A Cheery Little Blog about Fear

(Male, 40’s) I haven’t had many dreams recently so that’s what makes this one stand out so strongly. I’m riding a bike and it at least starts in my old neighborhood, the one where I grew up as a kid. Just down the street from where I lived, two different sets of people have moved out and have left stuff they didn’t want by the street. One is just furniture but the other one has a bunch of really cool toys and models. Several of the toys are themed after Scooby-Doo and a couple of the models are monster-related. The trouble is that all the goodies are stacked in a pile, maybe 25 or 30 feet tall. I find a stick and am able to knock down the stuff I want. But now I have to carry it on my bicycle.
And things change, pretty quickly. I’m still on my bike but I have NO idea where I am. In fact, I’m pretty sure it’s not the same city. (I suspect it might be the city where my Grandmother lived, a pretty tough place.) It’s winter, or at least there’s snow on the ground. I’m trying to pedal the bike even though I’m still carrying all this stuff. I can barely keep it upright. Most important is that I’m lost. I think that if I just start going around in a systematic way up and down the streets, I’ll eventually find someplace that looks familiar. The whole first street I drive down is abandoned which is a little creepy. But the whole second street is worse. There are lots and lots of people, just standing on the sidewalk and on the street. It’s hard for me to keep the bike balanced let alone to ride around them. And stranger still, about a third of these folks are “short people” that’s what they’re called, right? It feels like a very bad music video. The short people in particular seem to have it in for me. They’re waving metal sticks around over their heads, trying to hit me as a ride by. Eventually I realize that I can’t pretend they’re NOT trying to hit me and I try seriously to ride away. That’s when one of these large “bouncer” type guys starts to run me down. He keeps blocking me in, forcing me off the road. I just know I’m going to be beaten up and robbed if I fall off the bike. Last thing I remember, I’m teetering toward the side of the road with the big guy close to me, trying to knock me over.

(Male, 30’s) This has been a re-current nightmare of mine since I was a kid. I would be on a long bus-ride with my Mom. It’s always just my Mom even though there are five people in my family. It’s a long bus ride so at some point we have to get off just long enough to eat a meal or something. Thing is, my Mom gets off but I get stuck on the bus. It rumbles out of the station and I’m trapped heading onto my next destination. Recently, the dream has changed to where I actually go to the next stop and get off there but that’s no less scary.
It’s a simple dream but it’s still meant that I hate buses. There’s a bus that runs straight to Chicago that my buddies always want to take but there’s no way I’d ride that. Even when I have to take a city bus, I ride right near the door so I can’t be left on there.

Stop motion animation of any kind is a labor of love. Sure, computers have made some aspects slightly less tedious but the technique still involves taking hundreds of pictures and moving figures thousands of times. So even on a merely technical level this short claymation video is impressive.

But also consider the sheer quantity of gore in this clip. It would be impossible or at least highly cost prohibitive in most other kinds of video. The storyline too is fine. The same producer made earlier pieces that are much rougher.

Part One

Part Two

(Male, 40’s) Despite the fact that this nightmare was about vampires, the overall feel I had was frustration more than fear. I was a member of a team of about 5 professionals who were looking over a building with the perspective of renting it or buying it. It was a standard building by which I mean a generic office space without cubicles. And it was completely windowless. Sound like the office where you work?

The weird thing was that the place had about a half dozen life-sized marble statues. As we sort of wandered the space, these statues would quickly turn into flesh and blood, living (or I guess non-living) vampires, attack one of our group, then change back to a statue. We’d rush over and would notice the mutilated corpse and not realize that the statue had anything to do with it. This happened over and over but no one listened when I suggested “Hey, maybe we should get out of here.” Then I actually *saw* one of the attacks but again, no one was much concerned. It was down to me and the Boss, who incidentally looked like Jean-Luc Picard from Star Trek: The Next Generation. One of the statues changed and tried to attack him but he was able to hold it at an arm’s distance and do something to it to kill it. Now the trick became trying to kill the vampires when they changed but obviously before they changed back to stone which was much harder.

At one point there were two vampires attacking me — it probably doesn’t matter but they were female vampires with flowing glittery skirts, like they were nightclub vampires — and the only thing they could grab onto was one of my fingers which I kept them from biting, though I must confess I was getting pretty tired of being human at that point with all the drudgery of office work, the stupidity of my co-workers and the arrogance of my boss. But we defeated the vampires that were in the main room of the office.

My dream ended when I opened the double doors of a closet and there were two more, female vampires.

(Male, 30’s) I sent you a nightmare a ways back that felt like this dream or at least I think I did.

It was a weekend and I was trying to avoid seeing my Mother who at least in the nightmare was a nagging hypochondriac. So me and a buddy get in the car and drive up to visit my Grandmother. This is creepy thing number one because my Grandmother is dead.

We get there and Gramma welcomes us in but there is strangely very little furniture in the house. Then there’s a knock at the door and Gramma tells us we have to hide in the basement and not make much noise. At the door are a couple of my aunts and uncles as well as my mother. They’d gone out on a singing excursion, sort of showing up places and singing songs, kind of like Christmas carolers except it wasn’t winter and they weren’t singing carols.

My buddy and I go down to the basement and Gramma locks us in. It is dark but we can still see quite a bit from the light coming in by the side windows. The walls are a rotting brick, red brick that’s powdering away to dust. The basement also feels MUCH larger than the house above. We hear something skitter across the concrete. We investigate. There is this huge cut of beef, already roasted, like the kind you sometimes see at fancy buffets but this huge roast is just sitting on the floor of this filthy basement. It is all dried out and what’s weird is that it’s been nibbled and chewed at. I tell my friend that we need to get out of here. We slowly move back to the stairs when we hear more skittering. I bend down close to the ground to look under neath the random pieces of furniture. I see at least three creatures, a squirrel, a ground hog and a cat. All are extremely ragged and mangy. Their fur is grey blotched with white. For some reason, I know they’re cannibals maybe because they’ve been eating the dried beef.

(Male, 30’s) I’ve recently been transferred at work from one building to another and I have to say I’m pretty happy I don’t have to deal with a particular woman at the other location anymore. She was one of those people who can’t stop talking and furthermore, who only talk on and on about themselves. I think she may have liked me because my sense was that she gravitated to me especially.

In the dream, I had gone back to the old location for some reason. I think it was just to say hi to my co-workers. I looked down this long corridor and I saw this talkative woman. She waved at me enthusiastically. She had beside her two very large dogs. I think they were terriers. I waved back to be polite and when the dogs saw me, they took off running down this long corridor toward me. I’m not a “dog person” in life that is I don’t have a dog but I like dogs. When these large creatures bounded down to me, I wasn’t afraid, even though they were barking. Some dogs do that when they’re glad to see someone. I started petting one of them and someone said, “Oh you shouldn’t have started to pet it. That just makes ‘em angry.” The next thing I knew the dog had literally swallowed my entire left hand right up to the wrist. The other dog bit onto my arm a little higher up. I started to panic. It wasn’t so much because it hurt because it didn’t really hurt. Rather, I was trapped, held in place by these large dogs. I looked down the hallway for the woman to see if she was going to, well, call off the dogs. And she was gone. For that matter, there was no one anywhere. I didn’t want to cry out but I was really getting scared. I didn’t know what the dogs were going to do to me next.