A Road Less Travelled

If you are one of those people who is bored by the retelling of dreams, you’ll want to skip this post. This post is entirely a retelling of a dream I had last night, which I first described as stressful, but the more I think about it, the more I think it was pretty cool. In my dream the vampires overran us to the point that society had pretty much collapsed, but by the end of the dream, our church had banded together to form a survivalist community.

At the beginning of the dream, I was in the trailer we lived in in Pennsylvania, and the vampires were just beginning to attack people frequently. The dream apparently couldn’t decide whether my father was actually my father or Seth, but it was definitely Seth at the point when I had to tell him that my mother had finished turning into a vampire and I’d…taken care of it. (That would be one of the stressful parts…) He put his arm around my shoulders for a second, but there was a wave of vampires coming, and doors on that trailer were really not reliable in a standoff against vampires, so there wasn’t much time.

We must have survived the fight because soon I was leaving the city with James and Theresa to find someplace safer. We had kind of wagon/trailer thing, with individual slots for each person to sleep in, and not much room to take anything else with us. (Though we definitely had quilts–apparently this part of the dream had a heavy Little House on the Prairie influence) We were going to caravan with some other families from church, but somehow that didn’t work out, so we agreed to meet them there.

After some bizzare encounters with packs of ferocious dogs on a playground, we made it to a house that strongly resembled my grandparents house, and then to a very large building where the rest of the church was staying. A vampire had somehow made it into the building, so I was hiding in a closet with several children. I originally had a chopstick for defense, but decided that was wimpy and broke a leg off a chair. (Side note: at this point I ‘remembered’ Gabrielle saying that she could totally see me breaking a leg off of a chair to fight vampires, but now I can’t remember if she ever really said that or not. Either way, it was apparently inspiring.)

As the vampire passed by the closet door, I saw one of my elders motioning me from across the room to stake it while it had its back turned. (Three guesses which elder was most involved in vampire fighting tactics–and the first two guesses don’t count. ) So in complete terror at coming out of my hiding place, and with children practically hanging on my skirt, I staked and killed a vampire. Then with everyone asking if I was okay, I proceeded to faint. Fearless vampire slayer that I am…

In the last part of the dream, several ladies from church were going through an abandoned grocery store trying to find food we could use. We ended up with a few carts full, and the young men from church who were standing guard for us helped us load them into the van we were driving. We were just figuring out how to fit everything in, when the vampires (more zombie like in this scene, though) appeared again. Some of us jumped in the van, but a few were caught back closer to the grocery store. We drove back for them, trying to let them in without the vampires getting in, but the vampires were too close. So we drove past again, trying to decide if they’d been infected already or if we could let them in now. One girl’s mother declared it was safe to pick up her daughter, because the daughter’s teeth were bad, and the regenerative qualities of a being a vampire would have fixed that if she’s been infected. But there were the other people we didn’t know who were clawing at the sides of our van, panicking and begging to be let in. We couldn’t let them in, because we had no way to tell if they’d been infected. But could we just let them die?

And I’ll never know what we decided, because then I woke up.

I know exactly where large chunks of this dream came from, and while it really was that stressful to dream about vampires and the nasty, messy choices they cause, I really do love how the church came together in the dream, and we had each other’s backs. I’d fight vampires with you guys any day.