Posts from — March 2007

(Female, mid-teen) This dream took place in a small town. A tornado had just ripped through the center of the town, including right through the town’s high school where it had killed almost everyone. Life was just starting to get back to normal.

..Life was just starting to get back to normal…

A mother was in her kitchen working when she looked out her back window and saw the body of a high school girl lying face down in her back yard. It had been dropped there by the tornado. The mother called the officials and let them know. There were sounds of someone coming down the stairs. It was the mother’s five year old daughter. In the dream, my perspective shifted so that I was the little girl. The mother met the girl (me) as the girl (I) came into the kitchen and tried to block the view of the back window so the girl wouldn’t see the dead high school girl back there. But I looked around the side of the mother and I saw the dead high school girl. She was standing at the back window, waving at me, smiling. She was creepy dead, bruised, broken spine, leaves in her hair, that kind of thing. I woke up in the middle of the night and was scared to look at any of the windows in my room.

(Female, 40’s) I have this recurring nightmare scenario that plays on a couple of my real-life obsessions. One is my sense of orientation, by which I mean knowing which way is north, and therefore east, south, and west. In my head, I place myself on a map, most of the time, and I know where I am. And the other is a sense of direction, so that I know where I want to go on that map in my head.

My recurring nightmare image is more like a backdrop than a plot. Whenever I find myself in that dreaming place, I’m filled with a sense of dis-ease. I’m at the place where two country roads intersect. There are no street signs at these four corners. The roads stretch on in all directions far as the eye can see, and farmlands and fields cover all the ground. At some junctions, there’s a house or two, but no one is home at any of them. There are no signs of life, no cars in the drives. In these dreams, I’m usually traveling, either walking or driving or occasionally riding a bike. Sometimes I’m trying to get somewhere, like to visit a relative, or get away from someone who is following me. The scariest part though is not knowing where I am or which way to go. I travel on and on but the landscape keeps repeating. There’s no way out.

(Male, 44) I had this dream just last night so it’s still fresh in my mind. I’m still trying to get over it. I hope it’s not too extreme.

…I hope it’s not too extreme…

The situation is that there was sort of a Manson family sort of group holed up in this house. Except it was a real family, like they had kids too but they were also murderers who would invade someone’s house and butcher them. I saw the dream from several different perspectives, all pretty much at the same time, which was also weird.

From one perspective I’m one of the SWAT team who shows up to bring this group down. There are probably a dozen of us, each with a rifle and a site — a sniper’s set up — but what’s strange is that we’re right up by the porch of the house, probably 4 feet away from the family who’s just on the other side of some windows. It seems pretty clear to me at least that we are way too close to this situation for the weapons we’re carrying. In the dream this was my first time out as a SWAT member and I was crouching low, trying to get a good clear shot but there was too much reflection off the glass for me to risk anything.

Another perspective I had was inside the room with the mother and father and their kids. They had at least two kids, a boy and a girl, both probably 5 or 6. The place was a mess. They had ransacked the whole house and brought anything that looking interesting down to the living room and put it in a big pile. Also in that pile were bloody, lifeless arms and hands of the people they killed, thoughtlessly, casually. The mother and father knew that their bloody spree was up so the each pulled out a huge hunting knife. The father killed the son, just sliced into his throat so deeply he almost cut it off. Blood went everywhere. And almost immediately, the father threw up, a bright green vomit. (Did I mention this was pretty extreme?) And almost immediately, the mother did the exact thing to the daughter and then vomited as well. Somehow the vomiting meant that the parents loved their kids and regretted having to kill them.

And the third perspective was that I was a little kid, probably 5 or 6. I don’t think I was a member of the killer family; I think I was a member of the family whose house the killer family invaded. I was hiding. I had been hiding throughout most of what was happening. At the end, I found a telephone pole in the backyard and wrapped my arms and legs around it and sort of inchwormed my way to the very top so nobody would see me and I wouldn’t get killed accidentally or on purpose by anyone. I looked out over the neighborhood. The trees were a mass of leafless twigs sort of like steel wool. The house looked much bigger than it did on the ground. I just held onto the pole and waited. Eventually everything turned brown like in an old, sepia toned photograph which somehow meant that all the killing was over and that it was time for me to come down. It was time for the funeral for my family. Someone handed me a small silver tray that had six items on it. They were supposed to represent the other members of my family who I had lost. I started crying in the dream and the items started falling off the tray. When I woke up, I was still crying.

(Male, mid-40’s) This dream was like a movie, a post-apocalyptic / giant monster movie. I was one of a handful of survivors. We were all more or less trapped inside this one house. It was a relatively large house but still there were probably about a dozen of us. And for some reason, everyone — at least everyone other than me was stupid, doing things that were incredibly dangerous considering our situation. I suppose that’s a lot like a movie too.

The dream took place in the near future where bees had taken over the world at least all of it we could see. And by bees I mean bees that had probably 4 foot wingspan and were intelligent. The bees were able somehow to plant crops. They had planted every square inch of soil for miles around this house with sun flowers. The sunflowers grew right up to the walls of the house, right beside the road and the sidewalk. They were every where. Miles and miles of bright yellow flowers. But the sunflowers short and weren’t tall enough to hide humans if we went outside. And of course everyone wanted to go outside.

For some reason, our big project was to try to scoop up some of these sunflowers and bring them inside and get them to grow in the bathtub. (Did I mention that everyone seemed stupid? I thought this was a stupid goal even in the dream but I wasn’t able to convince anyone of that.) One guy went outside and tried carrying in a sunflower, which seems to be very fragile which meant you had to move very slowly, and of course he was attacked and stung to death.

I awoke as we were organizing a party, including lookouts to keep watching the skies.

(Male, mid- 40’s) This is just an image that I remember from a dream I had last night. I don’t know if it’s what you mean by a nightmare but it struck me dead in my tracks.

I was on a road that sloped pretty steeply down a hill. Beside the hill, down in the valley was a church or some kind of building with a tower. It wasn’t a tremendously high tower, maybe 5 or 6 stories tall but it was just about even with where I was on the road so I was able to see it pretty well. I don’t think it was an observation tower, that is, I don’t think it was really designed to have people on top of it. Further more it must have only been maybe 3 foot by 3 foot on the flat roof of this tower. But someone was standing up there on that treacherous peak, a kid, no more than 12 or 13. What’s more, that kid wasn’t just standing on the flat part of the roof, he was up on the edging, the “ramparts” I think they’re called. The wind was blowing because I could see it blowing around his hair and I knew that he could lose his balance or get blown off that roof before he realized what was happening. It’s just like boys that age to try something that seems cool, like crawling up on a roof without realizing how incredibly dangerous it is. Heck, I did sh*t like that all the time when I was that age maybe not quite as extreme but pretty stupid. In the dream, I started to panic because there was no way I could get to this kid or protect him. I couldn’t even pay him too much attention. I still had to drive my car down the road that took me farther and farther away from him.

(Female, 40’s) My oldest, most disturbing nightmare

There are three characters in this dream. There is a little girl of 3 or 4, who is sitting in her highchair at a dining room table. There is the mother, who is in the bathroom out of sight, getting ready to go somewhere; the mother never appears in the dream but she talks to her little girl while she is putting on her makeup and doing her hair. There is also the invisible Monster. He is sitting at the table. The mother doesn’t know he’s there. My perspective shifted back and forth in the dream. Sometimes I was the little girl; sometimes I was the audience watching the scene.

The Monster sits at the table, next to the little girl, and he has a toolbox. She knows he’s there, of course. She can see him. He whispers to the girl and only she can hear his voice. He asks, “Do you want me to make you pretty so you can surprise Mommy?” The little girl nods enthusiastically.

The Monster opens the toolbox, which is full of sharp things: scissors, knives, razor blades, pieces of metal, broken glass. He takes the scissors and chops her hair off all raggedy, all over her head. Then the Monster picks up a big piece of broken glass and jabs it slowly and purposefully deep into the girl’s arm. He leaves it sticking out, and blood begins to drizzle down her skin. He admires his work. Next he takes 10 small squares of metal and slowly pushes one under each of her fingernails. He uses each of his tools to poke and cut her face and arms, and she bleeds from her fingers and arms and cheeks. The box is full of things to hurt and torture her with, but he keeps telling her how pretty she looks.

In the last scene of the dream, the Monster tells the little girl that they are finished and asks if she is ready to surprise Mommy. He lifts the bloodied little girl out of her highchair and sets her on the ground. She toddles off to show her mother, saying “Mommy, mommy, look at me!”

And then the mother screams a long, loud, horrified scream.

I had this nightmare a long time ago, when I was a kid, maybe 9 or 10. It scared me terribly when I had it, and it scares me to think of it still. The thought that nightmares are stories that come from somewhere inside one’s head really doesn’t comfort me. I can’t figure how I came up with this.