McNutt Against the Music

It’s an old cliche – parents warning their kids that, “eating all that candy before bed will give you nightmares.” And while most of us shrugged it off as parental hooey, I’ve come to see this as a valuable piece of wisdom. While I don’t usually dream during sleep, those times when I do almost always come after gorging myself on sugary goods, and almost always in the form of “nightmares” (not exactly the happiest of material here).

Last Wednesday night, I made the mistake of woofing down half a bag of sour jube jubes and a can of coke sometime after 9 p.m. As a result, the whole night lept from one unsettling experience to another, and when it was all said and done at 7:30 a.m., I felt like I had barely slept a wink.

There are two lessons that I learned from the whole experience, candy-consumption aside:

1. I’m still psychologically distressed about the pressures of academia, despite having graduated.

Usually my dreams are completely random, but there has been one recurring dream that first began during my time at Acadia; this past Wednesday was probably the fifth or sixth occurance that I recall. In the dream, I’m overloading for a semester at university and eventually forget that I’m in one of my classes. The course itself varies from dream to dream, but it’s usually something ridiculous like calculus. With less than a week left in the term, I suddenly remember but it’s far too late to drop the course. I frantically rush to the last class of the term – the “exam review” class – where I’m told that I need over a 95 per cent on the final to pass and quickly realize that the material being “reviewed” is almost entirely foreign to me. This is usually the point where I panic and wake up.

2. Slow zombies are infinately more scary than fast ones, but fast ones have their coolness

Since 28 Days Later was an underground hit and the remake of Dawn of the Dead turned out surprisingly not-terrible, it’s been a fierce debate of scariness betwen traditional, slow-moving zombies and these new sped-up versions. Last Wednesday I had two different zombie dreams, one from each category.

The traditional one had me drinking alone in a bar late at night (like, 3 a.m.) when all of a sudden I notice random, slow-moving figures wandering down the empty streets. As they multiply, suddenly I see the people in the bar suddenly change into the undead (defying the traditional zombie logic that a person has to be bitten by a zombie to become one), and I’m trapped. This one really unsettled me, as there’s something very distressing about any assailant that you see coming but can’t escape from.

But the non-traditional zombie dream was pretty cool. I was a soldier in the desert and my platoon of soldiers was frantically running down a sand dune away from some unknown menace. As I reach the bottom, running full steam ahead, I make the always-tragic mistake of looking back (NO, MCNUTT, DON’T LOOK BACK!!!) and I see this smokey mass of the undead running over the top of the dune, gaining speed on the soliders. All of a sudden, this hoard veers to the right and flanks my men, colliding with the troops in a mess of blood and carnage.

So what’s the moral of all this? My subconscious fears both academic distress and the undead. I think it’s got its priorities straight.