Okay I just woke up from one of those deep-sleep naps, and I had the weirdest, scariest dream *ever*. It’s already starting to fade, which is a damn good thing, because it was about ZOMBIES and FIRE (Sarrah would be so, so proud).

The Zombies and Fire Ravaging the Silver Snail Dream

A strange zombie plague struck the city, but it did so while I was working one weekend at the Snail. There was this tiny little waif girl, who everyone thought had a heart condition, who was playing with me while I was working the front cash. She wandered off to the back of the store to look at toys and right then the zombie plague struck and zombies attacked the Snail, starting a huge fire by exploding something through the back door. All I could see was smoke billowing towards me and people screaming and running out the front store, and the little girl staggered back to the front, blinded by smoke, and I didn’t know who was dead or alive, so I scooped her up and ran her outside to the ambulance. Her face was all covered in black soot and she began to convulse and we didn’t know if she was going into cardiac arrest or if she’d contracted the zombie plague. There was a very brave lady doctor who stayed with her, and through the little girl we found a serum for the plague and started to innoculate the zombies in the store. By then it was spreading too quickly through the city; Natasha from Space took control of our group of Healthies and we stole a school bus and crash-drove it to the suburbs of Toronto. While driving, we treated the people who were still sick from smoke inhalation and burns and tried to manufacture more serum. The doctor confided in me that she wasn’t certain if it was a full cure or if the effects were just temporary, but someone overheard and word got out. Suddenly, the atmosphere got tense, and everyone got really nervous. Just a couple of feet away from the bus there were zombie suburb dwellers shuffling around the street, too comatose to organize themselves and attack but hungry for human flesh. So we had to get back on the bus and start driving to look for more uninfected Healthies. But half the people on the bus were post-treatment zombies and we lived in fear of them going into remission and eating us all, and it was causing a lot of strife and segregation. And just as we were starting the engine to start driving, my little girl passed out in my lap and started having another attack. And then I woke up.

I think this dream sprouted partly from the all-consuming fear of death that you get when someone close to you (and especially close to your age) dies suddenly, as I found out yesterday that someone I knew from Wilfrid-Laurier, whom I used to shoot pool with and play board games with and not-dance-at-weddings with because it was a Baptist-Mennonite service and dancing is a tool of Satan, passed away on Saturday after a long fight with cancer. I couldn’t even go to the funeral today, as it was too far outside the city and I had no time to ask for leave from work. But I thought about Ian all day, and I guess the morbidity of his death sunk all the way in.

To be fair, I’m almost certain that the plague aspect of the dream came from watching that plague episode of Stargate on TV when I went home to Oakville on Tuesday night to my parents’ house. And the little girl was probably because I spent the whole weekend (and some of Wednesday night) watching little kids run around the Snail, including one particularly adorable little miss with a loose milk tooth that she couldn’t stop fiddling with. And possibly the whole fire/crisis element was born out of my subconscious telling me that a cold sore is perhaps not the biggest crisis that I could be wasting my worry on, and that I should calm the hell down about it and focus on other things.

As a step towards healing my zombie/fire-ravaged psyche, I’m going to vacation in the suburbs tomorrow. I am looking forward to it with near painful anticipation. Even if my zombie nightmares follow me there, I’ll have someone to hold me when I wake up spooked. Someone who will stroke my hair, and shush my panicked breathing. Someone who, as soon as I’ve calmed down, will start in immediately with relentless teasing and making fun of me by whispering sweet undead phrases like “Brains!” in my ear and fake-chewing at my tasty flesh, until I am forced to see the absurdity of my fear. Or, until my ineffectual beating of him with a pillow renders him fake-unconscious. I’m actually feeling a lot better just from playing that scenario out in my mind.

Can’t. Wait.

But first, I’m going to continue the business that started me on this afternoon post-work, and edjumacate myself by watching more episodes of the Family Guy. As the cultural cross-pollination continues, I loaned him my ‘Space Ghost: C2C’ season one DVD set, and introduced him to a website that should keep him occupied pretty much all weekend. I still cannot believe Joe had NEVER seen or even heard of Home Star Runner’s website or StrongBad’s emails before I showed him today. How does he understand me when I’m talking? Maybe I’ve just always sounded like I threw a couple of words in a foreign language into my speech to spice things up every now and then (like ‘fangoriously’, or ‘theyellowdart’). Bizarre.