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The student newspaper of, by, and for Ames High School.

The WEB

The student newspaper of, by, and for Ames High School.

The WEB

Deciphering Zombie Dreams, A Step into the Abyss

“What is a story? Its a made up tale. What is a news story? It is a tale based roughly on something someone says they saw.” (Quote I heard someone say) In the last few months, a portion of Ames High students have been visited by a similar dream in which they and their group of friends were forced to fight off endless hordes of Zombies. Perhaps some would laugh it off, as a sign of too much Nazi Zombies and Dead Space. But this is where the laughter stops: these dreams bear some of the same key themes and characters that many find reason to suspect revelation. Subject 1: Danny Lyons Danny Lyons recounted his dream as one would describe their daily chores or walking the dog: “It took place in Atlanta, Georgia. Most of my friends were there: Graeme Dodge, Donny LaPietra, Nathan Gartin, and Paul Osgerby. Paul was freaking out because he’s a vegetarian. He was scared of the blood. We mostly just ran away. The zombies were overpowering, we had to sacrifice some survivors to the zombies. It’s an actual dream I had. I learned my friends are scared easily and you always have to run.” According to dreammood.com, a highly respected dream interpretation source, to dream that you are attacked by zombies, indicates that you are feeling overwhelmed by forces beyond your control. You are under tremendous stress in your waking life. Alternatively, the dream represents your fears of being helpless and overpowered. Also, to dream of a city in ruins, denotes that you are neglecting your social relationships and allowing them to deteriorate. Subject #2: Graeme Dodge A fascinating phenomenon is the variety in detail of dreams that people remember. Most people, if they remember any part of the dream at all, only remember a key concept or other, but occasionally if the dream is vivid and disturbing, the parts of the dream are as easily remembered as a conversation with a famous celebrity, like Snoop Dogg. Recently, Graeme Dodge, a local Junior had such a dream, “One time we were in Ireland in a castle right next to Nessy, The Loch Ness Monster.” According to dreammood.com, to see a Loch Ness Monster in your dream, symbolizes disappointments or misunderstanding in some situation or relationship. You may have unrealistic goals and setting yourself up for failure. Graeme admitted to having recently felt very misunderstood in a relationship with a close friend. Perhaps the Loch Ness expressed this concept, or perhaps the dream was a message for our society as a whole to hear. Graeme’s dream began to show uncanny similarity to the of Danny’s as he continued, “We had to hold down the castle from a zombie apocalypse, but after many days of fighting the zombies realized they could dig under the castle and so they did. Three people watched the windows and I went downstairs and slaughtered the zombies in the the tunnel with a machete and a torch. Me , Danny Lyons, Paul Osgerby, Phillip Dunne, and Alex Huston were all present. Paul was in the corner crying. Everyone was wearing kilts and wielding bastard swords.” According to dreammood.com, to see or wear a kilt in your dream, signifies kinship, camaraderie and masculinity. You are expressing a desire to belong. Graeme continued, “The whole thing was Nessy was six feet out of the water, ripping zombies into pieces. She gave birth halfway through and they all went on land with legs because they were the evolved form of Nessy. The Zombies went into the water and bit Nessy, and she became a zombie, and she got up on land and we had to kill her, and I jumped off the castle and was like, ‘aarrgh!’ and Nessy was like, ‘Rawwr!’, and then I woke up.” From merely these two dreams, one notices the parallels and patterns that interplay between the dreams: Zombies, friends, and Paul Osgerby, the vegetarian, deeply disturbed by the bloodshed. Perhaps the skeptic suspects corrobollation, but each interviewie was interviewed individually and wasn’t aware of the other dreams. Dreams aren’t a laughing matter. Abraham Lincoln dreamed about his own death a week before his assassination. Whose laughing now? Subject #3: Paul Osgerby The next interviewee was the vegetarian, Paul Osgerby, a junior. Coincidentally he also has recently had a dream pertaining to a sort of zombies, called husks. “A husk is pretty similar to a zombie.In Mass Affect, a video game, your main antagonist is the reaper. They genocide any organism be it Human, Asari, Krogon, or Turian. they use these spikes that come out of the ground and impale them and they slowly turn into a husk, a mindless, futuristic zombie. Yet they’re easy to kill. They are fast, but you don’t have to shoot their heads off to kill them like normal zombies.” It was a normal school day and everything feels right. I was riding my bike to school, I walked into Webb’s room, just a normal morning. Its first period, he’s teaching his usual stuff about rhetoric in APLAC. I got a text from my dad and I started reading it.” According to dreammoods.com, to dream that you are sending or receiving a text message, represents your connection to others and your network of friendships. The dream may also elude to romance. Alternatively, text messages represent messages from your unconscious. Paul continued, “Webb turned around and just looked raged with a very raged look. He’s normally pretty chill about that stuff, but he just yelled at me, something along the lines of, ‘How dare you text in my class!’ and we sort of erupted with a roar and then all of a sudden out of nowhere, a spike impaled his body. And he instantly turned into a husk, which is completely adverse to the mass affect universe,but that what happened. And then the spike shot back into the ground which is weird because he’s on the second floor,but that doesn’t matter because its a dream. And then he let out a shrilling shriek. He ran towards me with much anger and rage with a ferocity emulating that of a Tyrannosaurus Rex.” Dreams are not given the recognition that they deserve. The dream world is entered when the subconscious is conscious, when the irrational is rational, and when the truth is seen in ones life. Subliminal imaging Testing Subliminal Imagery Testing (SIT) confirmed the validity and vividness of this extraordinary dream. SIT is a process in which the subject is asked to close their eyes and focus all their energies on recalling the dream. As the subject recalls the dream in his head, he allows his hand, holding a graphite pen, to freely express, without constraint, the mental imagery inside the brain. The result is oftentimes, a very real and distinct image of the dream that helps the subject and others to better understand the dream content. Science would say that dreams are are successions of images, ideas, emotions and sensations occurring involuntarily in the mind during certain stages of sleep. Freud would say that dreams are the thoughts of the subconscious having a party in the mind. But in the end, we all are a little clueless. The Egyptians, some of the greatest scientists in history, placed heavy importance on the interpretation of dreams. Normal cultures around the world believe that dreaming is a window into the spirit world. It’s only us smart Americans who are to big for that sort of thing. This article isn’t implying that the future holds a Zombie Apocalypse or some other sort of disaster symbolized by the zombie dreams, but stating it as irrefutable fact. Case Closed.

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