Posts from — February 2007

(Female, 40′s) This isn’t a dream I had but one my daughter had when she was 3 or 4. She woke me up crying in the dead of the night so I went into her dark room. It’s always a little dangerous walking through a kid’s room in the dark because you don’t know for certain that everything got picked up before bedtime. There could be things to trip over. Usually I could get her to go back to sleep by rubbing her back and humming but she was really disturbed this time. I told her that maybe she’d feel better if she told me what the dream was about. She said she had dreamt she had a cat. I said that that sounded nice. But then she described the cat. Somehow it had been turned inside out so all of its bloody muscles and organs were on the outside. The idea creeped me out so much I couldn’t walk across that dark room again. I got in bed with her and slept there ’til morning.

(Male, 30′s) I don’t know if this qualifies as a nightmare because I dreamt it when I nodded off at work one day. I was in an elevator of a skyscraper with this other man. We both were wearing business suits and staring straight ahead. When you work in an office building you don’t really make too much eye contact with people in the elevator. The elevator seemed to be taking an extremely long time between floors. The man was picking lint off his suit.

At least I thought I thought he was picking off lint. when I paid attention to him out of the corner of my eye, I realized that he wasn’t wearing a shirt under his jacket. Then what was he picking lint from? I looked at him and saw that he was bare-chested under his jacket. The skin of his chest was bright red like it was brutally chapped, possibly even bloody. And instead of lint, he was pinching these small pustules on his skin and pulling on them. Out from the tiny sores came long white worms the diameter of string. He dropped them to the floor like it was nothing strange. He didn’t seem to care that I was staring at him pulling these white worms. I kept waiting but the door to the elevator to open but it didn’t.

After that dream, I was glad to wake up and get back to work.

(Male, recurrent dream since childhood) It starts with a Staircase, usually leading downward but at least once the Staircase lead up. Usually but not always the Staircase is hidden behind a secret passage.

The Staircase goes on and on ’til it ends at the Door.

One time, the Staircase was at my Grandmother’s house and I discovered it with my identical cousin (someone who incidentally doesn’t exist in waking reality) We chased each other down the stairs, flight after flight, laughing until we found the Door.

Another time the Staircase lead to a small room, a bombshelter done up like a swanky 50′s-style cocktail lounge – one with cinderblock walls and an extra low ceiling. The Door in this instance was round.

When I open the Door, as I always do, I am confronted with opaque black, a dead silence. There is the sense of space but it is a blank space, an empty void.

Once the Staircase lead upward and the doorway looked like it would lead to an attic. When I opened it with the pull cord, there was that sickening emptiness again. But as I stared at it, a tiny black spider emerged, suspended on a thin black web. That was almost worse because something from the dimensionless void “over there” was coming “over here.”

When I’m confronted with that dimensionless void I can’t go backward or close the door, but I can’t go forward either.

(Male, 30) I’m the guest of this couple, a man and a woman in this huge house. I follow a path down to this luscious garden filled with flowers that I’ve never seen before and fruits I’ve never eaten. Everything is beyond belief gorgeous like that garden in Willy Wonka, that kind of luscious. Everything is just delicious. I eat for awhile and I want to go but my hosts don’t want me to. Not only that, I find that I’m trapped. There’s no way out the garden or the house. I start to panic. I rush around frantic, trying to find an escape and as I do, the couple begins to age. By the time I actually find a door, they’re probably a hundred years older. As I finally exited, I woke up.

(Female, mid-teens) Dad was cleaning up in the kitchen but he wasn’t paying attention to what he was doing. It was like he was thinking hard about something else. He cleared the counter top basically by putting everything from the counter into the dishwasher.

….flames started shooting out…

One of the things he put in the dishwasher was the little blowtorch we have for making creme brulee. When he turned on the dishwasher, somehow the blowtorch turned itself on. It burned a hole in the door of the dishwasher and flames started shooting out. Dad didn’t seem to notice this until I started yelling. He reached in and took out the blowtorch and started to carry it outside. But he wasn’t very careful about how he held the torch and he basically lit the whole kitchen on fire as he walked out the back door. Then he closed the door and left me alone in a burning house.

(Female, I was 4 or 5, this is my oldest nightmare) I had to go downstairs since my family was down there. Our basement was pretty bright for a basement, but the stairs were steep and, on one side, there was only half a wall since the staircase opened into the basement. Being small, I had to move to the other side of the stair to hang on to the rail because the open space was threatening.I had to go downstairs but I was afraid. I was the only one who seemed to know about the monster who lived there. He lived in the space above the acoustical tiles that we’d recently installed. He was obviously very light-weight and he didn’t seem to bother anyone else. When I went into the basement, however, he’d catch me. Then he would poke pieces of scrap metal into my ears and I’d wake up crying with an earache.