Fever Dream

I ended last week feeling rough as a dog's arse - it just went downhill from there.  My fever broke overnight Friday into Saturday and I woke up literally drenched in sweat, but not before I'd had one hell of a fever dream.  I'm not a violent man and my dreams rarely involve violence, but this one was wall-to-wall violence.  As I remember it, the 'zombie apocalypse' had taken place, but the zombies weren't the problem: they were just shambling, utterly harmless wrecks who could just be pushed out of the way.  The problem, so it seemed, were these religious cultists who were wandering around wearing hoods and robes - so I was mowing them down with a sub-machine gun, left, right and centre.  Actually, to be accurate, it was a 'Grease Gun' - an M3 sub machine gun (it replaced the M1 Thompson SMG in US service during World War Two) - that I was using to make them eat lead, except when I was blowing them away with a pair of Colt .45 automatics.  Anyway, sometimes I was massacring them solo, sometimes with a sidekick, sometimes there was a whole group of us.  I don't know what sort of cult these dudes were running, just that they were bad news and had to be stopped. So, I just blew them away wherever I saw them - at one point I popped up from behind a bar (or, come to think of it, it might have been an altar) and opened fire with those forty fives.  Is it any wonder that I woke up soaked in sweat?

I was left wondering what had inspired this bizarre post-apocalyptic fever dream.  I thought that maybe the zombie apocalypse background might be a clue - I'd watched Zombieland again a couple of nights before, (it was on TV when I switched on when I came back from the pub, so I found myself slumped on the sofa watching it), but the problem in the dream weren't the zombies, though.  It was those religious cultist weirdos.  The only obvious cinematic analogy that immediately came to mind was The Omega Man, which had featured Charlton Heston gunning down nocturnal mutants - who had some crazy religious cult and dressed in hooded robes.  Except that I haven't watched that movie in a couple of years.  Then again, I did recently catch the end of Beneath the Planet of the Apes, which not only features Charlton Hestion, but also some cloaked and hooded mutants who worshipped a nuclear bomb.  Perhaps the sight of old Chuck doing some cultist bashing had triggered my memories of The Omega Man, with the two films combining with Zombieland in my subconscious to create my fever dream.  Another clue doubtless lay with the anachronistic armoury I was using to kill those cultist bastards - Grease Guns and forty fives are very much World War Two vintage.  But I'd most recently seen them, not in a World War Two movie, but in 1967's Battle Beneath the Earth (which I wrote about a couple of weeks ago), which feature them and lots of other anachronistic military equipment quite prominently, presumable because they were what the props department had to hand.  Much like the way in which our sleeping minds seem to create dreams, assembling them from whatever recent memories and incidents are to hand.