Posts from — July 2007

(Male, early 30′s) I don’t know if this is exactly a nightmare but it was really annoying. I was outside trying to cross this yard to someone’s house and there were all of these huge bats swarming around trying to attack me. Their wingspan was probably three feet across and they were covered in short, dark colored hair. And the weirdest thing about them is that their entire face was one big suction cup. Somehow I knew that they wanted to affix that suction cup right over my face and then drain out my vital fluids. I kept swatting them away and that seemed to be good enough to keep them out of my face. In the dream, I didn’t get to the house but then I didn’t get the life sucked out of me either.

From Australia, with love. Imagine this cheery little warning tucked between ads for, I don’t know Quantas airlines and Vegemite.

The whole perspective of this public service announcement is weirdo-creepy, ain’t it? The image of the Grim Reaper as a bowler knocking down human pins in some dank Goth bowling alley just twists and turns in my head like a hungry corpse-worn. Compare and contrast, won’t you? this little video tidbit with the image of death as a chess player in Bergman’s The Seventh Seal.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U219eUIZ7Qo

(Male) I had my own farm which is something I’ve wanted for most of my life. I was just out wandering through the fields when I came across a gray tarp. Underneath the tarp were eggs that were white and roughly the size of watermelons. I thought to myself “This can’t be good” and I thought for a second about smashing them. They were so large they looked like dinosaur eggs. However, before I could act, one of them hatched and hundred of tiny snakes came out. They weren’t much larger than earthworms but they were black and there were hundreds of them, maybe a thousand or so. I knew they weren’t good.

I retreated to an outbuilding. It wasn’t quite big enough to call a barn but it had bales of straw all stacked up. The snakes followed me which was my plan. I took down a hunting bow and nocked a piece of straw in it and sent it sailing off into the mass of snakes. I skewered one right through the skull like I was an archery pro. In fact, in the dream, I think I was supposed to be an archery pro. I kept shooting off pieces of straw that kept killing the snakes, one by one. The area in front of the barn looked like a weird patch of grass because there were all those tiny snakes in their death throes struck through the head with pieces of straw. The straw stuck up straight and waved gently back and forth like it was blowing in the wind.

Though it was impressive and though I was able to shoot just about every second, it became evident that the whole strategy was flawed. If I kept killing them only one at a time, I wouldn’t be able to kill enough of them fast enough to keep them from over running me. The mass of snakes kept advancing, closer and closer.

My suspicion is that anyone reading The Daily Nightmare would also be interested in the creepy-fun merchandise offered at “PushinDaisies.com” My personal favorite is the anatomically correct human heart made from a whole pound of chocolate (dark or milk) — though I’m also attracted to the cupcake tins shaped like skulls. Prices don’t seem too bad either.

http://www.pushindaisies.com/candypress/Scripts/default.asp

(Female, early 40′s) I was trapped with a group of human survivors inside a school building. We were battling giant robots like nothing I’ve seen before. They were fifteen to twenty feet tall, they had round faces like an analog clock and their heads were part of their round bodies. They had legs with wheels on the bottoms so they could move very fast and their arms were very long and had guns and pinching claws on the end. Their arms reached all the way from their shoulders down to the ground. Some robots look like metal people but these didn’t. They were just heartless killing machines. Did I mention they were trying to kill us in any way possible at any opportunity?

There was a herd of them circling the school.. There was something we could build that could eliminate the robots but they knew about it too. One of the essential pieces was this special rock. It was as big as my hand and it was dark black, like obsidian or something. We had the rock but the robots had killed the people who were carrying the rock. We had to get it back to have any chance of survival. So someone drove a bus around the school building and when it passed by the doors we had to take turns running and jumping into it to get inside. It had to go around several times because we couldn’t all get on at once. The bus couldn’t stop because that would attract too much attention. There were also delivery trucks at the school that were unintentionally helping us because they robots had to avoid them.

We were also trying to separate the robots from each other because one of them had the rock and we knew we couldn’t destroy them all. We got this one robot alone and then we crashed our bus into it. The robot fell over. Some of us got off the bus and grabbed the rock from the claw. But we had to get back in the school then because that’s where the rest of the device we were building was. We started running toward the school but that attracted the attention of the other robots. They started speeding toward us and shooting at us. Before we made it there, I woke up.

This was a dream straight out of Kafka. I was visiting another country where I could speak the language but it isn’t my native tongue. My room was right next to the train station, I knew when my train would be leaving and I knew the place was never very busy so I didn’t bother to saunter over there until nearly departure time.  The train must have been something like a commuter train because I didn’t have an assigned seat, I didn’t actually even have a ticket. I thought naturally that I would be able to purchase one and step aboard. But the train station was absurdly crowded. There were people everywhere and long, long line snaking around queues everywhere.  Standing in one of the lines was a colleague from work, actually a bit of a rival. He seemed in charge of a huge brood of schoolchildren who were also waiting for a train and incidentally clogging up the queues for tickets.  I stood in a different lines, several in fact, fruitlessly; once I got to the front I discovered this was, say, a window to buy caramel popcorn not train tickets. I was starting to panic.  I went inside the station which was pitch black.  A young man I know was there, someone who is confined to a wheelchair in both real life and in the dream.  He couldn’t get his chair through the turnstile so I helped him through and got him safely to his train.  But there was no place where I could buy a ticket for myself.  As I remember there was also a display set up inside the station where the history of rail travel was told in dioramas. There were no lights illuminating these displays and I was even more pressed for time. I raced outside again.  The crowds had thinned and I finally was able to purchase a ticket though this itself was a hassle because the agent wanted exact change and wouldn’t settle even when I wanted to pay too much.  Finally with ticket in hand I started running toward the train.  It was a small train, maybe three cars pulled by a steam locomotive.  There were train conductors stepping off the stairs.  It was clearly ready to depart.  I still had a small hill to run down to catch it.  I thought if I could get the conductors’ attention, they might hold the train.  I yelled but my voice was thin and tinny.  I started to take off my hat to wave it and catch their attention when I realized that I had tucked dozens of slips of paper under the brim of my hat and as I removed my hat, they all cascaded to the ground.