the zombie/alien invasion dream

On Friday night, for the first time in half a year, it was just barely warm enough upstairs to sleep without turning on the electric blanket. Maybe a bad move, in hindsight. I woke up cold, exhausted, spent Saturday catnapping, and still slept 8 hours into Sunday morning.

I had a long dream Saturday morning, and I still remember much of it on Sunday.

• long-legged alien machines roamed the landscape, intending to bring the extinction of humans.
• zombie-like transformation of humans to do the aliens' bidding (and eat our brains)
• each human transformation was preceded by about half a minute of confusion by the person.  that's how you knew someone in your vicinity was about to turn against everyone.
• these zombies sometimes remained smart enough, though, to herd humans into pens using pieces of doors and fences to push us around as we tried to fight back.
• I kept being separated from my escape-group of 3-4 people, who I think maybe(?) I do not recognize from real life.
• my escape group kept reforming as we lost/gained other survivors
• a cat was duct-taped (the poor thing) to my left leg for safe sleeping arrangement while I took my turn sleeping in a safebox in the back of a pickup truck on yet another section of travel.  I think the idea was that if I needed to take off running, then the cat would come with me without taking precious partial-seconds of tending to it

Curiously, this dream seems to match the current trend of anxiety-related pandemic dreaming.  According to the "dream" tag on this blog, it's been a full year (minus 3 days) since my last dream.  I'm sorry it had to return in such a common pattern of quarandreams.  How dull.