Dream Log: March 30, 2001

I was in another city somewhere, and all I could hear were screams as we ran. Several dozen of us, friends, family, strangers, we all ran and tried not to be the next one who was taken down, who would come back bloodied and disfigured and dead, trying to exact some sort of vengeance.

As we fled through the streets, they’d pop up at us from behind corners, cars, anywhere that was dark and we couldn’t see. Blood gurgled in their throats as they stumbled, calling out to us – fear, pain, death.

We ran inside a hotel, and took the elevator to the top floor, planning to use the staircase to find another exit. It didn’t work.

Every landing on the way down, someone else would be gone, someone else would be covered in blood, dead, but with enough life to hate us. I couldn’t hear what they were saying over the combined screams of the survivors.

As we reached the bottom, and I ran out the door, something tackled me, dragging me to the ground. I felt a thud on my chest as I was punched, and looked down to see myself covered in blood, and one of the zombies grinning at me.

He pulled me close, showing me the sac of fake blood he was holding, and whispered in my ear. “Welcome to the game. Your codeword is terror.”

I blinked, and looked around, non-believing, and saw my closest and dearest friends, all faux-zombies, give me knowing smiles.

I think I screamed.

The Great Outdoors

• I'm in Seattle with my girlfriend and I decide to give her flying lessons. Unfortunately she's too scared to leap off the cliff so I pick her up and throw her off. She flaps her arms and begins to hover some feet away. We have fun flying around over the canals downtown and spend some time under a bridge. I practice some Superman-style flying with arms stretched out in front and rigid body. I really go fast that way.

• With Allen and someone else, I'm surfing in Santa Cruz. We are the only ones out there and the city itself seems to be absent as it is just us, the ocean, the cliffs, and some ruins built into the rock. As time goes by, the waves get bigger and bigger until they are impossibly huge: several stories tall. I get caught by one of these and it catapults me far up the side of the cliff. As I work my way down I discover the ruins of a small school. The playground slide is embedded in the cliff face and I slide down it. When I'm back with my friends in the water I tell them about what I saw.

• With Mario and Adam, we decide to take a joyride through town. We're driving in a go-cart that seems to have little care for gravity as we sail up the walls of buildings and drive through Safeway and restaurants. In Safeway I hear this great jazz music and the radio and comment to Mario about how cool the melody is. I wake up with tune in my head and realize it's a hybrid of two Charlie Parker compositions: Blues For Alice and Donna Lee.