Gaunt, sickly, listless, mindless shells of what were once vital human beings, desperately cannibalizing each other in a wasteland stripped bare as they spread disease to everything they touch…
Zombies!
Right?
We name the things we see in our dreams so we can talk about them. Names mislead!
We have a collective, biological awareness – through the collective unconscious all the way to the first memories of the most basic things life encounters – of the presently impending repercussions of gross overpopulation.
It’s a memory.
Because it has happened before. Many times. If, perhaps, never before with this scope.
Our human and pre-human ancestors have survived overpopulation die-offs for billions of years. There’s a little red light blinking in the back of our understanding of our world, and when we see a zombie film, no matter how ridiculous, something stirs. The name zombie falls away and the instinct, the memory inside us that recognizes the thing itself says simply “THAT THING is coming.”
The fish are almost gone and the dead zones keep growing. The bacteria are adapting. The vulnerable species are already gone, and more go all the time, kept alive only in protective captivity. For now. Our deeply inbred food-plant and food-animal monocultures are fragile things. Most of our industrial fertilizer is produced using petroleum; a dwindling resource.
We know it in our cells.
If we don’t see real changes to the way things are progressing, THAT THING truly is coming. Call it whatever you want.
Art from Pixabay – artist unknown (contact for credit)
UNDER THE SEE 
Damn! This is a fascinating perspective. Of course, now you’ve got me imagining something like that happening in our modern times! How, what would it be like. Would it be a sort of sickness or desperation that drives people to cannibalism..?
Now I need to go reread about Ragnarökr, because now that I think about it, I could swear that I read something about humans killing humans, possibly cannibalism, just before Ragnarökr commences.
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Wow – nice bit of doom to start off my day and keep my optimism in check 😏
So as an archetype the zombie represents the self-destructive or self-limiting aspect of human nature maybe?
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