I also tend to have dreams involving zombies. I'm sure that mine were initiated by playing games involving them. There are a few strange things about these dreams, but the strangest is how real and natural they feel. They do not feel at all like the games I play which involve them. Instead, it's as though my brain has created realistic scenarios that feel exactly as they might if they were real. Another strange thing is that I almost never fight, I'm never violent, in any of my dreams, except for these ones in which I'm killing them with baseball bats, machetes, etc. I'm afraid, but usually really brave. The dreams, although they're always set at night which usually implies less vividness, actually tend to be quite vivid, with plots more intricate than those of most of my dreams.
You aren't the first person besides myself who I've heard dreams of zombies often. Just a few months ago I remember another thread just like this. I'm not sure why our brains take in the idea of zombies and make it more likely that we'll dream about them than other types of 'enemy' creatures. But I'd guess it has something to do with the definition of a zombie, that it's a dead, animated human.
We're used to seeing humans a certain way, to associating with them personalities, emotions, intelligence. We sympathize with them. For that reason, seeing a dead person can be a very scary experience. We're so used to seeing live humans, and are so used to sympathizing with them and expecting them to react in certain ways, that dead people confuse our brains. We know consciously that they aren't going to get up and move, but we're so used to them being alive that we subconsciously sort of expect it. This is where the idea of a 'zombie' comes in, why it's so popular, I'd guess. Because with zombies, the dead people actually have come back to life. Our brains on some level still expect dead people to be able to move, and zombies are basically exactly that. But they aren't the same as the humans they once were, they're monsters now. This confuses our brains even further. As though these people we are used to acting a certain way being dead is not confusing enough, they have now been reanimated and are monsters who want to devour your humanity too. The dead/alive uncertainty is terrifying, but it also intrigues us.
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