Left for Dead Rising. Two.

I just had an incredibly detailed zombie dream, in which I had to kill Patrick Stewart.

Patrick, I'm sorry!  You'd been bitten!  Everyone was watching you closely, and you were doing what you could as the military leader of the survivors before you turned.  When you felt it quicken, you turned to me and said, "You got this, Tim?"

To which I replied, "Yes."  And you bit down on my shotgun barrel, not wanting to die as a zomblebee.  It was incredibly noble of you, and a poignant scene in the complex drama that unfolded during sleepy time.  Of course, it ended up with some of your brains on the people around us because they wouldn't get away from you, because they loved their Captain.  ...yes, that was a dual reference to your rank in the dream and to your past as Captain Jean-Luc Picard.  Should I be sorry about that?  I've decided not to be sorry about that.

***

The dream began as a disjointed thing about me being at an awkward family function, in an extremely awkward house.   The house was awkward in its layout; there were wholly furnished and clearly lived in portions of it that could only be accessed through cumbersome, difficult and patently dangerous ways.  Of course, in the dream I seemed to be the only one who was having any trouble with such things, but that's not the point.  To avoid an internal family conflict, I had gone off somewhere in this giant house to play video games with some cousins.  We were playing something akin to L4D2 (Left 4 Dead 2, for the uninitiated), and at some point during that experience, that became the dream.

It was me, in a mall, running and hiding and shooting zombies.  I began with a crappy rifle.  It reminds me of the .22 Ruger I used to shoot at a friend's farm, now that I think about it.  Right about the time that I found a long lost lady love, we stumbled upon a Sporting Goods store and lucked into two shotguns and a box of ammo each.  The shotguns were five shot, pump action affairs that packed a hell of lot of punch.  She and I stayed together throughout the rest of the dream, occasionally temporarily separated, but always reunited.

I frequently encountered groups of people, tucked away in the very dimly lit stores of the mall, which was huge, by the way.  The mall was enormous, sprawling.   In the real world, it would have occupied kilometers of space (or miles, for you cute littler fellers still using imperial measurements).  There was an expansive basement and tonnes of stores, although I only recall there being two floors, with railed walkways on each side, separated by a huge open space that was occasionally punctuated with fountains.  ...it may have borne a striking resemblance to the mall from Dead Rising, only bigger, darker, and punctuated here and there with Things that were on fire.

Said Lady Love and I moved from place to place and group to group, frequently fighting off large groups of zombies.  Sometimes we fought them alone, just the two of us, saving a whole group of people for the moment.  Sometimes we fought them with a lot of help, with the occasional jammed gun or botched reload raising the heart rates of those involved.  I'm not sure when, but we started moving aimlessly through the mall with a large group of survivors.  In the middle of a skirmish with the undead, men in military uniforms with Big Guns and Precision Aim burst onto the scene from around the bend, taking out the zombies that were plaguing us, and they took us with them to a cordoned off, moderately fortified area in the mall.  Safety.  Ish.

That was when I was introduced to Patrick Stewart as one of the people responsible for the safety of a large group of others, and one of the lucky few to have found a worthwhile gun and ammunition.  He was the leader of these military men, and he introduced me to his lieutenants and included me in the decision making.  And then he began to turn, and I had to blow his head off.  RIP, Patrick.  You will be missed.  Your epitaph will read, "Make it so, my x-men."  Or possibly, "Dude could really rock a chrome dome."  I honestly can't picture you with hair, Patrick.

Afterwards, I fought off a wave single-handedly, because I was the only one at that point in the perimeter with a gun, picking off several zombies at a time with my shotgun, which was closer to a shoulder mounted flak-cannon at this point.  I'm sure that when I walked over to those stairs with the new commander, that he'd been carrying an assault rifle.  In fact, I'm certain that there were a number of men there with Big Guns, but the when the undead came shamble-running up the stairs, it was all down to me.  *Blam*, several more *blam*s, a reload, two more *blam*s and it was done.  I was basically the main character.

And then, a lull.  A long one, in which I toured the refugee area with the new commander, and searched for my Lady, who'd gotten separated from me when we arrived.  The refugee area was huge.  It stretched out almost as far as the eye could see, on both floors of the mall, with thousands of people.  Like I said, it was a really, really big mall.

I can see now that I've left out a lot, like how there were objects and goals that we had to try to find, early on, when the dream was still holding the form of the video game I'd been playing.  I left out almost all description of the darkened, trashed conditions of the mall, and I really didn't even describe the zombies - which were fast movers, but stupid as hell.

Unfortunately, the dream is fading, so this'll have to do.