Intro
It’s crazy how accurately vague dreams can be… Like their purposefully trying to hint or warn you about the thoughts you’ve gathered while conscious only since your sleeping your brain unconsciously becomes a French film director, or worse an extremely high budget bad horror movie director. In case of the latter of the two disturbing spectacles my nightmares usually seem to seep into the fine line of the endless void that is my imagination, so as to blur my conscious reality with a clear residue that leaves everything bearing a hue of a slightly dual tangibility between the real world and my mind. Suddenly the daylight seems out to get you. Or the usually gentle morning breeze is now an ominous whisper. Even your own things like kitchen utensils are not just convenient amenities but foreboding instruments that could be used at any moment to bring about your demise as you wash up or wander about your home. Maybe its just me? Maybe I really am just a little too paranoid… Like those conspiracy theorists you see on those UFO shows, or how the government uses the media to keep us all just the right amount of scared to be good citizens… Nah. I would of believed you in the past if you told me I was just being paranoid. I would have even believed me telling someone else that their dreams don’t mean shit. Although, I did have a dream once where I fell of a rocky cliff, like at the grand canyon or something, and I fell and fell for what seemed like a good while; fear never abating, and right before I was about to hit the bottom I woke up. I woke up to find me halfway rolled off my bed, so I was able to catch myself mid fall and actually stood right up… See stuff like that makes you question the complexity, or just plain oddness, of dreams. But anyways, I would have believed in my own over analytical, slightly OCD, highly over active imagination, paranoid self had it not been for the day I woke up, or should I say was very rudely awakened, to find that my vague French film directing brain, who had been working double time with guest artist extremely high budget bad horror movie director brain, had alerted me awake just in time to watch a lot of people die (come back to life) and my world (the world in general though) crumble.
1
I was dreaming. I guess you could say it was on the verge of a dream and a nightmare, or at least towards the end it veered more to the nightmare section. It was me, hi Kyle that’s me, my dog Neo, yes Neo like from the Matrix and before you say anything you have not seen this little guy do the Keanu stare so back off. And my best friend Sarah. We’ve been friends since middle school, yes the dark awkward acne ages, though Sarah seemed miraculously immune to the plague of awkwardness that took no prisoners with its rich or poor nondiscriminatory black cloaked skeletal hands… I added that last part for dramatic effect. I mean aside from having to get braces and wearing a retainer at night she stayed relatively cool and everyone liked her, but with Sarah what’s not to like. So yes dreaming, I was dreaming I was in a field, a grain field of all things, walking my dog. It was a nice summer day and appeared it would be a good harvest this year because this seemingly endless grain field is well above my waist level and I’m about six feet tall and oh yea, did I mention were strolling along a yellow brick road… Don’t ask me where the Wizard of Oz theme comes from, I have seen the movie before but its been a while, although if I recollect correctly I may have seen a commercial for it airing as some sort of special movie night on some network television channel, you know how bringing back the classics is always in when fresh originality is lacking, well maybe not lacking, I suppose popular is the correct term. But yes here we are strolling along this endless yellow brick road, very peaceful like, until little Toto starts barking at something I can’t see, and oh yes his barking is silent like a silent film. So he breaks free of the leash, which is impossible compared with his stature, unless it was due to faulty dream leash mechanics, and runs off into the field. I’m about to go after him when suddenly Sarah’s there with a snake on her shoulders, like some beautiful snake charmer beckoning me to embrace her while this black and green serpent of death slithers about her body, did I mention I hate snakes. She’s feeding the snake apples which is beyond me on so many levels of comprehension I cannot even fathom the depths of why, nor do I want to. And every time the snake bites into these very red delicious looking apples, with its very large very venomous fangs dripping poison, the fruits burst like the thin but sturdy skin never held anything but the green sludge that pours from them now, down through the slippery, pink insides of the snakes mouth and spilling onto the yellow brick road forming a growing pool of putrid waste. Sarah knows I hate snakes, and spiders and pretty much any creepy crawly thing that can kill you very quickly, but obviously dream Sarah is aloof to stored thoughts on me because she is smiling and waving me over to her as she continues to feed the giant snake on her shoulders apples. All the while Toto/Neo’s barking stopped the mute phase it was in earlier and is in full swing amongst the grains and I want to go after him but cannot take my eyes off of Sarah, but also have an underlying sense of fear about entering the field. Suddenly dream time speeds up as if to say I need to make a decision here because many things happen very quickly. The beautiful day rolls out of frame and the storm clouds roll in. The winds pick up and the thunder is so loud I swear I felt my conscious body jolt once. The snakes pool of apple sludge is creeping its way towards me as the grain stalks in the fields, if grain does indeed grow on stalks, start to bloom with beautiful white flowers that live their entire life cycles in about five seconds as they quickly wilt and turn into black decrepit totems of their former selves. So now instead of a beautiful grain field day it’s a stormy graveyard of horror. Neo is still barking as lightening flashes and strikes the fields around me ablaze. The sludge catches fire too and fire now pours from the serpents mouth. I’m afraid for Sarah but she’s laughing as the whole world is literally going up in flames around us and I can still here Neo. So as I rush in to find and save him lightening strikes very bright and loud around me and the fire closes in like a crashing wave engulfing Sarah and me as I scream and suddenly my eyes open, I’m awake.
I have no time to reflect on the lunacy of that cerebral picture because to my horrific surprise, I really am on fire. Well at least part of my bed sheets are but hey, there is no such thing as being just a little on fire. Even if there is, not when your waking up from crazy nightmare world. So I fall out of bed arms flailing nearly knocking myself back out again on the bedside table. I look frantically around for something to put the fire out with but instead of simply throwing possibly more flammable material on the pyre that was almost me I open my mini fridge and dump out the contents of my pure water filter container which puts out most of it then I just scramble over to the still lit patches and stomp them out. Only then, after that drowsily frantic escapade does the noise hit me. Of course Neo is barking like crazy and yes the room smells horribly of my burnt bedding but outside and seemingly from all directions comes the sounds of sirens and people yelling and screaming and what sounds like gun shots. I instinctively duck at the recognition of the last of these. I feel my heart quicken as I crawl to my bedroom door only to realize part of the noise is the banging on my door. It sounds like someone is trying to break it down. The smoke in my room is not too thick and as I glance around I notice the charred lampshade so I surmise the fire was most likely from an oil burner I must have left on the night stand by my bed. Since the house is not in jeopardy of burning down I lift up my mattress and quickly but silently slide in to the space between it and the floor.
This may seem odd to you but to an imaginative over active slightly OCD paranoid like myself, the fact that I have a “safe zone” in my room in the event of a robbery or some other equally dangerous situation in which I have to either fight or flight, the fact that I choose option three, to hide, just seems prepared. My heart feels like its beating loud enough for anyone to hear even above all the noise, which confuses the space in the back of my mind reserved for things to worry about later, but right now as I lay in the tiny space cocooned by the drawers and bed frame and floor my active thoughts are kicking myself for not grabbing the Japanese katana I keep by my bed before I crawled down here, and for not opening a window or something to make it look like I jumped ship. I mean, sure this is a good spot I got here tucked away out of sight. The frame is inconspicuous with the built in drawers and wood paneling on all sides, no one would immediately suspect a person inside such a space. But all a thief or crazed maniac has to do is lift the mattress and I’m done for.
Just then the door caves with a crash and someone stumbles in. I can hear heavy raspy breathing as the assailant tears through my room. I’m sweating bullets and trying hard not to breath or make a sound though I can do nothing about the drumming in my chest. I want to look but I’m scared. There’s a small crack between the drawers big enough for me to see out of but I’ve kept my face away from it on the off chance the creep destroying my room just happens to glance in to the dark hole I’m in and see me. Deciding to take the chance to be able to identify the intruder when and if I make it out of here I slowly slide my head forward and peek out. I see nothing but empty space. Then a shadow. I am immobile, my eye is glued, trained on the one space I can see where light from the outside streetlamp cast negative horizontal slants of shadow light on the wall. Then as my confused relief barely has time to settle on the fact that the madman who just tore into and ravaged my room is my father it is hastily chased away by shock tinged with confused fear as the slanted strips of yellowed street light slowly reveal his distorted and blood smeared features.
The face my father now wears is not his usually neutral visage but a mangled and bloodied mask straight out of a horror movie. His hair is beyond disheveled and wet with the blood that has been carelessly smeared across his face as if he just finished trying to down an entire cherry pie with his hands tied behind his back. Normally I would just assume this is what he’d done, but with the whole breaking and entering of my room, I understand this to not be the case. Oh, and if your wondering the reason why I haven’t popped out of my little hiding spot to address the situation allow me to finish the description. Along with his disturbing blood soaked countenance, half of my fathers face has been torn or it looks more like ripped/bitten clean off. This includes most of his upper lip and the right side of his cheek. But that’s not the nail in the coffin to my affirmation that this thing grunting and stumbling around my room is no longer my father, its his eyes. For the brief moment of a second when the light meets his eyes and my eye meets his, that light is transferred from his eyeballs to the “Aha” section of my terror gripped brain. His normally light brown eyes are now a sickening pale grey, and his sclera, you know that white part of your eyes, yeah, no longer white but completely bloodshot red as if someone played paint ball with his eyes as the targets. Seething with strained veins to form an expression of relentless malice that could mean only one thing. Insatiable hunger for carnage. That’s when I realize it. I’m not trapped in the waking nightmare of a home invasion or attempted robbery. Its something much worse, one of my worse fears actually. I’ve just woken from a nightmare only to be trapped in a real world version of one of my worst nightmares in general. Fucking zombie apocalypse.