Posts from — December 2007

(Female, 40’s) This dream was something like a movie set in the 16th century. Everyone was dressed in period costumes, the women wearing long heavy dresses with velvet and brocade and the men in suits. The rooms were lit with candlelight and each had a fireplace or two. The walls were stone and very tall and shadowy. The whole house was drafty and dark.

…The house belonged to a crazy uncle who was a retired general and his wife…

I had been invited to this huge, old house in the countryside to be the companion to a cousin. We were both teenage girls in a household of older people. The house itself belonged to a crazy uncle who was a retired general and his wife. With them also lived several elderly aunts, another uncle, his mother and father, and his sister, who didn’t like children. That aunt made a point of casting disapproving looks at my cousin and me on every possible occasion. If she didn’t like the way we sat at the table, the speed at which we knitted, or the amount we talked, she’d glare at us. She was frightening.

My uncle was frightening as well, in an unhinged sort of way. We were called down to supper, which was set up in the kitchen at my uncle’s insistence. Usually we ate in the dining room but tonight he wanted to sit in where he could watch the food being prepared. The cook had made, among other things, Steak Tartar. My uncle explained to the cook that he couldn’t eat Steak Tartar because it reminded him of meals in the army. Unfortunately, the cook spoke only French, so he didn’t understand my uncle nor did my uncle understand him. My uncle insisted that the dish had to be removed from the table and thrown out. The cook insisted that the food was good and that there were many other dishes on the table to eat. Finally my uncle stood up and took the dish of Steak Tartar and began the smear it all over the front of the cook’s white apron, handfuls at a time. The cook stood there, shocked. The family also sat in horror as my uncle emptied all the plates of food onto the front of the cook’s apron.

Did I mention that the house was haunted as well? In the evening, my cousin and I were in our room. The aunt that disliked us came in to scold us about something. She left the door to the room open and stood talking loudly and firmly to us. Then through the door came a very tall and wispy ghost, at least 12 feet tall. She was constantly moving, her arms and the drapes of her dress swaying like they were blowing about in a gentle breeze. Her appearance wasn’t as frightening as it was ominous. She’d come to warn us about something but we couldn’t understand what. My aunt was surprised into silence, but after the ghost disappeared, she said, “See? That is what will happen is you disobey.” But we didn’t understand what she meant by that either.

(Male) I was in a very large city that was located right beside a large body of water. Could have been Chicago, could have been New York, could have been Toronto… The city had been hit with an unprecedented winter storm, one that had gone on for weeks… months? There certainly weren’t many people left and the sense that that they’d abandoned the city or died. Survivors were able to get from building to building through underground passages. I had gone from the main building where we had set up camp to a neighboring building. I looked out through a window at a skyscraper, one of those glass windowed skyscrapers. It stood really close to the water and the spray from the water would hit the side of the building and freeze immediately. The ice built up and built up over these weeks upon weeks until there was a strange ice sculpture attached to the side of the building, almost as large as the building itself. The ice swooped out like the arms of a ghost, like the shape of the wind itself. It seemed like the weight of the ice would have the power to topple the building over soon.

I went to a different window. This one was just underneath the “snow line.” Snow had fallen so deeply that the first few floors of all buildings were submerged in snow. I looked out one of the window that was covered in snow but not too deeply. Light still got in and I was able to see shapes outside. There was someone out there! It was someone I knew, someone from work. He was laughing and it seemed like he was trying to walk along on top of the snow, unaware how dangerous this was, how unevenly packed the snow was, how he could fall through the crust on the top and suffocate. For some reason I thought I could save him. I opened the window and snow poured in the window. I estimated I was just 20 feet away from him. The snow here seemed very soft and uncompacted. I thought somehow that I could “swim” up to the surface of the snow. I jumped out of the window. I stamped my feet and compressed the snow underneath me then scraped more off above my head, gradually moving upward. But I eventually loosened too much and made my little cave unstable. Snow started to tumble down on me. It was light at first but then it trapped my legs. It got more deeply buried. It hammered into my chest, trapped my arms. I tried to thrash but I was trapped. I was suffocating.

(Male) I used to live in the old sprawling farmhouse that happened to located right next to a pretty busy road. The house had been broken up into apartments. Prior to the time I lived there, two of the former occupants, both older women, in totally separate incidents had been struck and killed by automobiles while trying to cross the road. All that really happened.

In the dream, I am laying down on a couch in the living room of the apartment. A woman who I don’t recognize shakes my shoulder, trying to get me to wake up. I open my eyes a little. She says “Go for a walk with me.” I close my eyes and try to go back to sleep. The woman is more insistent. “You must come for a walk with me. Now. Come.” I’m not certain about this next part because it’s hard to describe but it almost felt as if she was trying to push her arms into my body, to make me move from inside, almost as if she was trying to get inside my body to make me move. But I stayed on the couch and eventually she went away.

It wasn’t until I woke up that I remembered the women who had been killed going for a walk just outside. It still gives me shivers to tell this story.

This week’s Friday Night Movie is a rib-tickling, er, I mean CHILLING series from across the pond, Garth Marenghi’s Dark Place. The set up is that a famous horror novelist Garth Marenghi, created a television series about a haunted hospital back in the 80’s that only now is getting aired. It’s an enjoyable, self-aware satire with all the trimmings: wooden acting, not-so-special effects, self-important narrator and a slew of humorous continuity errors. There are only a half dozen episodes and they were collected on DVD in 2006 but alas, that disc is in the European format PAL. Watch them now before they get yanked from Youtube.

And if they have already been yanked, as least check out the official Garth Marenghi website: http://www.garthmarenghi.com/

Or read about ALL the details on wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garth_Marenghi’s_Darkplace

Watch ‘em while they’re there:
Episode One Part One

Episode One Part Two

Episode One Part Three

The funny thing about fear is that it isn’t that funny when you’re experiencing it. Perhaps that’s why a little comedy is so useful in scary movies as a counterpoint for rising tension. While collecting the nightmares found on this site, I’ve encountered a common reaction that people laugh while trying to tell me a dream that obviously was quite disturbing to them. Overlooking whatever Freud had to say about laughter, fear and the unconscious, what these people often say they’re laughing at is the inability to make the story sound as scary as it was to them in the dream. In some cases, even THEY aren’t convinced that one should be afraid of the dreams as they’re retelling them.

It’s just not easy to make others really understand the same things that scared you. Maybe that’s why we get some delight — IF we get some delight — from well-told scary stories.

I have also collected a small number of discarded fears, things that people said they were afraid of once but that they are no longer fear. These stories were always surrounded by laughter, that embarrassed laughter that means on one level “I can’t believe I used to be afraid of something so LAME as this.” On another level perhaps this reaction means “I was so naive then to find THAT scary. NOW I’m older and more mature and now I know what’s REALLY scary.” It’s a fun list that I’ll certainly add to over time. In nearly all cases, they’re images from movies that they probably shouldn’t have been watching at that age, but then again, who am I to say?

(Female, 40’s) Birds especially large groups of them, after seeing Hitchcock’s “The Birds” as an elementary school child. Walking home from school was sometimes a problem, especially in the late fall as birds massed in the trees getting ready to migrate south.

(Male, 40’s) The Wicked Witch of the West from “The Wizard of Oz.” Especially the scene where she appears suddenly on top of a roof and hurls a fireball at the Scarecrow.

(Male, 30’s) The Ghostly Librarian from “Ghostbusters.” He says what was so scary to him was that she appeared to be friendly at first but then turned terrifying.

(Male, 30’s) The Robot named Maximillian from Disney’s “The Black Hole” (Look it up on IMDB! It was a relatively early attempt to use digital imagery, I think) The whole design of the robot is a little scary plus he was depicted as being nearly invincible.

(Female, 30’s) A ghost that mysteriously appears in the back seat of a car as someone is driving at night. “I’m sure it came from a movie–probably LOTS of them– but I just can think of which one.”

Needless to say, send in your childhood fears! To grimgnome (a) dailynightmare.com

(Male, 30) I was in a living room with my brother-in-law. There was a large stone fireplace, similar to the fireplace in my own house but this wasn’t my house. There was a roaring fire in the fireplace that my brother-in-law had started. He was busy doing something with the fire. I moved close to see what he was doing. He had just finished burning a large collection of my belongings and he was now moving on to burn the belongings of my daughter. Just that moment in fact, he was stuffing a huge gnome hat into the fire. (?) I was furious with him but I couldn’t stop him. My stuff was already all gone!

…I was furious with him but I couldn’t stop him…

I think I know what is going on a little bit with the dream. The most recent time I’d seen my brother-in-law was around his birthday. He’s not very into things but he had received a large number of gifts. He was trying to find people to take away some of this stuff. The idea might have come up as a dream because my wife and I are considering selling the house where we live, which means we’ll have to pack and move all the stuff we have, including all the new stuff we’ve gotten since we’ve had our toddler. Moving: now THAT’S a REAL-LIFE nightmare!