I'm in a small town, deep in the American west. It's completely deserted, and rather trashed, as if a small horde of looters had passed through briefly on their way to somewhere more interesting and hadn't bothered to settle in for any serious arson or destruction of property.
I know some rules about this world in my dream, as if I'd been there a while. For example, you can secure a building against zombies but it requires a fair amount of quasi-magical ritual to Seal each exit and window. This means if you screw up and open a door, simply closing and relocking it isn't enough. You have to ritually re-Seal it. In the dream, I'm a visitor, a refugee, and I don't know which rituals work in this place. This means anything I touch I can screw up, leaving the way open for screaming, mindless death.
Another rule I know is that the only places of safety are defended smaller towns — big enough to hide behind walls, small enough to be able to tell when something's gotten behind your walls with you. You don't want to defend Manhattan or even Peoria, you want to defend Radiator Springs. In order to get from place to place, you have to move very fast, so there's an irregular economy of people driving old hot rods at insane speeds along the remains of the Interstates. Towns on windy two-lane blacktops are toast, and have been abandoned, leaving a very limited collection of safe spots strung like flawed pearls on the concrete strings of American highways.
I'm in this place to meet someone who will take me somewhere else safer, more populous, on whatever undefined dream quest I am pursuing. But my contact is missing, their fortified ranch house quiet, innocent of even cats or roaches. I wander around the house, calling for them, forget myself and open the Sealed door to the garage. It's a potentially fatal mistake, one I cannot repair. I am clumsy in this special, quasi-magical way, breaching Seals and finding only dust, not even bloody skeleton bones.
I am alone, my ride is not coming, and I have opened all the gates of my last refuge.
Weirdly, this being one of my dreams, the entire time I have a soundtrack of generically dippy pop music, sort of like listening to Alanis Morissette while butchering hogs. That is somehow the most threatening of all.