The Walking Dead

That's what I looked like today...

Sometimes my dream world is further off base when I’m awake than it is when I’m asleep, but last night definitely didn’t follow that game plan. I spent five hours of when I should have been sleeping being chased by various undead beings, ranging from grave rats to some human-sized version of the Balrog. Honestly, people. There were two necromancers, the woman being the dominant and the man being a subsidiary (the feminist in me, perhaps?). We were chased through a huge mall, initially, and we (the group of people I was with; I think I was near to being the oldest, and there couldn’t have been more than four of us) couldn’t catch a break with the weather. You know, the whole sunlight-beats-undead thing. It was partly cloudy, and the mall had a glass ceiling, so we should have been okay, right? Not so much. The clouds seemed to follow us, and these weren’t fluffy clouds either. They were the thunderheads I pray for at work (could that be karma in the form of nightmares?). The undead creatures following us at the mall were largely shambling human corpses.

Then, somehow, we ran to a boarding school. I know it was a boarding school because there were places to sleep, though it wasn’t as though we took advantage of them. Mainly we spent our time running up and down the huge spiral staircases, running from the grave rats and more shambling corpses. Then we ran up a tight spiral staircase and into the techie booth for the auditorium. That wasn’t a good idea, ‘cause it was darker there than anywhere else, and I was fairly traumatized by innumerable enemies. Going down another tight spiral staircase, we passed a bunch of places that run together in my brain, but there was much running to and from the tight spiral, until finally we just ran down the whole thing to the deep, dank cellar place beneath the building.

Oddly, it wasn’t as dark down there. Everything glowed red (so either I love the dungeon or it was a very angry place, says Freud). There were lots of little cells there, about three feet by three feet, made all of cement but without doors or bars (remnants of Support Your Local Sherrif?). There were drains in the center of the room where the floor sank (trauma from work, perchance? The cells could have been the showers at the Scera changed from tile to cement, now that I think about it). Only two of the numerous cells were filled, one with the human-sized Balrog and the other with a pasty white, over seven feet, bald, wiry, thick-skulled something or other. He had big teeth. These two undead were actually very friendly, and they apologized time over time about how, if their masters arrived, they would turn all evil on us and try to devour our souls. They were really sorry about that. And of course, since we had been seen on the spiral staircase and nowhere else for at least two hours of the dream, it wasn’t too tough for the bad guys to know where we’d end up. So then we were running from Balrog and Bobby (the pasty guy’s name was something like that, maybe it was Fred).

We managed to get outside, and Balrog and Bobby were outside of their masters’ range, so we chatted for a while to catch our breath. But it was nighttime, so we were practically doomed for another six hours of dreamtime.

The worst part of it was that I didn’t even sleep the entire time. I started to fall asleep the first time after an hour of tossing and turning, and that was around 1:00. I continued to wake up periodically during the dream, only to pick it back up again when I fell back asleep. The last time I remember looking at the clock was 6:15-ish. Bleagh. I feel terrible.

Now, I’d blame this whole thing on the fact that I re-read Sabriel recently, but that was two weeks ago. Either my psyche has delayed reflexes, or it was something else.