Zombies?

Okay so II'm a bit of a sci-fi geek and every once in a while I have an alien/time travel/zombies type dream. Okay so I had this crazy zombie dream last night. No I didn't watch a movie before bed. It was unprovoked. Basically, People were turning left and right. They weren't decaying, at least not all of them, They were pretty much in the state that they "died" or were turned in. I was with a group of people including John Leguizamo and Enrique Iglesias. Of course Johnny Boy was the bass-ass, and enrique was the one that always got us into deep dog dudu.

Okay thats neither here nor there. The real issue was that at one point I found myself in a football field full of zombies, and they only attached when they a)saw me moving erratically. b)came close enough to their face, or when c)I interfered with their "normal" rote movements.
When I hid and watched them, they just kept doing movements that they normally did in life. for example on the football field, some players kept moving their arm like they were throwing, some kept kicking, some kept running forward repeatedly, some kept running from side to side.

They weren't really dead. they were just in the state that they were when they turned. Meaning they had a diminished sense of others around them unless related to normal movement. Some zombies retained the ability to talk, but it wasn't conversation level speech, it was more like memory of sentences they most frequently said in their past life (past living life).

For example, at some point I made my way onto a bus (sounds like a bad idea huh? well okay let me premise the bus story. Basically on the football field I realized that not everyone was "DEAD" there were a few people that learned to interact with zombies on the zombie level that were still alive. one guy just hid in the electrical cabinet, another guy hid behind a pillar, and another dude was actually just pacing back and forth at a steady pace. at one point he made sure he walked in such a way that each pace in my direction was larger than in the opposite direction and when he got close to me, he whispered that he's not a zombie and that there seems to be a trick to dealing with the zombies, that I should follow him, but while he was saying that, zombies noticed his non-normal behavior and attacked us!)

this leads us to the Bus scene... so we ran and it took a while for some zombies to "wake up" from their routine to chase us... some where less sensitive than others... so it gave us time to get to a bus... he said we should follow him. so we did and crazy enough, we walked onto a full of zombies just sitting. we get on and sit too. the bus driver is noticeably a zombie. he doesn't ask for fare, but when I didn't put it, he sort of grunted "fare" so i dug for change and put it in lol! As we sat we realized that there were actually about eight of us that were non-zombies (mind you that you turn if you get the spit/blood of a zombie in a wound or tissue that is permeable to virus, sort of like HIV) Anyway the bus is taking us on this long route.

One guy in front disturbs the driver enough from his routine that the driver is aggravated and attacks him, funny enough the driver keeps saying "if you think you can do any better, you take the wheel" which makes me believe he probably said it before to a passenger or had that reoccurring though in his mind while "alive", both fall out of the door of the moving bus. this gives another man a quick opportunity to grab wheel of bus. Its so hard not to react and to stay still. Anyway many of the zombies seem "shut off" some are so involved in their routine like the woman in front of me knitting. I can tell she's a zombie because the back of her head is partially ripped out.

Anyway we are able to get off the bus and burn it(thats the thing about dreams... o don't remember how now) and we are in a podunk town thats empty, maybe zombies mass migrated or or are dormant. either way, we walk towards the most rural area with corn fields and no-civilization. We walk for miles. we see an airplane fall out of the sky some distance away from using the direction of the metropolitan area, we get to deep corn field and see unturned black people playing golf in the fields!!! Whats weird is that there are NO birds, or animals of any sort. Where are they. Anyway a biker band rides through and we hide, but they stop and find us, kill the black people, but not my group... any i'm black... i dunno why, maybe because they were yuppies... lol anyway we fight until they induct us into their group. they carry tanks of pesticide with them. apparently they use it to numb zombies, because the poisonous chemicals in the pesticides that cause parkinsonian like symptoms in us, cause no movement for zombies...

Okay then I woke up..

so lets get down to the fact/fiction/plausible/not plausible portion..

1) okay maybe the virus is something that only attacks the brain and nervous system. This justifies why they had diminish ability to think on a higher level but still retained some ability to talk, and move as they did when they were alive. maybe there is Zombie IQ because some were more skilled than others and retained more higher order function and thought process. Also maybe accounts for why some were in a deeper state of "dead" meaning they weren't as sensitive to us moving in a non-ordered pattern. this may have to do with duration of infection, IQ, ability to rally from infection, etc

2)they weren't quite living dead... they didn't smell dead, they were just "sleeping" they could breath and walk etc. so this brings me to another issue, if zombies by tradition are living dead, and they are pretty much moving corpses, why is it that they move at all? muscles need oxygen and nutrients to move. If the body is decaying, so is the nervous system too, then the brain cant send signal to the rest of body to move. so it must be an infection of an isolated organ or part of organ ie brain. remember many times viruses have an affinity to specific tissue (ie Herpes Symplex virus 1 versus 2, different types of HPV, and even the Herpes Zoster virus).

3) brings me to question "why don't zombies attack each other" in my humble opinion... and i'm not a zombie expert, it way be for a number of reasons. some people say pheramones. one thing i love about viruses is that they can make your body produce whatever it wants your body to produce! It can code for proteins that lead to increased pheramone production, increased activity of cells to produce new organs, increased production of onco-genes to keep cells from "dying" etc. ok also could be that if only higher level thought is affected, there is something primitive that keeps us, animals, and zombies from being "cannibal" meaning they don't each each other, but they don't see us "living" as one of them so they can eat us.

4)zombies that don't attack unless provoked or unless they notice erratic movement? i love this concept of higher order function and a virus that only affects a specific portion of the brain. when they used the pesticides to freeze the zombies it really fit into that theory because pesticides many times affect the thalamus and dopaminergic system. so maybe in the zombies the virus codes also for increased production of dopamine receptors, not just in the cells of the thalamus but all over, since all cells have full genetic code, but have parts of DNA that are methylated and such, maybe virus can code to undo methylation and cause production of things that particular cells don't normally produce. Reverse cell differentiation... love this idea.

5) maybe zombies don't want to feed or attack to spread virus. maybe the virus just spreads like other viruses we have in our real world, and like rabies makes person attack b/c of dis-inhibition or something. affecting frontal cortex areas? i dunno.

6) ok one thing that really irked me in my dream was that for the life of me i could not find any animals? no zombie animals, no animal corpses, no living animals, WTH? is it that my mind could not handle factoring in animals into the dream? or is it that maybe in my subconsciousness i believe that animals could sense the "turning" of zombies and got the hell out of dodge, or maybe animals were turned but it makes then commit secret suicide, they go hide and die, or causes photosensitivity, so they hate light (b/c my whole dream was in daytime) Remember that movie alien, when they killed the alien, and exploded it into pieces, but then a rat came and munched on the little piece of exploded alien and then it turned? does that happen with animals? or do animals lack the part of the brain that the virus needs to replicate. lets delve into differences in our genetic code to see what may be a protective factor for animals. maybe we can make a zombie vaccine!

ok so there you have it... my zombie rant. feel free to comment and give your own thots on this and my dream. Can Angelina Jolie-Pitt or Angela Basset play me in a movie? is my dream movie worthy lol!Where are you warner brothers? Id wanna cast John Leguizamo to play himself!

Diary of a Gidi-Girl disclaimer: My Nigerian friends may not find this as interesting cuz it seems they are not much into sci-fi, they plead the blood of Jesus on anything alien or fictional... so as a Nigerian, I'll say "God forbid we ever have a zombie virus or get overrun by zombies" in all honesty, i do rebuke zombies because it would be such a scary thing. However, you never know whats going to happen at the endtimes. only God knows and God is in control.