Can't sleep, clowns will eat me.

I’m no stranger to the occasional survival horror dream.  Mostly in those dreams there are zombies involved and I’m trying to figure out a way to either kill them, or hide from them.  Once I dreamt that a zombified cat was trying to bite my legs.  The thing was wile has hell and I knew if it succeeded in biting me that I would turn into a zombie too.  So I fought like crazy because it was fast, really fast, and of all the zombies I’d battled taking on a zombie cat was the closest I’d come to being bitten.  I remember waking up and telling my husband about the dream, “Zombie cats are hard to kill!” I exclaimed, and ever since its become somewhat of a motto of mine.  I enjoy those horror-themed dreams.  What others call, “nightmares”, I call entertainment.  They are usually so vivid and exciting that years have passed and I can still recount a dozen or more of them.  But out of all these fantastic horrific dreams, one of them stands out from the rest, and it’s the one where we died.

The dream: Adam and I were on our way to work.  We’re public transit kind of people and in my dream it was no different.  We’d taken some form of transit to a friend’s house where we had to stop off to pick up a book or something we were borrowing.  Our friend lived in a basement and when we arrived and walked inside our friend was sitting at his kitchen table listening to a public announcement on the radio.  There was a look of horror on his face, eyes wide, mouth agape, complexion ash white.  He looks over at us and says, “It’s happening.  We’re being attacked, and it’s nuclear.  There isn’t much time.”  Adam and I decide not to stay in our friend’s basement, for whatever reason, and take off on foot, running for home.  I think of the cats, and how if there was a nuclear blast here I’d hoped they wouldn’t survive.  The terror that would come after such an event would surely be worse for them than dying.  I thought about all the miles we had to go to get home, and how I knew we weren’t going to make it.  Adam was faster than I and he was about four steps in front of me but it seemed like a hundred.  I thought about how much I loved him and that I was glad we were going to die together, because I wouldn’t have the strength to live without him by myself.  And I called out to him not to leave me behind, he briefly glanced back and said, “I would never leave you behind” and he reached his hand back for me to grasp and all the while we were running, running, running, and I reached forward and took his hand just as a white blinding light exploded in the sky and the entire world became a white flash of light, bathing everyone and everything in its void.

I woke up with a face wet with tears.  It’s my favorite dream, and whenever I think of it I feel a reaffirming sense of union.