sticking up through the ruined earth. She was held as a slave in one of the towers, under the guard of some sort of dragon/demon thing. When it died, she was told to claim a tower for herself, but as she looked, her lover fell from the tops of one of the towers to be impaled on the diamond shards below. She rushed down in time to catch his dying breath, the last fluttering of his aquamarine eyes, and then as if in a daze she raised her head and saw his diamond ring fall… she caught it and put it on as a sign of her love, and the dream ended.
2.11.08
I visited Mazatlan, the forbidden city of the Aztecs…went back in time, stood on top of one of the massive stone pyramids and took pictures of it with my cell phone. I felt like a dirty tourist. But it was so beautiful and terrifying, shining through the haze of smoke with its blood and gold, and the sound of drums…
2.25.08
A giant house on a hill, made of stone that was always warm to the touch. It was built into a cliff, and I’m not sure which came first, the two monolithic stone skulls it was built around, or the house. The view was gorgeous, looking down into a wooded valley, but there was something sinister about the house. The owner had died and left it to my friend, and he had been some sort of warlock who consecrated the house with blood. There were two or three little girls with us (I had a few companions in the dream but don’t remember who). One of them was playing in the pool at the foot of one of the skulls when it came to life and tried to kill them. Then the dream shifted, or I crossed planes and ran into my friend and sometime lover, Death. It was a gorgeous, androgynous being, skinny as hell. I argued that the need for blood that was a contract with the house was a deal that had died with its owner, and so the death of the little girl was made null and void. I knew it was normally futile to argue with Death, but in this house it was bound by certain rules. After it left, I was able to resuscitate the little girl. She looked at me with wariness and asked “what did you do?” And I, exhausted beyond explaining, replied, “I made a deal with Death.”
3.28.08
I was flying a kite in my childhood home when I accidentally caught the sun. We tried to put it back up in the sky, mindful of cosmic balance, but it was difficult. Finally I told the sun to go back in time to the days when the Babylonians worshipped it. They had superior astronomical knowledge, and could tell it where its place in the heavens was supposed to be in any century.
II
In Babylon, the moon phases walked the earth in human form. The New Moon was a pale, skinny girl, the Harvest Moon a buxom red-haired woman, the Full Moon a handsome man, etc. One of the moon phases, the Crescent Moon, I think, was kidnapped by this priest who wanted to force her to marry him, and thus use her to lure all the other moon phases to him so he could control our power. He was a lunatic, as it were, but we were not amused by his antics. I was at first an outsider, then later one of the moon phases, the Quarter Moon, I think. The priest was very strong, but he was only human, and we were gods, and angry at what he had done to our sister. We drove him mad, tortured him in every way possible and destroyed everything he had, but we did not kill, and so we could not take his life. He still wanted to capture us, though, even after all that, and so we bound him like the Hanged Man, and left him to hang upside down from a tree.
4.9.08
An island, isolated from the rest of the world. The people there survived long after the others on their planet had died, and everyone on the island was related somehow, because of all the incest. A new generation was born that was immune to death. They could also build machines and speak their language…I’m not sure if it was nanomachines that kept them alive, or some strange magic. They ended up in a grotesque, endless cycle of intermarriage, birth, death, and rebirth. When their relatives died, it took them three days to come back as zombies of a sort, and then they were given a treatment that restored their physical condition and they were re-integrated back into the family. It was…bizarre and disturbing, but they all thought it was perfectly normal.
4.13.08
It’s very common that I dream of being a man, or having a female lover. RL has not reflected this, but the imagination is not limited. This time, I was a man, with a surprisingly mundane storyline. I was about 6’, good-looking, brown hair, brown eyes, living in a town somewhere in rural America, in the 1800’s. I met a beautiful black-haired widow with a young son whose husband had died violently. I knew how he died, but I could not tell her. It was a harsh land, and the people were often harsher. She fell for me right away, but for some reason, I didn’t seduce her-instead, I played the game of courting her, and drawing out the process of being proper. Then her cousin died, and I was there for her, and things progressed before boring me so much that I woke up and was disgusted for dreaming the plot of a trashy romance novel.
4.20.08
I was at the University of Tacoma with my friend/mentor when the zombies hit. They tore through the place, devastating the classrooms full of students. We called for backup, but there was none. We discovered that the easiest way to deal with them was to sever the spinal cord at the base of the neck while they were incubating, before they had fully turned. It took them a couple hours to wake up, and when they did, they were physically incapable of moving. As we were running from those that had already woken, we moved through the classrooms and used a knife to break the spinal cords of those students who had been bitten and were still turning.
Somehow my mentor and I got separated-we were both very capable people, but I was still worried, and it got a bit scary being on my own. Eventually I found my mentor again, and we were joined by a military specialist who was trying to fight off the zombies and fix his generator at the same time. He did us a good turn, and then we did him one, and together we managed to get the hell out of there.
5.10.08
Many shifting dreams, but I remember one in particular, for its disturbing bizarreness. I was in an unfamiliar house, guarding a group of people who were too afraid to go outside, and who could not help themselves. They had called me there, through some kind of portal, it seems. There was also a robot who kept them safe by scaring off the phantoms trying to break into the house, but it seemed they thought I could do better. They looked at me the way people would look at a spirit that had been called up to save them-with mixed fear and desperate hope.
They dared not look at the phantoms outside the house, but I wasn’t bound by their rules, or their fear. When the black mass of one of the phantoms pressed up against the glass window, I looked up and saw a mirage of what it really was: a boy, helpless, innocent and pure, who was being ridden by an evil warlock. In Voodoo, the gods who ride mortals often have a disregard for the physical well-being of their vessels, but this went far beyond that. The evil man, or demon, or whatever he was, had the boy paralyzed, and was torturing him. He had entered his soul and turned his body apart with barbed hooks, but the boy could not die. As I watched, the man bent down, looming over the boy, as if to kiss him, and three curved black metal prongs came out of his mouth to fasten on the boy’s face, sinking deep into his flesh as he screamed.
I turned away in disgust and horror, knowing I was dreaming then, and wondering how my mind could imagine such a thing. I resolved to do something to save the boy, but woke up instead.
5.11.08
There was a beautiful, surreal dome-like structure in the desert that used to be my home, or used to belong to me or be a part of me. It looked something like the mausoleum in the Valley of the Temples, but blue, and made of ceramic and gold metal. I do know that I loved it, and felt a keen attachment to it, although I cannot remember ever going in. An old friend invited me to stay at his house, which was within view of the dome, but they guarded me to keep me from going out. It seemed they were afraid that I would go out there and be lost to the world of the living. I had no indication of such danger. I wanted to go back, with a yearning born of nostalgia and reflection. It felt so familiar…perhaps it’s one of my avatar’s homes?
5.16.08
W00t. I’m in the middle of World War Z, a book written by Max Brooks, Mel Brooks’ son. It’s fascinating, and naturally made my mind imagine all kinds of what-if scenarios based on the book, 28 Days Later, and various other zombie dreams I’ve had. I think I may write this one up as a short story in his style.
I. Zombie Wars
I was a girl around 13 at the onset of the Plague, and we lived in a cabin in the woods, someplace like Colorado. My father was one of the first to turn-he was bitten by something in the woods and came home to eat us. My mother and I held out for days, finally she cornered him and tricked me into going outside. The last thing I heard from her were screams and gunshots, and she was gone. I don’t know what happened to her, if she was turned, or killed. To this day I still look for her among the zombies. Anyway, I was standing with my back to the road, facing the house, when an Alpha team drove up the road, and narrowly saved me. I told them what happened, and they, impressed with my coherency, recorded the story and took me with them. They found I had a good head on my shoulders, and I begged them to train me, so they did. They were getting desperate in those days. After I was trained, the first thing I did was convince them to go back to the cabin, presumably to gather evidence of the infection. I really wanted to know what had happened to my mother. We stopped at the house of this strange hippy guru guy who questioned us, especially me. Turns out he was in charge of the operation, as a covert agent. We went back and found my father, still animated in one of the rooms, but there was no sign of my mother. They restrained my father, severed his spinal cord, and brought him along for testing.
II. The Aftermath
It was found that some zombies, about 1 in 20, still possessed a vestige of coherence. An industry arose for these, who were rendered secure with their spinal cords severed and their heads restrained, or for others in better condition who were frozen in cryogenic blocks and sold as a giant, grotesque house decoration. Most of the buyers were looking for friends or relatives, but some of them were thrill seekers and trophy hunters. There was even, at the extreme, a zombie dating service, strange and cruel, where you could supposedly obtain one with certain attributes. I watched the markets every day, still looking for my mother, but I never found her.
5.31.08
There was a sort of Kill-Bill scenario happening. I was trying to get the attention of some kind of crime ring, or assassin ring, and so I killed a few of their members, people who had done me wrong in the past. A few were saved when their children showed up though, and I had to spare them.
Scene shifted to a Marrakesh night market-type place, and there were extraterrestrials walking among us. I could barely tell them apart from regular people because they had a sort of glow about them. At the same market, I was looking for a few old friends to stage an offensive, and found them. I invited them back to my fortress, which was, again, the house I grew up in.
The first to show up was Kyle M. He broke in, like the rogue he is, and I caught him with a katana against his throat and patted him down looking for weapons. I missed one, and he pulled a knife out and spun it around, laughing at me. I hugged him. "I know which side you're on," I said, and welcomed him in. There were others, but he's the only one I really remember, because it's been so long since I've seen him. I miss him. Where in the world are you, Kyle?
Anyway, I built an elite dream team of fighters to take down the assassin's guild, but woke up before we actually struck.
9.11.07
New moon, depressing dreams. The hounds of Anubis were passing over the dream world, and like ghosts, they froze everything with their presence. I warned my family, and we brought all our animals inside before the weather hit 0 degrees and the windows frosted over. We lost our mother when she went outside to check on things, and we found her, frozen solid once morning had come. It was a devastating storm, all over town, anyone or anything that had been caught outside froze to death. The next-door neighbor lost their oldest son (Passover reference, anyone?) and the stable down the street lost some of their horses. Only a few of us knew what had happened, and had seen the giant black jackals of Anubis running in the night.
9.27.07
I was a ghost. I’ve been dead in dreams before, but this one was uncomfortable. My death had been violent, but my family didn’t know how I had died. Anyway, I trailed them and tried to communicate, but I mostly just ended up creeping them-and myself-out.
10.20.07
I was in a ritzy hotel somewhere on the islands, and two volcanoes started to explode. I ran into Ronan from VNV Nation, lounging calmly by the pool. Everyone else was freaking out, running around and screaming, falling into the pool from the higher stories or jumping to their deaths. “So, do you think the world is ending?” I asked him, and he shrugged and seemed noncommittal. We continued to talk about music and the end of the world, while around us panic ensued.
10.26.07
Recurring Dream: I’ve had this one twice, or visited the same place twice in dreams. I don’t think I’ve ever been near this place in person, but if I have, it’s on the Big Island.
There’s an underground pit somewhere on the islands, and its native guardian spirits. I went in again, and was amazed by the power of whatever god or goddess was there. In the dream, I recognized it from another dream I’ve had. It’s connected to the moon, to sacrifice and nature, but this time it turned into a trial and quest, and I had to go through all kinds of physical contortions to make it back to the surface of the earth. I knew it was some sort of test symbolizing birth, but nobody told me anything other than that.
11.4.07
Stormy night. No sunrise to wake me. I dreampt of being, or being companion to a beautiful black-haired man with black wings. I alternated between seeing from his eyes and seeing him from another perspective…when I was not him, he reminded me of some of my friends. We were traveling through the mountains to get back to our home, and it was very cold.
11.21.07
My mother went crazy and tried to kill my father with a knife. She said I was the only thing she valued, but I wanted to get away from her. I went with her until we came to something called a House of Retribution. A number of minor prophets and some old daemons and elementals lived there and took pity on me. They told me they would help me get away, no matter how tenacious her hold on me, and so I did, and they messed with her mind.
12.7.07
I was in a boat on the ocean, and there was a great white shark. It turned into a sort of competition, with the shark trying to overturn the boat, and me trying to run the shark onto land. Eventually I did run it aground, and the shark turned into a woman. The hunt began in earnest then, because land was my domain. I stalked her through cultured ladies, pearls, purses and beautiful things, all material and sexual in nature. I eventually found her, and seduced her before letting her know who I was…and then I killed her. But isn’t that the summary of a life in excess…ecstasy, agony and then death?
12.28.07
Phantoms in a dystopian world full of grey. They sucked the life out of people, and left them a hollow husk. It was the servant class that developed a way to fight them, and had great success. I was a doctor, and it was very satisfying to rehabilitate the minds of those who had been paralyzed by fear, and to help them live again.
12.31.07
I was a devout member of a church, probably the Catholic Church. There was a beautiful girl, who I loved, but it had to be in secret because I was also a woman. The dream went back and forth in time, and at the beginning I saw her die. I thought at first that she was executed because she tried to tamper with the system and was disobedient to the chief enforcer, but then I went back and things became clearer.
I was an enforcer in training, which was much like being an inquisitor. I was also an advisor to the younger students in the Church. She asked me to come to the woods with her because she knew how I felt about her, and she trusted me. We talked, and kissed, and then the Chief Enforcer showed up and read her death sentence. She was calm…she always was. I, however, was at once furious and passionate. “I swear to you, I will live for you, and I will finish the job which you started.” I kept telling her that I loved her, kissing her arms, her hair, her face, as my heart broke. I knew I was safe…because I had a dirty little secret of my own. I had been named already as the Chief Enforcer’s heir and successor, and the decision was irrevocable. “You can’t touch me, old man, and it must break your heart, that a lesbian will succeed you. You can’t kill me because you are old, and weak, and one day I will take your place. I am the only one who can…one day I might become you, and you need that too much. But I tell you this, I will never forgive you. You are taking away the one thing, aside from the Church, that gives me a reason to live and makes me human. Don’t think I will ever forget that you killed the woman I love.” And his eyes widened in something that almost looked like fear…and he turned away from me. But I could not stop them from executing her, and so after three days, she was killed.
1.28.08
Two lovers, tragically beautiful, who were destined to never be together. I saw her poetry on the walls of my dream world before I met them. “My life, reflected in the future: Diamonds, tears, and blood.” It ended in a surreal landscape of glass spires and towers like diamond shards sticking up through the ruined earth. She was held as a slave in one of the towers, under the guard of some sort of dragon/demon thing. When it died, she was told to claim a tower for herself, but as she looked, her lover fell from the tops of one of the towers to be impaled on the diamond shards below. She rushed down in time to catch his dying breath, the last fluttering of his aquamarine eyes, and then as if in a daze she raised her head and saw his diamond ring fall… she caught it and put it on as a sign of her love, and the dream ended.
2.11.08
I visited Mazatlan, the forbidden city of the Aztecs…went back in time, stood on top of one of the massive stone pyramids and took pictures of it with my cell phone. I felt like a dirty tourist. But it was so beautiful and terrifying, shining through the haze of smoke with its blood and gold, and the sound of drums…
2.25.08
A giant house on a hill, made of stone that was always warm to the touch. It was built into a cliff, and I’m not sure which came first, the two monolithic stone skulls it was built around, or the house. The view was gorgeous, looking down into a wooded valley, but there was something sinister about the house. The owner had died and left it to my friend, and he had been some sort of warlock who consecrated the house with blood. There were two or three little girls with us (I had a few companions in the dream but don’t remember who). One of them was playing in the pool at the foot of one of the skulls when it came to life and tried to kill them. Then the dream shifted, or I crossed planes and ran into my friend and sometime lover, Death. It was a gorgeous, androgynous being, skinny as hell. I argued that the need for blood that was a contract with the house was a deal that had died with its owner, and so the death of the little girl was made null and void. I knew it was normally futile to argue with Death, but in this house it was bound by certain rules. After it left, I was able to resuscitate the little girl. She looked at me with wariness and asked “what did you do?” And I, exhausted beyond explaining, replied, “I made a deal with Death.”
3.28.08
I was flying a kite in my childhood home when I accidentally caught the sun. We tried to put it back up in the sky, mindful of cosmic balance, but it was difficult. Finally I told the sun to go back in time to the days when the Babylonians worshipped it. They had superior astronomical knowledge, and could tell it where its place in the heavens was supposed to be in any century.
II
In Babylon, the moon phases walked the earth in human form. The New Moon was a pale, skinny girl, the Harvest Moon a buxom red-haired woman, the Full Moon a handsome man, etc. One of the moon phases, the Crescent Moon, I think, was kidnapped by this priest who wanted to force her to marry him, and thus use her to lure all the other moon phases to him so he could control our power. He was a lunatic, as it were, but we were not amused by his antics. I was at first an outsider, then later one of the moon phases, the Quarter Moon, I think. The priest was very strong, but he was only human, and we were gods, and angry at what he had done to our sister. We drove him mad, tortured him in every way possible and destroyed everything he had, but we did not kill, and so we could not take his life. He still wanted to capture us, though, even after all that, and so we bound him like the Hanged Man, and left him to hang upside down from a tree.
4.9.08
An island, isolated from the rest of the world. The people there survived long after the others on their planet had died, and everyone on the island was related somehow, because of all the incest. A new generation was born that was immune to death. They could also build machines and speak their language…I’m not sure if it was nanomachines that kept them alive, or some strange magic. They ended up in a grotesque, endless cycle of intermarriage, birth, death, and rebirth. When their relatives died, it took them three days to come back as zombies of a sort, and then they were given a treatment that restored their physical condition and they were re-integrated back into the family. It was…bizarre and disturbing, but they all thought it was perfectly normal.
4.13.08
It’s very common that I dream of being a man, or having a female lover. RL has not reflected this, but the imagination is not limited. This time, I was a man, with a surprisingly mundane storyline. I was about 6’, good-looking, brown hair, brown eyes, living in a town somewhere in rural America, in the 1800’s. I met a beautiful black-haired widow with a young son whose husband had died violently. I knew how he died, but I could not tell her. It was a harsh land, and the people were often harsher. She fell for me right away, but for some reason, I didn’t seduce her-instead, I played the game of courting her, and drawing out the process of being proper. Then her cousin died, and I was there for her, and things progressed before boring me so much that I woke up and was disgusted for dreaming the plot of a trashy romance novel.
4.20.08
I was at the University of Tacoma with my friend/mentor when the zombies hit. They tore through the place, devastating the classrooms full of students. We called for backup, but there was none. We discovered that the easiest way to deal with them was to sever the spinal cord at the base of the neck while they were incubating, before they had fully turned. It took them a couple hours to wake up, and when they did, they were physically incapable of moving. As we were running from those that had already woken, we moved through the classrooms and used a knife to break the spinal cords of those students who had been bitten and were still turning.
Somehow my mentor and I got separated-we were both very capable people, but I was still worried, and it got a bit scary being on my own. Eventually I found my mentor again, and we were joined by a military specialist who was trying to fight off the zombies and fix his generator at the same time. He did us a good turn, and then we did him one, and together we managed to get the hell out of there.
5.10.08
Many shifting dreams, but I remember one in particular, for its disturbing bizarreness. I was in an unfamiliar house, guarding a group of people who were too afraid to go outside, and who could not help themselves. They had called me there, through some kind of portal, it seems. There was also a robot who kept them safe by scaring off the phantoms trying to break into the house, but it seemed they thought I could do better. They looked at me the way people would look at a spirit that had been called up to save them-with mixed fear and desperate hope.
They dared not look at the phantoms outside the house, but I wasn’t bound by their rules, or their fear. When the black mass of one of the phantoms pressed up against the glass window, I looked up and saw a mirage of what it really was: a boy, helpless, innocent and pure, who was being ridden by an evil warlock. In Voodoo, the gods who ride mortals often have a disregard for the physical well-being of their vessels, but this went far beyond that. The evil man, or demon, or whatever he was, had the boy paralyzed, and was torturing him. He had entered his soul and turned his body apart with barbed hooks, but the boy could not die. As I watched, the man bent down, looming over the boy, as if to kiss him, and three curved black metal prongs came out of his mouth to fasten on the boy’s face, sinking deep into his flesh as he screamed.
I turned away in disgust and horror, knowing I was dreaming then, and wondering how my mind could imagine such a thing. I resolved to do something to save the boy, but woke up instead.
5.11.08
There was a beautiful, surreal dome-like structure in the desert that used to be my home, or used to belong to me or be a part of me. It looked something like the mausoleum in the Valley of the Temples, but blue, and made of ceramic and gold metal. I do know that I loved it, and felt a keen attachment to it, although I cannot remember ever going in. An old friend invited me to stay at his house, which was within view of the dome, but they guarded me to keep me from going out. It seemed they were afraid that I would go out there and be lost to the world of the living. I had no indication of such danger. I wanted to go back, with a yearning born of nostalgia and reflection. It felt so familiar…perhaps it’s one of my avatar’s homes?
5.16.08
W00t. I’m in the middle of World War Z, a book written by Max Brooks, Mel Brooks’ son. It’s fascinating, and naturally made my mind imagine all kinds of what-if scenarios based on the book, 28 Days Later, and various other zombie dreams I’ve had. I think I may write this one up as a short story in his style.
I. Zombie Wars
I was a girl around 13 at the onset of the Plague, and we lived in a cabin in the woods, someplace like Colorado. My father was one of the first to turn-he was bitten by something in the woods and came home to eat us. My mother and I held out for days, finally she cornered him and tricked me into going outside. The last thing I heard from her were screams and gunshots, and she was gone. I don’t know what happened to her, if she was turned, or killed. To this day I still look for her among the zombies. Anyway, I was standing with my back to the road, facing the house, when an Alpha team drove up the road, and narrowly saved me. I told them what happened, and they, impressed with my coherency, recorded the story and took me with them. They found I had a good head on my shoulders, and I begged them to train me, so they did. They were getting desperate in those days. After I was trained, the first thing I did was convince them to go back to the cabin, presumably to gather evidence of the infection. I really wanted to know what had happened to my mother. We stopped at the house of this strange hippy guru guy who questioned us, especially me. Turns out he was in charge of the operation, as a covert agent. We went back and found my father, still animated in one of the rooms, but there was no sign of my mother. They restrained my father, severed his spinal cord, and brought him along for testing.
II. The Aftermath
It was found that some zombies, about 1 in 20, still possessed a vestige of coherence. An industry arose for these, who were rendered secure with their spinal cords severed and their heads restrained, or for others in better condition who were frozen in cryogenic blocks and sold as a giant, grotesque house decoration. Most of the buyers were looking for friends or relatives, but some of them were thrill seekers and trophy hunters. There was even, at the extreme, a zombie dating service, strange and cruel, where you could supposedly obtain one with certain attributes. I watched the markets every day, still looking for my mother, but I never found her.
5.31.08
There was a sort of Kill-Bill scenario happening. I was trying to get the attention of some kind of crime ring, or assassin ring, and so I killed a few of their members, people who had done me wrong in the past. A few were saved when their children showed up though, and I had to spare them.
Scene shifted to a Marrakesh night market-type place, and there were extraterrestrials walking among us. I could barely tell them apart from regular people because they had a sort of glow about them. At the same market, I was looking for a few old friends to stage an offensive, and found them. I invited them back to my fortress, which was, again, the house I grew up in.
The first to show up was Kyle M. He broke in, like the rogue he is, and I caught him with a katana against his throat and patted him down looking for weapons. I missed one, and he pulled a knife out and spun it around, laughing at me. I hugged him. "I know which side you're on," I said, and welcomed him in. There were others, but he's the only one I really remember, because it's been so long since I've seen him. I miss him. Where in the world are you, Kyle?
Anyway, I built an elite dream team of fighters to take down the assassin's guild, but woke up before we actually struck.