There was a heap of junk in a field, and Chris hid partially under that. I had to lay out in the open because the police were coming and I didn’t have time to hide better. We pretended to be dead and then the police would leave us alone. One of them must have seen one of us blink or twitch, though, because they realized we were still alive. We got up to run again but suddenly two of the policemen became zombies. One of them was the traditional slow-moving zombie type, and the one closest to me was the quick type, such as in 28 Days Later. Suddenly the riot gear on those two was gone and they were dressed in rags. They no longer had hair, and instead had bald and slightly shrunken heads. Their faces were all distorted and wrinkled; their nails were long and like claws. Chris had managed to run away, I think, because he was nowhere to be seen. The quick zombie ran up to me as I started to run and grabbed hold of my hand; it was chewing on my arm as I tried to wake myself up.

I don’t know if I ever really woke up or if it was all in my dream, but I kept falling back asleep. I ended up at a hotel with Todd, and the world was back to normal. However, I told Todd that I thought zombies were in several of the rooms on the floor below us. Todd thought I was just being silly, and he just wanted to go to sleep. I called the hotel front desk and told them my fears; they wanted me to go check out the rooms that were suspect. I made Todd come with me and we went downstairs, but I woke up before I could check for zombies.

It was daytime and the Joseph-Beth bookstore had a lot of shelves and tables in the yard. There were lots and lots of displays of books, candles, fresh vegetables, and other groceries; I started to browse through the aisles. Other people were there, also looking through things. I got to the end of an aisle and suddenly the dream shifted again.

I was in Hell, but not as a regular damned soul: I was apparently some ruler in Hell. I wore a strange brown outfit that was like a hard shell. I had some kind of head gear on that was oblong in shape but had points on either end instead of rounded edges. It pointed out above my head several feet and below my chin to my stomach. It was made of the same material as the hard brown dress I had on. I had long hair and didn’t look like myself: my hair was curly and brown, and my face and body were different. I was in some room in Hell: there were cutouts in the walls for windows and a door on one side. Outside, there was just cracked brown dirt with some steep cliffs. Everything seemed to be burning; there were heat waves rising off of everything.

The room I was in had some other people in it. They crawled along the floor, weeping. There were also a few skeletons that were apparently like the policemen of hell; they held spears and wandered amongst the people, poking at them. Then we all paused, looking toward the door: Satan was coming. We just sensed some kind of powerful, dark force coming toward us. I glimpsed him through the window opening and then he opened the door. Satan was a huge skeleton with brown bones that looked either dusty or burnt. He stood about eight feet tall and wore a cloak around his shoulders, like a king’s robe. He came in and the other skeletons bowed to him; the people cowered down. I was apparently some kind of assistant to him, like a secretary. He brushed my cheek and asked me to go up to earth and do something for him, I don’t remember what.

Before I went up to earth, though, the dream shifted and I was sitting on a dark blue ridge of a cliff. There were concentric tiers of cliff edges, and they seemed to be the only non-burnt looking things in Hell. They were the nine circles of Hell, apparently. Satan was standing on the highest one, talking with one of the lesser demons and laughing about something. He made a comment about ‘poor Sarah down in the third circle’. I was sitting there, legs dangling over the edge of the cliff, next to a pot-bellied demon that was shivering. It was apparently cold there.

The dream shifted and I was Julia Butterfly Hill on some kind of archaeological expedition with Indiana Jones. We were in some old, dark ruins out in the middle of a forest. There was a huge snake that we’d unleashed and were trying to study without being eaten. However, I sensed something and yelled at Indiana to run, because something bad was coming. We began to run through the dark corridors toward the entrance to the ruins. Everything was rumbling and we could feel something terrible behind us. We burst out through the entrance and my perspective shifted: I was no longer seeing through the eyes of Julia, but instead from some fixed position beyond the ruins’ entrance. I watched Julia and Indiana run off to the right and then Satan, the dusty brown skeleton, tried to come barreling through the entrance after them. The edges of the entrance were these huge rock points jutting out, like the peels of an orange cut open. They suddenly pulled inward, pinching Satan like they were the fingers of a hand closing shut. Then a huge, booming voice came from above: it was God. He was saying that Satan wasn’t allowed to run loose in this world. However, this part of the dream was like a prequel to the parts I dreamed earlier, and I knew that Satan would get loose somehow. He was the one that set the zombies loose.

The next thing I knew, I was outside the barn and the zombies were swarming around me. They were all packed together in a big crowd as far as the eye could see. They tried to kill me and I assumed they thought I was dead, but I wasn’t. I turned into Bobby Hill from King of the Hill. I laid there in a big pile of bodies and watched as they threw on more. One tan, male torso that was ripped in the chest from what looked like barbed wire was thrown on top of me. Another torso that was ripped open so that the chest cavity was exposed was thrown on next. One zombie commented on my eyes because the pupils were so small. He instructed me to flex my finger, so since he did this, I knew they knew I wasn’t dead, but instead was a zombie like them. I curled my right index finger at them.

The dream skipped again and I was running around on the headers of a large warehouse; surprisingly, it was easy to stay balanced on the thin beams. It was nighttime and I was running from a friend of mine, Kim. She was angry with me and wanted to kill me. She looked similar to the blonde zombie from earlier. There were a lot of people around us, allowing me to get lost in the crowd. Fires were burning down below in the warehouse and the smoke drifted up to us. I ran around a tall vertical beam, thinking I had lost Kim, but then she came up behind me. I turned to see her and she yelled at me about something. Deciding to get it over with, I ran toward her and we backed toward a large gap between the headers. We grappled with one another for only a few seconds before I shoved her through the gap. She fell several stories to the concrete below; I couldn’t see her land, but I knew she had been killed. I dusted my hands off on my pants legs, completely unconcerned about her death, although I was slightly annoyed because I apparently had to keep killing people.

The dream changed perspective to third person and the camera zoomed out, then moved down through the headers to the concrete floor way below. It zoomed in on Kim’s head in a fire; the skin of her face had turned to dark gray ash. The rest of her body was buried somehow.

The dream shifted and my parents and I were walking along that same road at night; the barn was gone. We were apparently stuck in the past or an alternate universe. There was a horse up ahead and my dad said he hated this part. I was curious about what he meant and he said that I’d see soon enough unless this was an older version. He was talking as though we were watching a movie that had a newer and better version, but this made perfect sense.

The horse up ahead was brown and pretty, but seemed to be stumbling around. Apparently, it had a disease and was suffering. Dad pulled out a short, double-barrel shotgun and shot the horse. It collapsed and we went over to it; it was still alive. It seemed that the horse was too ill in the mind to actually die, but it was suffering how it was, so we had to try and put it out of its misery. However, because it couldn’t die, every attempt seemed to hurt it more while simultaneously bringing it closer to death. My dad shot it again; it didn’t die. He knelt down and the horse laid its head across his legs. Dad looked up at me with a sad look and said, “See why I always hate this part?”

The shotgun changed into a pistol and my father handed it to me. He was going to examine the horse and needed his hands free. My mother expressed wanting to get back to our own time/universe/whatever. I said that one way we could would be to shoot ourselves. She asked, “And I suppose you’re willing to do it?” and chuckled. I pointed the pistol at her and told her yes. “Well, all right, if it doesn’t bother you to shoot your own mother.” My dad joined in, saying, “She’s helping you out.”

The dream shifted and my mother and I were back in our yard; she was moving some of her plants around. It was daytime but the light was funny, like the light just before a storm. Sure enough, the wind picked up and I knew it was going to rain. I also had a feeling, like before, that something bad was going to happen. My dad walked over. He had almost made it to us when the wind gusted strong enough to pick us up. We were blown around everywhere, and the wind was screaming terribly loudly.

I ended up out in our field, several hundred feet away, and had hit the top of a palm tree on the way over. I had also seen a giraffe flying through the air a little ways away from me. I landed on my back in the grass and just kind of laid there for a bit, stunned, before getting up. The wind immediately picked me back up, whipping me around more before depositing me in front of a car in our driveway. My mother was there, sitting on the ground a few feet away. She looked shocked and scared but not terribly wounded. Dad was nowhere to be seen.

Another gust of wind came up but it only knocked off some glass, which came flying over and ended up in broken pieces beside my right foot. Some got in under my flip-flop, so I brushed it out before standing up. Just then, an incredible silence fell over the place because the wind stopped. The sky was now a sickly yellowish green. “Oh shit,” my mother and I both said at once, staring at each other. Then I cried out, “I’m getting under the house, in the foundation.” As I got up and began to run toward the entrance to getting underneath our house, I heard my mother run to join me and also yell, “This storm is going to kill us.” That comment really scared me so I ran all the harder.

I got to the entrance and had to move a lot of junk out of the way before I could actually reach the door. I finally got the door open and was afraid I wouldn’t fit inside the opening, which seemed as big as a coffee can opening, but it seemed to stretch to allow me to fit. I was just crawling in when the dream ended.

This dream was strange for me in that not everything bad that could have happened actually happened, but also in that I had a feeling before each truly bad incident that something was going to happen. My dad also, for once, was not the enemy, as is usually the case in my nightmares.

Everyone was freaking out but I don’t know if anyone tried to help the three or not. The people just kept going back and forth on the rolling pins; when they reached the end, instead of falling off, they went back the other way. Somehow, finally, they got off of the conveyers. The first guy was completely skinned from the shoulders down. The woman had large holes torn in her everywhere. I don’t remember what the third guy looked like. I tried to walk over to them but I somehow slipped and ended up on a conveyer. I screamed but it only took me across once, unlike it had done with my three family members.

I was deposited at the foot of the conveyer and I ran away from the whole machine. There were woods off to my right and I went toward them. There were a lot of metal sheets on the ground that looked like they had come off of the conveyers. My uncle that was so bloodied up came over toward me and a cousin of mine. We saw him and shied away.

The wasps rose slowly out of the jar and hovered in the air. There seemed to be a lot more of them than had been in the jar. They turned toward me as if they knew that I had been the one to cage them. They suddenly flew at me extremely quickly. I ran toward the house and managed to get inside the front door. Some wasps got in after me and I frantically tried to kill them. Their abdomens started swelling into giant bulbs and they had some golden liquid in them. I swatted at them and they popped in midair like soap bubbles. I had shut the screen door only and now I shut the main door, too. I pressed a solid oak board against the door, just to be sure the wasps couldn’t get in.

My dad came in a little later. The time flew by really quickly until he was just suddenly running in the door. The wasps hadn’t been after him.

I took off flying, but one of them could, too, and he grabbed onto my leg. We flew off over some treetops and I tried to shake him off but couldn’t lose him. The others ran along the ground and climbed up into some really old trees, trying to reach us. We got tangled up in the trees ourselves, and that’s how I finally got him to let go. When I tried to fly, however, I couldn’t take off.

I landed back on the ground and the three men were there. They now looked like the agents from The Matrix. They told me that I would now be the worst of the body of humans. I started screaming and my point of view zoomed backward, where I could see myself. I was clutching my head and blood was oozing up around my hair (my head was partially bald and I wore my hair in a ponytail).

I jumped up and was able to fly again, but this time it was out of control. I zoomed up and up and saw this huge wall that I wasn’t supposed to fly over. I saw beyond it and it looked like the area in a video game that’s off the playable area of the map. I zoomed up over and way up into the sky, up into the atmosphere. I heard some voice saying, “You’ll die in the atmosphere.” My head exploded. “And then there’s Heaven.” Everything went black.

I was flying around over a huge city at night. I looked closer and saw that it was actually a huge prison. The prison lights were on in the shape of a skull and cross bones. As I flew, some of them went off. I zoomed down into the prison and into the darkened rooms. I flew inside a large gymnasium-like area with men sleeping in cots on the floor. I flew up to an opening in the wall about thirty feet up that was lit, thinking I could be alone up there. There was a lady reading stories to inmates by lamplight, though. I stayed hovering just beyond the opening, out of view. The story was some kind of romantic drama.

I dropped to my knees sadly, laying my head on her stomach. We held each other for a long time. From another porch, I heard someone saying, “I came to you because I knew I was going to die,” praying, and what sounded like my grandmother saying a blessing over their head. I started praying, and my grandmother whispered prayers over my head. On the other porch that I could see just slightly, the deck tilted and I heard an “Amen,” then a thump, and a sliding sound. A body started sliding off the deck to the ground below; it was my father.