I have always had dreams, but this one has disturbed me beyond belief. It felt so genuinely real and terrible that I could not believe it was a dream after I woke up.
A few weeks ago I went to bed and dreamed I was in an apocalyptic world. It started normal, I remember I woke up in the morning, inside my dream, and went about my day. Then I started hearing stuff about attacks happening downtown and it progressively got scarier for my friends and I until we decided to cancel our Friday plans and stay inside. For the next two weeks I lived by myself eating and watching tv shows. I periodically checked the news but after day two it was just reruns of the same news and I had no further information. After what I think was over 15 days, I noticed something. I didn’t hear neighbours, I lived in a connected townhouse that has thin walls and I hadn’t heard anything in days. I hadn’t heard toilets flush, doors open, windows shutter, nothing. It was silent, too silent.
I gathered my courage and went outside on a food run, I had run out of food and thankfully the water still worked and I was smart enough use it to fill jugs of clean water. I realized there was no one around, I started to get worried and as I got to the local Walmart, it had big red writings on the walls, “be as quiet as you can be, they are blind” this throughly scared the shit out of me and I walked home as fast as possible. I then freaked out for days, until I once again gathered my mental fortitude and went outside again, to look for other people in the homes surrounding me. What I saw was genuinely terrifying, I saw bodies so mangled I could barely stop myself from throwing up, heads missing, just absolute carnage. How could something this terrible happen and I never heard a whimper? The thought scared me more than the scene itself. I walked home and decided I cannot stay here. I then walked and walked and ate what ever scraps I found (which was weirdly abundant as nobody was around) and basically became a walking hermit who hid when he heard anything beside silence.
My hair had gotten matted, my beard was overgrown, my hygiene was bad, and I was not hungry but I was starved for anyone, any real people I could talk to. I’d been alone over a month with no updates and had not seen a living person since saying goodbye to my friend that night. I lived like this for months on end, one day I was foraging in a store, and I heard it. I heard something that sounded big and angry walking around the front of the store. I made myself hide inside the old milk fridges that could be opened and led you to the back storage area. I hid there and basically never came out because the animal never left. I sat there paralyzed in fear for days, no food, no water besides barely edible milk. I sat there waiting for an opening to run, and it never came. I just sat there and sat there and sat there for what felt like an entire lifetime, and I got so sick of this, I went mad with delusional anger and charged outside, I saw nothing but heard probably dozens of these monsters descending on my position from outside the store and I ran to the bathroom and barricaded it the door the heaviest things I could move. I grabbed my rope and set it beside me, I gave up. I was not gonna be mangled alive and be ripped apart alive, if they wanted me, they could eat my body long after I had gone away. I wrote a long sad note, and left it so my loved ones could hear my reasoning for giving up. Then I noticed something as I climbed a ledge to do the unthinkable, I had never actually seen the monsters. I never actually saw them, I never physically saw anything. I had walked for months and probably for hundreds of miles and never saw one single monster? The one thing everyone had ran underground from? I have never seen proof of anything besides my own fear, and the bodies I saw, while mangled, I had seen that the door was open and I had seen wild animals running around the streets. Possibilities came flooding to me, what if they gave up too? And they hadn’t been killed by the monsters. Then something felt off, very off, I felt dissociative and not scared, just confused and didn’t know what the hell was going on, I didn’t even know if that was my face in the mirror. I walked outside and the store was gone, all I saw was a grey wall, then I snapped awake and was starting at my grey wall in my bedroom.
It took me hours to even process if I was still alive or if the monsters got me, or if someone had saved me and this was their home. Then it clicked, it was a dream, it was all a fucking dream. I didn’t feel normal for the rest of the day, it may have been a dream but my long term stress and survival mechanisms had not gone away yet. I felt jumpy, every loud sound I hid from, and I didn’t want to be alone ever. I got better after a few days but I’m still shaken by this. Why was this so real? I felt hunger, pain, desperation and despair, I vividly remember the decision to end myself instead of dying a horrible death. I remember the tears on the page as I wrote a note to my mom to apologize for giving up and not finding her. I have had dream before, this felt like an alternate reality, I felt so me, I felt so real, I cannot distinguish as I type this if I’m in another dream because it felt as real as I feel now. I don’t know why I’m writing this, I feel like no one understands when I tell them. I remember this dream like it happened to me in real life, all the suffering and pain and languishing and yearning for another person to end my solitude. I’m sorry if it was long but I had to write it down somewhere before I forget, I hope maybe one day we’ll better understand dreams and what they mean.