meta-zombie

To see or dream that you are a zombie, suggests that you are physically and/or emotionally detached from people and situations that are currently surrounding you. You are feeling out of touch. Alternatively, it may indicate that you are feeling dead inside and are simply going through the motions of daily living
Dreaming that a zombie is after you can mean you feel or fear that someone is threatening you in real life—emotionally, mentally, or physically—or it could just be that you're having a Toxic Dream.
Zombies can represent people who will simply not think rationally. Zombies can relate to moments when you are unable to act and feel paralysed. Zombies exist in a state where they are not alive yet they are not dead. They may symbolise something in your life that has similar features.
After two consecutive 'chased by zombies' dreams last week, i'm left wondering, 'Why are the reanimated such a persistent dream motif for me?' Zombies are the fertile soil in which my subconscious plants its past anxieties and my repressed condescension to the rest of the human race. i can think of no other dream symbol that more effectively reflects my anti-social tendencies and distaste for humanity.
in waking life, like any decent person, i would like to think of myself as a very social, open-minded person who will hear anybody out and validate others even if I'm actually rather ambivalent about the person in question. i know this isn't true, of course, and yet this is how i conceptualize my interpersonal activities.
I know this isn't true because in dreams when the rest of humanity has turned to consuming brains and walking around as corpses cold and soulless, I am the one voice of sanity. The one with the clear head (albeit a head targetted for consumption by ghouls).
I'm such an asshole.
I know this because while my husband will heed the beckoning wave of a non-familiar person wandering our neighborhood, I know before the first word is spoken that they're trying to get something from me, and probably not anything too specific, just anything they can get, which is even more dangerous in my perview. Because this person thinks I'm a sucker, or full of white guilt, or simply stupid. And before he opens his mouth to tell me his story, I'm miles away from listening and I'm reatreating in to the land of Getting the F*ck Outta Here.
My husband sees this behavior as treating the people who randomly show up on our doorstep as "Those People". I would wager that there's a race element in it for him because of his chosen characterization. I suppose it can't be ruled out as part of my trigger to evade the situation (I make no naive claims of immunity from the racist currents of our society), but I'm inclined to think it has more to do with the fact that it's any random stranger approaching me in my personal space with a grifter's smile and a used car saleman's guile. That said, I certainly understand how my failure to overcompensate in those situations could be read as racist.
But I just don't buy that it's all so simple. I could deal with being a racist. It's much harder to look at yourself and see a complete distrust of humanity in general. Much harder to logic that one out of the way ...
I would like to think of all this not as a fault line in my own map of morality, but as a manifestation of hard-won survival skills. But, maybe during the episodes in my past when I acquired said skills, some human part of me died. Maybe despite my superego's attempts to objectify those around me as zombies, maybe I'm really the walking dead feeding on the soft entrails of humanity.
Hmm. Maybe so.