The Quiet Earth

An experiment gone horribly wrong...

Zac Hobson wakes to find he's the last man on earth.

Then it gets worse.

Check it out if you can find a copy. It is on DVD, but hard to find. Filmed in New Zealand (no sheep were harmed during the production of this film) in 1985 it's one of the best though under appreciated Post-Apocalypse movies from the 80's.

I'm bringing this movie up because, not just because I think it's a great movie, starting and I guess age ten I began having this recurring dream. I wouldn't call it a nightmare but it is disturbing.

In the dream I wake up like it's a normal day but it slowly dawns on me just like the hero in the movie, I'm the only one left. Everyone else is gone.

What really makes this dream so disturbing is that it's so vivid. It's like a kodachrome film in my head the colors are so bright, I can smell smells, taste things... And when I wake up from the dream back to reality I can almost still smell the smells, like if I had been walking through a field with honeysuckle, I can still smell them when I wake... If I'm drinking a cup of coffee or drinking a coke I can still taste it too...

And it comes back with no rhyme or reason. It might be a year or a month, or even tonight it'll come back. Nothing triggers it that I can think of. I could be happy, sad or indifferent to things in my life and there it'll be in my slumber.

It's not always the same and I'm not always doing the same things, but the start and end of the dream stay constant. I wake up and I'm alone. I do know that in my dream, unlike the movie Quiet Earth there's still birds and bees and animals and things, just no people. That's all well and good because I always say the world would be a far better place without all the people, but the ending... The end of the dream, or the stopping point or what ever, the part that wakes me...

I'm walking somewhere. It could be a city or town, where ever I happen to be living at the time. It seems like the dream changes with the location I'm at. But I'm walking. Looking for things I can use. And I come across this huge berm of earth piled high. I slowly scramble my way to the top and the view I have makes me gasp... I always gasp even though I know in my dream what I'll find when I get to the top.

I'm standing at the rim of a massive crater... One that the diameter has to be double that of Meteor Crater outside of Winslow, Arizona and twice as deep. If you've ever seen that it would take your breath away too. That one is one mile wide and over seven hundred feet deep.

I've always heard that dreams mean something, and if you can remember them like this one and they're that vivid they really must mean something, but I'm at a loss as to what it's imparting to me, if anything.

It's like it's telling me my beginning and end. My Alpha and Omega...

Any ideas?

Copyright 2005 Thomas J Wolfenden