Playing football with the dead

Very nightmarish dream last night, a little bit psychedelic and sad as well. Mostly scary though.

In it, I was playing football and I think it was meant to be as part of a school thing. I wasn't in school though, so everything was generally a bit confused.

Anyway, I was meant to be playing in some kind of championship (but not like the World Cup) and was running down the pitch with the football when I noticed lots of hands beginning to come up through the earth. They were moving and looking to grab hold of things, with the fingers clenching into fists and then unclenching again. I was (obviously) incredibly scared by this and stopped running, but everyone else on my team started shouting at me to keep going and it became clear that only I could see the hands.

So I kept running, but dodging the hands so I ended up dribbling the ball all over the place. I don't remember if we won, I just remember that it ended up being a sea of hands and towards the end of the game I had to start standing on them because there was no more space to dribble through them.

The match ended and everyone went home, and I lived near the football pitch so when I looked out of my window I could see all of the hands grasping and searching. I realised that everyone buried underground was dead, but that they weren't zombies. They needed to be freed, and since I was the only one that could see them, I would have to do it.

At that point in the dream things got a bit muddled up, because suddenly (in dream terms) I was a man, and I realised that my wife was buried in the football field. I had to get her out. I found some way of getting underground without digging or anything, and when I got there I realised that everyone looked the same - rotted and bloated. I couldn't tell who was who, but they all grabbed for me with their free hands and cried out to me.

I wasn't sure who I was looking for, but I found a woman who I thought was my wife. I got her out and took her to the surface, but when I got there I realised it wasn't my wife at all. But I couldn't face putting her back underground where everyone was soulless and desperate. So I took her home and she was still unhappy, and all the while I knew that my wife was still underground, but I knew that even if I got her out she wouldn't be herself, just like the woman I had rescued.

Needless to say I had a migraine when I dreamt that, and was also drugged up to the eyeballs with migraine medicine.