Wednesday, November 24, 2010

Dreams you may have missed and...I STILL hate Zombies

My Dad died in October last year. I had just deployed to Iraq in September. When I got the Red Cross message I was on a plane to Kuwait that night. The message said he was in the hospital in critical condition back home but, before I could even get out of Kuwait I found out he had died that next day.

You can read more about it here.
http://dragoncam.blogspot.com/2009/10/last-salute.html

Also...my dog died. Needless to say, that cast a gloomy pall over my whole year.

There were things I never got a chance to say. Our last conversation on the phone right before I deployed was detached and abrupt. There were things I wanted to say but never got that chance.

After I returned to Iraq, night after night I had dreams about my Dad and in every dream I didn't realize he was dead. We would talk not necessarily about anything meaningful but would just talk. It wasn't the father that I knew but the father I wanted to know.

I would wake up shaking and crying, sad and afraid realizing he was gone.

It wasn't something I felt comfortable to talking to anyone about really. I also stopped posting on my dream blog because I didn't feel comfortable posting about it either.

The dreams happened frequently while I was in Iraq. When we returned to the US the dreams about my Dad stopped happening so frequently but I still have them.

Lately, I haven't been dreaming well.

I have some awesome flying dreams every now and then but lately almost every night I have dreams about being chased and hunted by the undead.

Last night, an assassin had been hired to kill me and a few others. This assassin was using dark magic to re-animate corpses of the dead to do his bidding.

All I had was an ineffective bludgeon.

I don't even watch Zombie movies. Sure, I've seen a few before but normally I avoid movies like that. I don't play games like that either much.

Lately, I've been playing this game called Entropia Universe off and on. Mostly all you do in that game is shoot alien dinosaurs and robots. You know, if I was being hunted down by robots at least it wouldn't be so emotionally wearing.

But these undead, re-animated corpses are really sick and disturbing.

When I wake up in the morning after having one of those dreams, I'm literally worn out.

I also have really vivid dreams, always have. When I'm even partially lucid in a dream, it's on like Donkey Kong. I can float, fly, manipulate the elements, create energy shields and so forth.

But...when I don't have that lucidity to protect me, I'm pretty much screwed.

I've learned a little bit about myself though mostly about what I would do in a situation like that.

If I'm by myself, my usual response is flight, i.e run away or find a safe place to hunker down in. The "hole up" option isn't always the best in dreams though since usually in your dreams the monsters always seem to know where you are.

If I get cornered, I go for a desperate fight/push through the enemy ala "Last Stand".

If I'm in a group, I pool ideas and resources. 70 percent of the time I'll take lead of the group.

Sometimes in my dreams though, there's a "big brother" type of person and somehow I feel younger, not quite my age and I'll take on a "little brother" role where I find myself taken under the wing of another person.

Sometimes, I find myself in a situation where there's something special about me and the group's role is to protect me or get me somewhere safe.

"What would you do if a plague of Zombies broke out?" might not be a practical question to pose to one's self but at least I have sort of an idea of how that would play out.