Blast From the Past

Wednesday 23 May 2012

When I was a boy I used to have this recurring dream. Well, a nightmare, I suppose. I would dream that I was floating in space, unable to move, looking down on earth. Somehow I knew that despite no food, water or oxygen I would remain alive forever.

Forever looking down on earth, knowing that my family were living their lives and growing older and I had nothing to look forward to except an eternity of loneliness and immobility.

Mrs Mac is into dream analysis and I suppose she might suggest that the dream tells of a fear of isolation and estrangement from my family. Either that or an early realisation that I was to become a complete space cadet.

A few years later my nightmare was realised in an old instalment of The Twilight Zone involving an astronaut about to embark on a sixty year mission to Mars. He was to be placed in a cryogenic state for thirty years and woken when he reached Mars. Then he was gonna mince about a bit on the red planet and come back, again in a cryogenic state, to awake back at home sixty years later but no older.

Then he meets this burd and falls immediately and madly in love. Both are tortured by the idea that when he gets back she’s gonna be a wombling old coffin dodger in a house coat and blue rinse and he’ll be the same picture of youth and vitality that left sixty years previous.

So off he goes to Mars, frozen in time like the solitary fish finger you find at the back of the freezer. While he’s gone his burd convinces the cryogenic dudes on earth to freeze her too so when he gets back she’ll still have pre-GILF status.

So, sixty years later they wake this burd up. She has a shower and gets herself ready for some hot lovin’ and makes her way to the landing pad and awaits the return of her fella.

The spaceship lands, the door opens and a ladder descends.

You can feel the tension right?

Then down the ladder hobbles this old geezer, all baldy slap-head and wrinkles. He walks up to his burd and explains that after leaving earth he couldn’t live with being so much younger than her so he woke himself up.

And spent sixty fuckin’ years on his own in a tin box.

That edition of The Twilight Zone terrified me and transported me back to my boyhood. Then, fuck me, just the other night I had a nightmare that was equally as terrifying.  

I was locked in a barn with Mrs Mac and our children while outside lurked hundreds of flesh eating zombies trying to get in and devour us.

I don’t know if I’ve told you before, but I’m a former member of Her Majesty’s Armed Forces and so I did a good job of keeping the living dead at bay.

But I had to leave the barn to deal with a pressing matter. I can’t remember what it was but it was important. And I knew that after leaving the barn and dodging and outrunning the zombies, they would get in and kill and eat Mrs Mac and The Brady Bunch and I would return to a barn of emptiness.

Again, an analyst might say that the dream demonstrates a fear of abandonment. But there’s a good side to that dream. You see, if I were the only living person on earth, surrounded by moaning, slow moving zombies, I’d kick some proper arse in a race. I’d even give a recently despatched Jez Bragg a run for his money.

But, of course that dream contained the sort of shuffling retro-zombie you get in older films like The Dawn of The Dead.

Now I live in absolute fear of a dream containing the more modern zombie like the ones in 28 Days Later. You know the ones that move like shit off a shovel. Oh well, at least that dream will be a return to running normality for me.

3 comments:

Richard said...

Don't eat cheese before bed?

Dale Jamieson said...

very ammusing. cheers big guy

Tim said...

You know what's more boring than someone telling you their dreams? Nothing. :-P