My husband likes to play zombie games on his Xbox 360 like Red Dead Redemption: Undead Nightmare or The Walking Dead: Survival Instinct or Left 4 Dead and others.

One of his most recent game-playing evenings mixed visuals with a previous dream of mine and since then, I’ve avoided watching his zombie killing games because the dreams resulted from it weren’t fun and they went on for far too long.

I remember going up an elevator to visit someone. I believe I was going to go warn them because everyone around us was falling to the land of zombies. You couldn’t trust anyone anymore. One moment they’d be fine and the next moment they’d be stumbling around. But those were just the “regular” zombies. There was something else, more human but also extremely vicious among them. It ate or destroyed anything that breathed whether it be zombie or human. I think this is the part that had mixed with my dream form a few weeks back because there were other human-like creatures in that dream that acted much like these zombies. I didn’t have time to journal that other dream but I had committed it to memory so the visuals and ideas were floating around in my brain as I created this new zombie vision in my sleep.

By the time I had finished trying to visit my friend (who incidentally wasn’t home) the elevator was occupied and on its way up. It was containing either one of the vicious beings or a zombie. You could tell by the thrashing around it was doing in the confined elevator compartment. I was terrified of the door opening once it reached the floor I was on, but someone else showed up before it did and helped me destroy the elevator shaft so that it couldn’t open on our floor. If it had we could have been instantly killed depending on the type of creature it contained. We watched the elevator fall several stories down and smash into pieces. Blood was everywhere so we felt confident that whatever was inside of it, hadn’t survived. Of course, this also meant that we now had to get out of the building through the stairwell which was potentially more dangerous.

But I knew something about the zombies, both the stumbling kind and the vicious ones. I could get around either one with out too much trouble. Zombies to me were like alligators or crocodiles. They could make decent headway in straight lines, but if you ran around corners or zig zagged a lot, they really couldn’t follow you, at least not quickly. So they were easy to out maneuver. The other vicious things, however, were an entirely different story. They moved so quickly that you could barely see them unless they slowed down to hunt. They were like a blur and their path of destruction was equally blurred with gore. If they noticed you, that was it. Your life was over. There was no chance of survival. The only saving grace was that it would be over before you could even scream. They were clever but strangely enough, they seemed blind. They had eyes, but they were just black. They didn’t see. Their skin was a purple hue and their hair was like spiked dreadlocks. Their faces or arms often had tatoos on them. It reminded me of a Sith or something from the Star Wars: The Old Republic online game.

We were headed down the stairs but heard screams and knew one was near. We left the stairwell and the other person said to run, but I tried to convince them otherwise. But it was no use and there was no time. I ducked down a hallway that was separated by a pair of double doors. I backed myself against the wall behind one of the doors and held my breath. Something flew past the doors, but then stopped. It came back and then I saw it as it walked slowly around the corner. It was hunting and sensed that something may have been down the hallway. I knew that if I just held my breath that it would soon move on and never know I was there. I had to be remain motionless too. But then, because that must have seemed too easy or my brain had a death wish for me, my 7-month old daughter appeared in my arms. She was sleeping and therefore not moving, but I didn’t know how long I could safely muffle her breathing so that the vicious hunter wouldn’t detect us.

That’s when I woke. It was too much. My daughter coming into the picture was where I had to draw the line and pull myself out of the dream. That’s one skill I’ve always been grateful for. When you journal your dreams a lot, you learn to be in control of your dreams – well at least I did. I guess I don’t know of anyone else that can do that. I can stand back from a dream at any point to stop them in progress or to change where things are going. In this case, the dream simply needed to end. I was not enjoying it and the prospect of my daughter then being in danger made it that much worse for me.

Dreams that endanger my children are really no fun for me. Do other people have dreams that put their children in danger? Does anyone else stop or change their dreams?