Couple of nights ago I had possibly the most epic dream my mind has even seen fit to generate. How epic, you might ask? There was a zombie whale. Yeah. Read on.
The dream started with me in the first person as some sort of scientist at a clandestine facility akin to Black Mesa from Half-Life. The facility sat on the edge of a modest-sized man-made lake or reservoir of some kind surrounded on one side by a cookie-cutter suburban neighborhood of houses that I presume were the living quarters for the scientists and staff.
In the beginning it was twilight and the lake was drained. Something happened where I became aware of some sort of escape within the facility. I didn’t appear to have intimate knowledge of everything “we” did there, so I wasn’t sure about much more than that I needed to find shelter and find it soon. As I ran from the facility on the reservoir bed I came across a friend and we decided it’d be better to try and survive this together. (I never conceptualized anything beyond some sort of arbitrary border around the facility, lake, and neighborhood… it was like a closed map.)
The first thing this friend and I did was find a house. It was nightfall by this point and things were starting to get creepy. We walked through the dark rooms making sure we were alone. We weren’t. A single zombie ambled by just outside the open back door, not spotting us initially. My friend grabbed a shotgun from a closet, loaded it, and promptly fertilized the back yard with undead blood. He handed me an AK-47 and we blasted our way down into the basement as zombies started to swarm the house. We found some sort of tunnel system in the basement that I think led back to the facility, but at that point things… changed.
I went into third person all of the sudden, like I was watching a movie. I saw someone important arriving with a slew of press. He got into some sort of limousine with bullet-proof glass and proceeded from the science facility to the neighborhood where the zombies were gathering in much higher numbers. At first he and those in the car ogled the zombies, sort of akin to how Sam Neill and his companions ogle the dinosaurs when they first arrive in Jurassic Park. They marveled at how the zombies couldn’t see very far by themselves, but in clusters they used a sort of “group sight” to extend this range, kind of like optical mesh networking.
Right about at this point things got crazy. The zombies got wise to the car and suddenly started swarming it. The driver attempted to get away, heading back toward the science facility, but the faster he drove the more aggressive the zombies got. Eventually they broke the windows of the limo and started ripping pieces of the occupants out in spectacular fashion, blood and entrails splattering everywhere.
The press, which had remained at the science facility, soon became the next target of the advancing undead hoard as the bloody car rolled down the hill from the neighborhood toward them. A cameraman filmed the massacre as long as he could but soon dropped his rig and started sprinting for his life toward the shore of the (now full) lake. Behind him I could see reporters and crew people getting swallowed up by the crowd of zombies and bloody flesh flying into the air.
The cameraman reached the lake and dove in as the zombies were almost upon him. Obviously, since zombies can’t swim, he was apparently safe for the moment. He start swimming for the opposite shore as the zombies behind him growled with frustrated disappointment.
(Do you ever have one of those moments where you’re watching a movie and you just think to yourself, “Man, wouldn’t it be great if this happened?” I had one of those moments at this point in the dream. For some reason that I will probably never understand, my thought at that moment was a simple two words: zombie whale.)
As our hero reached the halfway point across the lake, somewhere behind him the surface of the water swelled and a deep, thunderous groan rumbled through the depths below him. He looked over his shoulder and saw a massive whale breach the surface. It had pieces of skin rotting off and holes down to the bone in several spots, just like a zombie whale should. Worst of all, it was hungry.
The cameraman let out a panicked “Oh S***!” and started swimming like a frantic, doped-up Michael Phelps away from the massive mammal bearing down on him. Just as it looked like the cameraman was done for, a very conveniently-placed motor boat sped toward him from the opposite shore, swooped by and plucked him out of the water just as the whale was almost upon him. As he sat there, heart racing and water dripping off his quaking body, the boat driver turned to him and said with a stern, Tommy Lee Jones drawl, “Don’t ever do that again.”
That’s when I awoke.
Best. Zombie. Dream. Ever.