Left 4 Dead plus Fallout 3 plus Twelve Monkeys = my dreams are crazyland.

So here's how I know that I'm playing too many video games and am watching too many horror/zombie/thriller movies. The other night I had this super-vivid, realistic, and a little bit disturbing/crazy dream in which there was both a (Left 4 Dead) zombie apocalypse and (Fallout 3-Style) nuclear holocaust in the same series of events. Yeah. I know... This is probably where the line should be drawn. I should shut off the internet, dump all my movies into a basement, and unplug the PS3, but then I think to myself, "maybe I could just use these crazy dreams to write video games of my own someday?"

So here's what happened:
Where I think these references/influences came from are in Parenthesis.

(Fallout 3)

    I was alone in the woods and suddenly came across a clearing with tons of people headed into a very large shelter (Fallout 3). For some reason I was in a panic and knew that I had to get to this shelter or I was quite doomed. In a frantic sprint I barely made it to the dank looking entrance that led below ground. Apparently, they were running out of space in this below-ground stronghold, and soon started rejecting people. Riot police stood in a line at the entrance and kept people out. Upset and confused, I started asking why we weren't letting them in. "We're out of room," I was told, and promptly pushed away from the opening and told to shut the hell up and sit down. Far off in my field of vision I suddenly see a large horde of zombies approaching (Left 4 Dead, running psychotic-style zombies) towards those left outside the shelter. As the large, metal doors closed, some desperate souls were caught in their mechanics and literally torn apart. (Oh, Jessie, no more Saw movies for you).

(Resident Evil 4: Maybe this is why my dreams are graphic?)

(Left 4 Dead: zombie horde)

     The doors close and I turn to look upon some television monitors that are for some reason recording what is happening right outside the facility. I feel hot tears streaming from my eyes as the zombies approach the people who were left outside, and turn away just as the mob of zombies rips into those left to their doom. Merely seconds later, I hear an announcement that "deployment has begun," and look back up to the monitors to see a bright flash of light overtake the screen.

(Nuclear Light-wave Effect simulated photo: an awesome person's Flickr Account)

Then, there is nothing. The screens go dark, and all the lighting and electricity in the facility goes dead. Panic flies through the underground space. People scream and run into each other like a flock of confused birds in a cave. Some just collapse to their knees and cry. Personally, I am in shock and don't really know what to think. My dream goes fuzzy here for a bit, and I can't really remember the next series of events, but for some reason I end up waking up in a room with like fifty people. I believe my dream has decided it has been a few years at this point because I look older when I glance in a mirror (Fallout 3).

I haven't seen anyone I know throughout the duration of this dream up until now. A random smattering of my friends have collected together to form a group that decides to steal the radiation suits from the soldiers and use them to get the hell out of this nightmare and go above ground. Apparently we decide this is the best course of action because the facility is running out of food and people are saying that those in charge will let some people die off to let others survive (12 Monkeys). We have gathered information that only America is blanketed in serious fallout (Fallout 3), and that we can go south and somehow climb the "Wall of Mexico" to live somewhat normal lives where the zombies and fallout did not extend.

We succeed in taking a few radiation suits, and somehow succeed in escaping through a series of de-contamination chambers to get outside (12 Monkeys).

(12 Monkeys: radiation protection suit)

Outside is somewhat covered in nuclear winter, but the most shocking bit of imagery is that there are a crap load of frozen, super decaying zombies (or what used to be zombies) all over the place.

(12 Monkeys: nuclear winter)

I mean, there must have been one hell of an outbreak, which is probably what prompted the "let's launch some nukes" decision. We then spend what is only a few minutes in "dream time" walking to Mexico. On the way we kill a few zombies that have survived in pocket areas of a "sort-of-not-complete radiation blanket." Don't ask me where we got shotguns, but we have them. Yeah, dreams. Whatever.

(Resident Evil: He found that shotgun somewhere.)

We get to the "Wall of Mexico" and note that it is covered in turrets to keep people out (Doomsday). I find this a little ironic because now everyone wants so desperately to get over this wall into Mexico to survive when we built the wall to keep Mexican people from jumping the border to the U.S. in the first place. Yay irony. In my dream it does not escape me.

(Doomsday: in which there is a wall around Scotland to keep zombies in.)

After managing to take out the turrets using a sniper rifle (we somehow acquired this as well, I'm now thinking I've played too much Resident Evil now) we climb the wall. We then see some zombies run out from the woods and one of my friends loses his grip and falls into a snarling pile of them. He is torn to bits and I somehow manage to look away and continue climbing over the wall. We make it to the other side and suddenly fallout disappears (because obviously my dream doesn't understand that environmental impact would gradually decrease as we walked south rather than suddenly vanish as though it was never there). 

We make it to South America, where we discover that the U.S. Government was behind the whole zombie apocalypse and subsequent nuking to cover their tracks. The general who gave the order had escaped to some remote corner of South America, and my dream ends with us setting out to kill him, because obviously, he sucks and is turbo evil.

(U.S. Government Testing of the Atomic Bomb: Operation Cue 1955)

So what have I gotten out of this dream? Is my subconscious slowly sinking into insanity? Nah. I think it's just the fault of media. Media is melting our fabulous brain bits into goo. MMM melty. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go to the kitchen and hang some garlic crosses above the sink to ward off vampires and load some silver bullets into my shotgun to stop werewolf attacks.

Signing out in terrifying awkwardness,
Lady Lara Jones

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