sanity is relative

The beginning of this dream involved running around a hospital in which most of the people had been turned into zombies for unknown reasons. They were slower than the humans but stronger (and waaaaay more of them). Those of us who were still not-undead were trying to get everyone who was still living together, and I remember attacking a zombie with a wooden pencil and literally having an argument with it as to the fact that a wood pencil stabbed into the heart should kill it. (Dream logic forgot that this applies only to vampires.) I won the argument, the zombie died.

At one point I was alone again running from zombies who seemed a lot smarter than they should have. I could hear one of them off in the distance sort of calling out to me that he'd find me. (Most of the zombies just did the typical horror movie "raaaaaaaaaar" or whatever.)

I found myself in an empty room that had cupboards up high and I remember trying to see if I could crawl up into a cupboard as some of them seemed to open up into the ceiling-works, or I could at least maybe hide until the zombies went away. I'm not sure if this succeeded or not because the next thing I remember was arriving in the hospital lobby where the survivors were all holed up defending one spot and actually managing to hold it.

I joined the group and after a while things calmed down enough that I said some of us who knew the local area should try and go out and scavenge for things like food and weapons. I told them that everyone should at least go in pairs, and to not let each other out of their sight. I even said if the other person had to go to the bathroom their partner should stay right in the bathroom with them and plug their ears and go "LALALALALALA!" (*snicker*) ....yeah... well it was smart advice for zombie-land at any rate, if rather goofball.

There were restaurants and stores sorta near the hospital, as well as some of our homes. I went to my house with a guy and his son (the house was nothing like anywhere I've ever lived in real life). As I was looking for useful things, I turned around and saw that the son was going zombie. The father was freaking out and the son appeared to be attacking him with some kinda weird black magical bits that flew out of his eyes. I told the guy to run for it but he didn't, he seemed upset he was losing his son and I told him there wasn't anything that could be done, if he wanted to live through this himself he had to bail!

Well, he was still not listening so I ran, managed to snag a bag full of large kosher crackers in the kitchen and ran out the front door. I hadn't had time to get much else of use (I don't think I even snagged any knives in the kitchen either, faaaail). Some blonde guy who's outfit and convertible car screamed California was pulling up in the driveway, he seemed a bit lost. He also had a little girl with him in the passenger seat (there was no back seat, the font seat was all one long seat).

I asked him for a ride, meanwhile he was looking for directions and I realized he wasn't local. I said, "You mean it hasn't spread past our town yet?" And he was like, "What are you talking about?" I told him something bad was happening, people turning into zombies, and I needed to get back to the hospital fast; I could show him where to drop me off because it was close by and then he should get the heck out of Dodge.

I could tell he wasn't sure he could trust me but he had his daughter move over into the middle so I could get in, then we were driving along the main drag (that had a lot of traffic... that I knew came from out of town and just happened to come straight through and continue on). I pointed out miscellaneous zombie and people corpses and then mentioned I'd been fighting them. Suddenly he really wasn't sure he should have let me into the car, I could tell by the look on his face. I told him not to worry, and to please just go right ahead and drive up the sidewalk that led to the hospital main doors (it went in from the road a bit).

He did, and several zombies started chasing us. They were fast enough that they were really close to the car and I couldn't get out and make it to the door. I told him to drive circles, and he managed to get the brainless things to keep chasing the car but they were a little slower than it, so before long there was space enough for me to make a run for it. I made it in through the doors and as far as I know the guy drove off like a bat out of hell.

Meanwhile I reached my impromptu buddies still holed up in the lobby in the middle of another attack. I told them the virus or whatever it was that was making these zombies hadn't seemed to have spread beyond our town yet, and I think we might have thought about moving locations to somewhere safer or trying to go warn the rest of civilization...

Then I woke up.

I don't remember the first part of this dream, except that it seems like I'd been accused of handling something wrong, maybe to the point that someone had gotten hurt or killed. But I do remember being asked to explain exactly what happened, and as I started explaining it the explanation became reality. I was only vaguely myself and seemed more like a woman a few years older than my real persona, and I was in a room in my house with two children, both girls around age eight to ten. Some sort of huge natural disaster struck, all I knew at first was that it involved a lot of water.

There was a strange square-shaped depression in the floor that we could basically fit into, like a step or two down with some vaguely alien-like architecture that looked like support beams coming out of the corners of this thing (on floor level) and going diagonally up to meet each other above the center of the square "hole." On the top of this thing was a small pyramid thing that could have been a roof if the thing was bigger and not sitting in this room. (I remember thinking it was vaguely Sith-looking in origin, it reminded me of the ancient Sith architecture on Korriban in the game Star Wars: Knights Of The Old Republic.) The point of noticing this thing is that I knew it might help keep me and the girls safe if we could stay inside it. The water might not be able to rush us out of the room and kill us or spread us too far apart to be able to help each other if injury occurred. So I got the girls to go into this thing with me and I laid down on the bottom with them, one girl under each arm, and all of us facing downwards. I hung on tight to them as the water rushed through the room (it seems like we had a few moments warning before this thing hit). It worked, we were okay and the flooding moved on (or whatever was going on was done with us, we weren't still sure what was going on).

The room was still more or less intact but really messy now, and very wet. There were other people in the house, and I knew I had to check on them. I told the girls to stay in this room. I'm almost thinking it was a first level room or even a basement, which seems like an odd place to stay during a water catastrophe but I think I knew it was over, so since there wasn't tons of water in the room I figured it was safe enough. I also somehow knew that this disaster had incapacitated at least the entire United States. I asked one of the girls if she wanted anything, and she said somewhat spitefully, "Crackers." (Her attitude made sense in the dream, but I'm forgetting bits... it seems like there had been some argument earlier about crackers.) I left the room and went to the front door (the house layout is really murky now, I'm not sure it made sense) and found a teenage boy who I think was supposed to be my son. (At this point some John Grisham-like flavor got thrown into the dream, almost like I was a high-priced lawyer or something who worked too much.) There was also someone else there, probably another family member (not my real family, but this made-up dream family of which at least one of the girls mentioned earlier was part of).

My attention was on the boy though, I wanted to ask him if he was okay and if there was anything he needed but as I started asking, I realized I wasn't even sure what his name was. This was supposedly my kid, and I was so disconnected from my family I couldn't even remember his name! So I appologized and told him I understood it was very careless and wrong of me to have let my life go where it had gone, but at the moment would he please tell me his name and if there's anything he needs? He said, "Mitch," and he was looking at me with sarcastic disgust. I did a double take, and told him I wondered why the heck one of my kids got a name like that, and it almost felt like I got the vague notion of some larger conspiracy. I told him we'd figure things out if we could, and I asked him to go join the girls in the room they were in. The other person went too.

I found a full or almost-full box of saltine crackers and I knew it was the one the girl had asked for earlier. I picked it up and went back to the room where everybody else was now. My food stamps card was there on a table, and it's almost like I used it at that moment to buy the crackers somehow. I was thinking that the card might not work during such a state of disaster, but it cleared the order without problems. Mind you, there's no grocery store present, just this room with my apparently-estranged family. Plus, weren't the crackers at home and mine already in the first place? Stupid dream logic. But I was happy to get my food stamps card back (it was almost like I had to get the crackers to do so) and now I thought perhaps the government had put an unlimited dollar amount on all food stamps cards during this state of emergency.

I called to attention the people in the room and asked them if there was any one single item in the house that they could not live without or absolutely had to have. I told them they should go find it right now and come back here immediately. I said, "If we get raided then you'll probably have lost that thing, and since we don't know what we're going to do yet or where were going to go or what we're going to take, you'll at least have that one thing here where it's safe." I was worried about looting, and I'd figure at first we'd fortify our position in this room and worry about what to do next after that.

One or both of the girls got up (they were still hanging around that weird thing in the floor) and I think the other person (not my son but whoever it was that was with him earlier) was making for the door; they were going to go get whatever thing it was that they wanted most badly. Mitch however didn't seem all that inclined to get going, and I said something like, "If there's nothing here that's so very important to you well then good for you," or something like that. That was some attempt on my part to imply that I knew possessions were just mostly junk and not as important as people... or something. Mitch said, "Well, I do have a lot of movies but there's so many of them." He still didn't seem like he was gonna go find something. I was on my way out the door at this point, and I said, "Well, I have a teddy bear that's not really replacable, as opposed to Jurassic Park which is."

Then I woke up.