I was in my office in the Parliament. The underground parking area -- a large concrete chamber, about as big as the footprint of the whole building -- had been turned into a makeshift prison for zombies. The way it worked was that, whenever the police or a concerned citizen came across a zombie shuffling around in the street, they would bring them to the Parliament, and the security guards would prod the zombie down into the car park.
Obviously, the zombies weren't particularly dangerous, but their bites were still incredibly infectious. It was pretty easy to avoid getting bitten, as they were about as agile as a housebound 90-year-old. Also, some of them didn't even have any teeth, what with the rotting gums and their non-existent dental hygiene regime. You still had to be aware of them, though. You couldn't relax in a place that you didn't know for sure was completely zombie-free and you had to check constantly that there was no way for any zombies to get into wherever you were.
The office was absolutely secure, as long as you took simple precautions. At the far end, there was a lift that went down to the parking level, but, obviously, nobody used that anymore. Except for one person. None of us knew it, but one of our colleagues had been secretly using the lift to go down to the car park to visit her boyfriend, who had become a zombie a few months previously and had recently been captured in the street. Several times a day, she sneaked down, risking death or infection, to see the guy, even though he no longer had sufficient brain capacity to recognise her as anything other than lunch.
It was quite romantic, in retrospect, but nobody in the office thought so when we found out. There was a lot of hysterical shouting, and hurtful things were said by everyone.
The dream ended with a soundless image of our paranoid fantasy of what she might have brought about: the lift doors opening and dozens of blood-spattered zombies stumbling out into our office.
Notes for Freudian Interpretation
First, I have to make clear that the idiot with the boyfriend in the basement was a generic human-type person, not a genuine colleague of mine. In fact, none of the people in the office were people I know in real life; they were like central casting office workers. The car park was exactly the same in the dream as it is in reality, though. Here it is, sans undead:
Secondly: zombies again. As I've said before, zombies appear to be my subconscious's default signifier of impending doom, and there's nothing I can do about it. Perhaps the fact that the zombie plague in this dream doesn't appear to be too big a deal says something positive about my current mood.
I saw Diary of the Dead a few weeks ago, and wasn't particularly impressed. A few days before the dream, though, I'd read an interview with George Romero in which he'd stressed the need for zombies to be shambling, unhealthy-looking things who walk terribly slowly and fall over occasionally. He said that it made no sense for them to come back from the dead with super-athletic abilities (as in Zak Snyder's remake of Dawn of the Dead). I thought that was a great comment because it suggests that, to George Romero, zombies make sense. On another level, though, I liked it because it showed that he agrees with me about how an audience's suspension of disbelief works. Basically, there should be only one unbelievable premise in the story. To put it more simply, you're only allowed one "What if?" In Romero's case, this is, "What if people people could come back from the dead?" The answers to that question (however unbelievable the premise of the question might be) must be more or less believable.
What if people could come back from the dead? Well, they'd probably be brain damaged, as their brains wouldn't have been getting any oxygen and would have decayed somewhat. Also, they'd want to eat, as that's one of the most basic human impulses. Can we make our zombies threatening, for the sake of the story? Well, we can if we suppose that this brain damage has wiped their higher thought processes and left them like uncivilised savages, trying to satisfy that basic human impulse by eating anything that moves, and also that they exist in overwhelming numbers. However, we can't make them threatening by giving them super strength, the ability to outrun cars or, say, fly. Even though we would be genuinely terrified if we were somehow confronted with a super-strong, super-speedy, flying zombie in real life, we would be entirely unafraid of the same thing in a film, because it requires a succession of suspensions of disbelief, rather than one big one.
I should point out that Dracula, one of the most popular scary fictional characters in literature, is, effectively, a super-strong, super-speedy flying zombie, so perhaps I'm full of shit.
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