Z is for Zombies

I don’t know about the rest of you but all this talk of zombies has been severely cutting into sleep time. After many years of diligent research I have determined that my body performs best when I have logged a solid 8 and 2/3’s hours of sleep each night. Yeah that’s right, 8 hours and forty minutes. All those scientist hacks who say 8 hours is sufficient clearly didn’t test out 8:40 or they would really know ‘what was up’. But today, science isn’t the problem, zombies are. I’ve been finding it incredibly hard to ‘fill my tank’ at night when I am woken up time and time again as zombies invade my dreams. All of the discussions about zombies and survival has sent me into, what can only be called, a perpetual state of zombie preparedness. Basically I am constantly on my toes for the outbreak of a zombie apocalypse. While the likelihood of such an event is highly unlikely it has not deterred my mind from preparing emergency action plans for every situation, and I do mean every situation. In the last couple months I have made strategies for the library, the post office, the bars and even the shower. Who knows where I will be when the shit hits the fan?! I have decided it is better to be safe than sorry, but this constant readiness has taken its toll in the form of sleep deprivation.

At first I even kind of enjoyed it. The dreams were fun, and I felt like Dale from the Walking Dead, as I mowed down zombies left and right with Jedi-like precision. As the semester progressed however, the dreams just kept coming and zombies just got more and more difficult to kill. Soon I was having my brain eaten basically every night as the zombies went from slow moving ‘chumps’ to swift and intelligent brain munchers. At its worst, the zombies evolved into a flesh-hungry creature that could communicate with other zombies, but worse than this, they were able to remove their brain and still survive. I can remember quite vividly one instance where the zombie did this and my numerous shotgun shells proved useless as he waved the brain around like some sort of demented carnival game. So I was dying in my dreams with regularity and every time I died I woke suddenly, sometimes covered in sweat and other times feeling for my head to make sure it was all still intact. Needless to say the nightly occurrence got old kind of quick.

Since this last occurrence I have vowed to take back my dreams. No longer will I allow these undead a-holes to invade my precious slumber. I have taken a number of steps to ensure this happens. First off, no more thoughts of zombie defense. While this proved difficult to just ‘turn off’ after three plus months of doing so, I was able to make this happen after realizing how unlikely it will be that I will ever have to use these POA’s. The second thing I did was to refrain from reading zombie material within 3 hours of bedtime. This step was significantly easier to follow through with compared to the first one. The last phase of ‘Operation Eradicate the Zombies’ came down to my choice of Netflix show I watched as I drifted off to sleep each night. As fun as it would have been to fight zombies with Special Agent Jack Bauer, the television program 24 had to go. All of the gunfire and dramatic music pumping out of my Mac each night could have easily contributed to the terrors that were going on in my head. So I swapped out Kiefer Sutherland et al. and went with an array of different comedies including South Park, Its Always Sunny and The Office.

*The changes have helped. I haven’t had a dream with zombies in it in almost a month and I couldn’t be happier about it. Now I can get back to my 8 hours and 40 beautiful minutes of rest each night.