nicholasThe dream began as four small children boarded a dinghy at the edge of a decrepit pond. It felt like a low-grade horror movie. It was almost dawn, but still quite dark and there was mist floating off the surface of the water. I remember myself actually pushing the boat into the water. The kids were around six and ten years old, dressed somewhat hip, and scared out of their minds. As it turned out there was some sort of undead entity living in the body of water and we were using the children as bait to coax it out.
The point of view suddenly switched to the zone underwater where I could see the zombie-like creature swimming about like a water snake. It felt like a bad nature video as the underside of the dinghy was framed by rays of light and the muted voices of the children floated downwards. I couldn’t tell if I was swimming alongside the zombie but suddenly I told the children to paddle towards the shore and get out of the boat. The POV switched suddenly to the shore line as the children began scrambling uphill. The zombie slowly lumbered out of the water and as began clambering up the hill it began reverse decomposing. The children meanwhile had gotten into the house, climbing in through a back door from the porch. There were two rooms inside the house which felt like a cheap suburban condo.
In the back room, there was a mattress on the floor and a small group of adults ushering the children into the bed. We warned them to get the .45 ready in case the zombie was going to misbehave. As I walked back into the front room what had been the zombie was a well-dressed Bulgarian woman who stepped elegantly into the room. She was calling out for her children and peeking into corners and closets looking for them. As she made her way into the bedroom she immediately got into bed and pulled the covers up to her chin and snuggled in-between the kids. It dawned on me that we needed to tread lightly as if we altered her to her true nature (that she was still quite dead) she would immediately revert and attempt to devour her children. We began interviewing her using a series of ritualized questions. We began tentatively asking her questions about what it was like in the afterworld, how her body felt, and how she felt about her surroundings. The details of the interview were sketchy but as we approached the end of our divinatory undertaking the adults began arguing over whose responsibility it would be to execute our undead guest. There was some sort of gnawing fear that whatever supernatural causes allowed her to reanimate and reverse de-compose would soon wear off. Not to mention the children were beginning to forget that she wasn’t actually their “real” mother and it was excruciating for us all to watch.
Someone nominated themselves to do it and I had to step out of the room as it was too painful to watch. I heard a single gunshot and everyone began streaming out of the room in tears, adults, and children and we all stumbled out onto the hill sobbing. As I stepped out of the porch I noticed a massive mound of hay that was trembling off to the right. It was emitting a terrible wail and as I walked up to it I noticed it had a small misshapen mouth and it was crying as well as it looked over all the other assembled mourners.
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