Last night I dreamed that I lived in a little apartment in a New York style apartment building, in a row of nearly identical apartment buildings that was completely enclosed in a shell from the outside world. In the center of the neighborhood was an expanse of green space, a little park about the same footprint as an apartment building, and one end of it opened to a dock and the sea beyond, with a big industrial garage door that would open and close.
Everyone was in a panic and in the process of evacuating because we had been invaded by aliens, although we never actually saw the aliens themselves and there was nowhere to evacuate to. They had landed on the rooftops of our buildings and were slowly taking over. Even though we couldn’t see them, we knew their paths because wherever they went, everything turned dark and crumbly and dead. Walls, plants, furniture. And people who’d been “infected” or whatever began to look like zombies, with tattered clothing and purple circles around their dark dead-looking eyes. I was one of the unofficial leaders trying to get the remaining people to safety, and I was lucky in that even though I was running around everywhere, through infected areas, I hadn’t been turned into a zombie yet. I wasn’t sure where we were going to take people anymore, because the park had been taken over by the aliens. I thought that maybe it was possible for us all to gather on the roofs, since the park wasn’t safe anymore and we had nowhere else to go, but then remembered that the roofs were probably where all the aliens were gathered.
I noticed that Bob and someone else were up on the 3rd floor of one of the buildings, and they needed help. I found another leader, who radioed to someone out on a boat that she was “Missy” from the health department and she needed two life jackets. I guess they were only giving supplies to the actual people in charge, so we had to pretend to be those people in order to get anything done. Then she told me that I had to go pretend to be this fictional Missy and get those life jackets to (somehow) rescue Bob. I ran down to the dock and realized that Missy from the health department WAS actually there looking for life preservers, and that I’d probably be caught if I tried to pretend to be her. Somehow, I got them anyway. I ran back to Bob’s building and tried to toss an orange life preserver through the open window. It took several tries, but I got one through. Then I bent down to pick up the green one to toss it in, but in that few second interval, his apartment had been taken over, and the window was shut and dark. I was too late.
Back at the park, I looked into a first floor room of one of the buildings and saw a classroom full of little purple-eyed zombie children, staring straight ahead at the zombie teacher with rapt attention. Moments before, it had been a regular classroom full of regular children, and it scared me how instantaneous the transformation was.
Then I found myself sitting with several other people at a picnic bench in the park, cooking. I had a little kerosene burner on the table in front of me, and a frying pan full of oil. Everyone was looking to me to feed them. Next to the pan was an arrangement of ingredients, and I wasn’t really sure we should eat any of them because most of them were vegetables that had been taken over by the aliens. I guess if alien stir-fry is all you have to eat, though, that’s what you eat.
I cut several slices from an alien zucchini, and there were dark sad faces in the zucchini. You know those tubes of holiday sugar-cookie dough you can buy that have designs in the middle, so when you cut them into slices, each one has a Christmas tree, or a bunny, or a pumpkin design in the middle? That’s what these zucchini were like, only they had dark unhappy human-looking faces as their designs. But the minute I put them into the hot oil, the slices grew to giant proportions, taking up almost the entire pan, and the dark sad faces turned bright and happy and sunshiny. That is when we realized the answer: the alien menace could be eradicated through heat! I woke up before we got a chance to test whether it was just plain old heat that would do it, or if everything had to be purified in hot oil.
