Zombie Dreams (Grab Your Boomstick)

A few years ago, after waking up in a pool of sweat with my heart racing like crazy, I finally figured out why I had recurring dreams of being trapped in a mall where putrid, rotting, shambling zombies were piling in by the hundreds to come eat me alive.

This is no ordinary nightmare, mind you. This is 3D, Cinemascope, Sensurround, Smell-o-rama, Tingler Percepto shocking, nightmare had it all! Visuals. Sounds. Smells. Textures.

Fear.

But also…anger.

Why? Because, in each zombie dream, I would start safe and sound enjoying my haven and bountiful life in the shopping mall when some mindless group of idiots would break my barricades letting all the zombies in to eat me.

Bastards.

Luckily, back when I was 8 or 9, I learned that the Frankenstein Monster that had been chasing me for years was just trying to tell me something.

“Wake up and go pee before you wet the bed…again,” Frank grumbled when I finally stopped running and stood up to him… er… it… um… whatever.

Me and Frank got to be pals after I learned that message. No longer did I have to sleep with that stupid plastic sheet under my Silly-Putty™ stained sheets (that’s a whole other story. Shut up.).

Well, many years later, I no longer had the bed-wetting dreams. So, for what possible reason was my brain trying to wake me up now?

When I awoke from the dream, I didn’t immediately figure out the solution. It came to me later in the day while the dream still haunted me, and was remarkably simple and elegant by design.

Before I tell you what it meant, do you know the way to ‘kill’ a zombie?

According to George Romero’s zombie movies, The Zombie Survival Guide, and many other stories, movies and television shows, the way you “kill” (or stop) a zombie is by severing it’s head from it’s body. Now…this is important…to do this, you have to pretty much ‘kill’ one at a time. A rifle, pistol, shotgun (boomstick), shovel, axe, or chainsaw are pretty good tools.

With that explanation of how to dispatch this sort of undead creature, I will now tell you that when I came to the realization of the meaning of the dream, I was overloaded with work, bogged down with tons of tasks, and generally had a list a mile long of things that were only able to be dealt with…

…one at a time.

So there it was. Zombie dreams, for me, meant that my subconscious was trying to say, “Stop trying to take care of everything and start picking off tasks one at a time, or we will eat your lunch…and you too.”

Oh…and my recurring Tornado dreams? Yeah. “Things happening are beyond your control. Stop trying to fix it, take cover and ‘weather the storm.’”

Damn! My subconscious is pretty clever.

Or I watch too many movies.