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Nightmares

Nightmare #210 – Other World Escape

(Female, 40’s) My dreams don’t usually fit in obvious genres, but this was a total science fiction dream. I was on some other planet, which was very earth-like with plants and streets and buildings and neighborhoods, along with a whole community of people, but some of us were ready to return home to earth. A transport ship was due to dock so I was preparing to leave the planet.

“…the ships that arrived were filled with these alien creatures who wanted to kill us…”

Only the ships that arrived were filled with these alien creatures who wanted to kill us. I was waiting in the docking station, and when the aliens opened the doors and started looking around, I had to hide quickly. They were like large, brown floating worms, with eyes like flashlights. I rolled under this baggage cart where I couldn’t be seen, and a guard who worked there and was my friend slipped a sleeping-bag-like getup to me under the cart. I could camouflage myself with this, covering my face and looking down at the ground. In order to fool the aliens though, I had to keep looking down so I never got a good look at them.

I got out of that tight situation somehow, and then a group of us plotted together to slip by the aliens. The plan then was to load two of the ships with supplies and humans to go back to earth, but we couldn’t let the aliens know this was happening. They were malicious, but not very smart, I guess. I worked with other escapes to load the ships and then we had to stay in hiding until it was time to depart. The aliens were guarding the ships and searching for us.

Somehow there was a mix-up with the departure time. Maybe we overslept– I’m not certain. I just remember the extreme disappointment of discovering that the ship had left without me. It was morning, sunny and bright, and I was walking down the hilly street with a group of friends– just going to make sure that we had indeed missed getting on the ship. We walked past a friend’s ceramic studio and admired the piece she’d made in honor of my marriage as well as this ceramic installment that looked the a dozen silver-glazed paper airplanes that were mounted individually on a wall. We could see the empty docking station as we walked to the center of town. At least we were safe from the murderous aliens for the time being. I had been happy in this place for a while but now I ached with homesickness.

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Nightmares

Nightmare #209 – Intruder Alert

(Male, 40’s) Strange dream, really violent but most important it was really detailed and vivid. Strange flashbacks to the past.

“…Here I am talking like I’m a big tough guy..”

It took place on the street where I grew up but sort of in the present day. Literally on the street, not in the houses, though I was living in one of the houses. It wasn’t the house I grew up in and in fact there were no houses like the one in my dream on this street. I had met up with a friend I knew from 20 years ago. It was in the afternoon and he said we should go someplace and get lunch. He was going to drive but I just wanted to make sure my door was locked and that I should pick up a hoodie.

When I went back to my house, which was a ranch style house, very modern with its entire yard a cement slab, I found that the side door was not only unlocked but open. I kicked it open and said, “OK fuckers. Come on out.” (Here I am talking like I’m a big tough guy.) I could see someone sitting at my computer which in the dream was one of those cute little iMacs from years back, the ones that were candy-colored. This guy stands up and he is a physical double for Lurch, the butler from the Addams Family TV show. He’s wearing a flannel shirt with a brown plaid pattern. He advanced on me and I grab him by the front of his shirt and sort of catapult him over top of me. He lands in a pile on the cement but gets right back up and charges at me again. Again I grab him by the front of his shirt and this time I toss him down a short flight of stairs that must have led to the basement. This time though as he’ll getting up I slip off one of my shoes and hit him repeatedly in the face with my heel. He goes down and out.

Like an idiot, I rush inside the house to find the other guy that I just *know* is there. I open the door to my kitchen and there he is. And this guy looks like Bruce Lee. Well, to be honest he looked like Bruce Lee if he lived to middle age and put on a few pounds. I mean, he still looked dangerous but he just looked a bit more manageable. But for some reason I can’t understand, this Bruce Lee guy decides to shoot at me. He’s got some kind of hand gun that apparently has an inexhaustible supply of bullets but that isn’t very powerful. I’m able to hide behind a wood door and not get hit. Then I hear him kick out a window and I look just in time to see him diving out this window. I go after him and again he starts shooting at me. So with my legs dangling out of the window, I kick him. And at that point I wake up.

As I write this down what’s striking are all the pop culture references. I really want to go back and watch “Enter the Dragon” now.

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Nightmares

Nightmare #208 – Shopkeeper for the Mob

(Male, 40’s) This is another nightmare I had while I was battling the worst cold I’ve had in years. Feverish dreams are wild!

“”…everything was a front for the Mob..”

I operated a little shop of some kind in a canvas tent pitched in a parking lot beside a highway. There were big bags of coffee beans and by big, I mean probably 50 pounds or so. There also were different kinds of spices and bags of food like it all had been directly imported from other countries.

And everything was a front for the Mob. Though it wasn’t explained in the dream, the set up sounds like there were drugs or guns being smuggled in with the coffee and other items. My position was extremely tenuous. There was really no reason to have an outsider like me so intimately involved with Mob work and I knew it. It was only a matter of time until I was killed. The Mob guys would show up every couple days, cut open a bag of coffee, spill the beans everywhere and then take off. There would be someone holding a gun on me in case I wanted to make some kind of an objection. This one time the Mob people show up and they’ve got someone with them. In fact, it’s someone I work with, a nice enough guy. He chats with me, totally oblivious to the danger he’s in. He’s amazed that I run an import shop in addition to the other job. Then the Mob guys grab him and force him to his knees and without saying anything they shoot him to death right there in front of me. I am simply terrified. Shocked and terrified. I don’t know what to do. The Mob guys back out of the tent. I don’t know if I should run or call the police or what.

Then all of a sudden I’m in an apartment building. I get the sense that it’s also entirely owned by the Mob. I’m in one of the rooms possibly a room where I live and I look out of the door just in time to see a couple Mob guys drag another guy I know up the stairs and thrown him on the landing face down. They put these weights on his arms. The weights look like big coffee cans with a handle on the top. The guy is unconscious. One of the Mob guys prepares a syringe of something, maybe heroin for all I know. Then he backs up and makes like he’s going to throw the syringe like a dart. That part makes me cringe.

All of a sudden he realizes that I’m there, that I’ve been watching everything from just a couple feet away. He turned toward me and started walking. I backed up and at that instant I woke up.

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Nightmares

Nightmare #207 – Apocalypse Party

By brewbooks from near Seattle, USA (The Rubble pile - Garden Rubble Project) [CC-BY-SA-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
By brewbooks from near Seattle, USA (The Rubble pile – Garden Rubble Project) [CC-BY-SA-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

(Male, 40’s) The last few days, I’ve had the worst cold I’ve had in years. Sweats, chills, sore throat, the works. There’s nothing like a nice fever to spike up the nightmares. This is one I had last night. I’ll send you another one too.

“…And of course, we were fighting for our lives….”

This nightmare STARTED after an apocalypse of some kind. Most of the world had been leveled into rubble. All the buildings as far as I could see were knocked flat and crushed. I just had the sense that I was in the last building left intact anywhere in the world. And the people in this building were the last humans. We were a weird group. It was sort of like a random collection of people you might get at a train station or a bus terminal. Little clumps of us were related to each other or knew each other but there was nothing in common really about the group as a whole. There was four or five guys, who wore overalls and straw hats, who looked like a cartoon cliche of a jug band. A couple of them were really muscular, a couple were pretty overweight. There was another group of women who I think were speaking Italian to each other. On and on like that, little clusters of people. I was on my own though, all alone. There were tables with white table cloths and punchbowls, though it didn’t seem like there was any food. Maybe we’d already eaten it all or maybe it had never been put out. Weird party. Weird collection of people.

And of course, we were fighting for our lives.

The earth had evidently been invaded by creatures from another world. And by creatures, I mean exactly two. They were remarkably human-shaped, except for a couple key differences. One is that their heads were oriented 180 degrees backward which was incredibly unnerving. They were both bald, with extremely pale skin that glowed slightly. And they were really rather fat, like some of those statues of Buddha. At one point in the dream I saw them at the end of a hallway and I was seriously terrified. They saw me and invited me to take an elevator ride with them to the top of the building. There was nothing for me to hide behind, if that would have even done any good. I was in plain sight and they could have disintegrated me. But I declined. They chuckled to each other and got on the elevator.

The humans somehow thought we could fight these beings. We tried to come up with a plan, some strategy but before we could get ready the beings just appeared through the walls. We were thrown around, killed, exploded. There wasn’t any hope we could win. And then someone poured a bucket of water on one of these creatures. It sizzled, like short circuiting electricity and melted like the wicked witch of the west. The other being backed up toward a wall of windows, terrified by us for a change. Then it disappeared.

The last part of the dream was like the closing sequence of a movie. The camera pulled back and revealed the same building we’d all been in. It had been rebuilt and was full of people. The camera pulled back even further and showed that the whole city had been rebuilt. It was like the camera was in a helicopter and it was giving traffic reports. Humans had survived and rebuilt the world pretty much exactly as we did the first time.

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Nightmares

Nightmare #206 – Lost Hospital

“…it felt like an empty warehouse: dark gray walls and very high ceiling, probably 40 feet up and filthy, not like a hospital at all…”

(Male, 40’s) I had taken my daughter to the hospital for something serious. I think it was serious and bloody like an accident. She was probably 7 or so in the dream though she’s 18 in everyday life. My wife was with me too. The doctors whisked her away to start working on her and we never saw her again. At first a nurse came and said she’d been moved to a certain ward somewhere down the hall. So my wife and I walked down this long cavernous hallway. Seriously, it felt like an empty warehouse: dark gray walls and very high ceiling, probably 40 feet up and filthy, not like a hospital at all. But at the end of it, there was the ward we were told about. By the time we got there, though evidently my daughter had been moved. A nurse very impatiently told us to follow her and she shot off though this extremely crowded ward. It wasn’t much like a hospital either. The rooms were too large, more like school class rooms. There were no actual beds, just mattresses laid so closely together that there was barely enough room to stand. The mattresses were each filled with at least one patient, sometimes two. Some of them were wrapped with bandages discolored with rust and black. Often visitors or family members stood in the small gap between the mattresses. The lights were off in the room so everything was a dim twilight. Many of the occupants were coughing like they were sick though the bandages made me think this ward was for physical trauma. Maybe they made no such distinctions in this hospital. The large grey windows were all thrown open for ventilation, I suppose and a torrential downpour of hot rain was coming down outside. The nurse we were following very deftly traversed the mattresses and crossed the room in no time while my wife and I stumbled slowly behind her. She disappeared out the door on the opposite side before we made it half way across the room.

The hallway on the other side of the room was completely different, much more like a hospital hall but not entirely. It had been painted white at least and there was the sense that there were many many rooms just like the room we’d just left, rooms crowded with patients. There was no sign of the nurse or of any hospital staff for that matter. My wife and I wandered down the hall and eventually we found an elevator. The door of the elevator was tarnished brass though the casing around it was quite fancy, filigreed. When the door opened, the elevator car was round, spherical in fact. You couldn’t stand up in it but rather had to sort of sit in it, leaning against the walls and bumping into the other passengers. At first we weren’t going to get on but the people who were already in encouraged us to come aboard. “We’ll make room” The doors closed and it became evident that no one really knew how to make it work. The “floor numbers” or the place where one would normally indicate what floor one wanted didn’t have numbers on them. And the car itself didn’t just seem to move up and down; it also rocked side to side and I think it actually moved side to side.

I don’t remember getting off the elevator but next I was in what felt like an upper floor. It was regally appointed. Brass, maybe even gold, rich red velvet, fancy rugs on polished floors. It was crawling with loud fraternity college students. They were all raucous and mostly drunk. There were different tables set up, I gathered, for different fraternities to recruit but based on their boorish behaviour, there was little difference between them. However, in the middle of this room there was a collection of fancy arm chairs. i think they’re called wing chairs because of the shape of the upholstery on the side. There was a collection of distinguished men sitting in these chairs, distinguished but not pretentious, just quietly powerful. None of the fraternity animals seemed even able to see that these gentlemen were in their presence. I walked over and spoke with one of these men. I can’t remember exactly what I said but I think I said I was looking for my daughter. The man said “Are you?”

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"What We Fear" Halloween papercraft This Just In

This Just In – Man Bites… Man

I bet this one slipped by the leftist media cultural elitists:

Man Bites and Chews Off Part of Another Man’s Arm!

Much of the commentary that’s appeared on the blogosphere surrounding this event assumes that the attacker was a zombie. OK, fine, fair enough. I see the resemblance at least to the early Romero-style zombies. Some nit-picking kill-joys were hung up on the fact that the attacker didn’t go for the guy’s brains.

But let’s back up for a moment. It’s it terrifying enough to think that this guy came up out of nowhere and bit a chunk out of someone’s arm? Isn’t it even a bit creepier in fact that the guy WASN’T a zombie?

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Nightmares

Nightmare #338 – Ceramic Death

“…And he jumped on the intruder and slashed at his throat…”

(Male, 30’s) A buddy of mine told me this dream. He’s a ceramicist, an artist who makes pots and jugs and cups and that kind of stuff. In his dream he had just finished making a vessel with this beautiful shino glaze. (I didn’t ask him for particulars but I looked it up on-line and a shino glaze is supposed to be an exceptionally warm and rich glaze, one that’s rather difficult to pull off flawlessly.) He’s always telling me about how deadly some of the chemicals are that he works with. Radioactive. Poisonous. Even the clay itself turns into a fine powder that collects in his lungs and will eventually kill him from cillicosis.
In his dream, an intruder broke into his house. So my friend smashed this vessel with the beautiful glaze and he took one of the larger fragments, one with a particularly sharp edge. And he jumped on the intruder and slashed at his throat. The pottery shard tore into the intruder more effectively than a knife; it hacked him open. He just went limp, dead in my friend’s arms. I asked if there was any blood and no, the particularly odd thing was there was an almost entire absence of blood.