(Male, 30’s) This nightmare has to be related to Mother’s Day somehow.

I was with my mother shopping, I think. I came across flyer focused on investing that noting how so many different kinds of alcohol are actually the registered trademarks of specific companies. I gather this was supposed to make it more attractive to invest in those companies, or perhaps the parent corporation that owned them all. All of a sudden we were at a house party, in someone’s kitchen that had been set up as a bar. Happy bouncy people were everywhere and the bartender handed me a drink. We looked on the menu for something that my Mother might drink. She’s pretty much a teetotaler and so pretty innocent about alcohol. I think she ended up with a sweet rum drink, maybe with cream, maybe Kaluha…

Before I knew it, it was hours later. The clock said 4:30 AM! The party was still going quite strongly with music and dancing. Mom was smashed, absolutely drunk, barely able to stand even propped against a wall. I felt horrible, like I’d neglected her. Everyone was giggling because someone noticed that the place was surrounded by cops in riot gear. I looked out the back window and was able to hide just as a battering ram shattered the outside kitchen door and a legion of police dogs poured inside. Now that I think about it, there were hardly any policemen at all, mostly ravenous dogs. The dogs started biting at everything that moved. I tucked my hands inside the sleeves of my coat so I had no exposed skin. One of the dogs bit my right hand, swallowed it up to the wrist. Its teeth couldn’t penetrate my jacket so it just sort of hung there, growling, chewing every now and again. I tried to get over to my Mom but another dog bit onto my left hand. The dogs weren’t impossibly heavy but they made walking difficult. Mom had the sense to hide in a back room and turn off the lights. The police either got who they came for or had set up a very loose cordon because Mom and I (and the two police dogs!) were able to escape. The dream gets fuzzy at this point but we we able to get in a taxi and ride away at least a certain distance. Then I realized I was in my old neighborhood, the one where I grew up. The rest of the dream was spent avoiding the police or any official notice while trying to take care of my Mom who was still stupid drunk.

Weird.

(Female, teenage) In this nightmare, I was one of several people who were being held hostage and tortured by this evil creature that strangely enough looked like Sarah Michelle Geller, you know, Buffy? She was holding us hostage in this town house surrounded by other houses. We could see other people living their lives and having fun next door and they probably would have been able to notice that we were being tortured if they stopped to look closely enough. Someone next door saw me through the window and waved. I waved back and I dared to walk up to the window and I talked to this person through the window. Then the Sarah Michelle Geller-creature noticed me and came over. She threw a hand-grenade out the window at the family I was talking with. It was some strange kind of hand grenade that only blew up the people and left everything else standing. Once they were killed, the Creature moved us all next door into their house.

…I was one of several people who were being held hostage and tortured by this evil creature that strangely enough looked like Sarah Michelle Geller..

There was a pool in this area. One of the people who was trapped with us was a little girl. She jumped in the pool and started splashing around. All of a sudden a dog, like a terrier, came up out of the water and started pulling her underneath. We all rushed over to try to pull her out but the harder we pulled, the larger the dog grew. It eventually became as large as a bear. It tore her apart and pulled her under. We yelled at the SMG-creature, why did you do that? “Because she was having fun.”

There was a bowl and for some reason I thought that if I could fill this bowl with water from the pool, I would be free. So I started walking over to the pool, dipping my hands in to get them wet and then walking back to the bowl and shaking the excess water off into the bowl. All without drawing attention to the fact that was what I was doing. But one time, when I returned to the bowl, the sides of the bowl had grown incredibly tall, far taller than me. I sat down, depressed. Then I looked down at my hands and I saw that my index finger had been chopped off, raggedly, at an angle. It was bleeding but it didn’t seem to hurt. The creature laughed, “You won’t be able to fill up the bowl now.” She was holding a metal spatula, like the kind you use on an outside grill. It must have been especially sharpened or something. Then one by one she cut off all my fingers. There was nothing I could do to stop her.

(Male, early 30’s)

…There was no way out and nowhere really to run…

I was in a hunting lodge out in the woods. The standard log cabin kind of lodge with a big stone fireplace and everything. I was alone but it wasn’t the peaceful feeling of being alone in the woods; it was a more sinister, lonesome, vulnerable sense of being alone. Then I realized what was wrong. The animals that were mounted on the wall were alive. There were some pretty serious animals here too, like bears and cheetahs. At first I thought if I just didn’t move around very much that maybe the animals wouldn’t notice me, that maybe they wouldn’t attack me. But they did notice me. The animals started to chase me around the lodge. There was no way out and nowhere really to run.

(Male) My wife and I were helping my elderly mother get her house ready to sell. She was sitting on the front porch in a house dress, distraught, acting senile if not downright psychotic. Mom said something like “I’ve got less that you expect. You’ll see.” Which made absolutely no sense to me but I ignored her because I knew I had a LOT of work to get the house into an even somewhat presentable condition. I went inside the house and over heard my wife talking on the phone very sternly to someone. There must have been something wrong with the roof. She said something like “We’re VERY disappointed with this, Mr. Brockway.” I thought that was kind of strange because Brockway was the name of a friend that my Dad knew when he was a child.

…I knew I had a LOT of work to get the house into an even somewhat presentable condition but I didn’t expect this….

I continue walking through the house which is in bad condition but not beyond repair. I walk out the back door to the back yard where I’ve decided I’ll start working because it’s a nice sunny summer day. I’m walking around in my bare feet. The grass if vibrantly green and perhaps it needs to be cut. There is grass everywhere, even where there used to be drive way. Unfortunately, someone has driven a vehicle down this grassed area and the wheel has cut a deep muddy furrow probably 8 inches deep. The strange thing is that there is only ONE tire gash so this vehicle must have been one very heavy unicycle, or so I imagine. I walk up beside the house and there, right beside the chimney is the true horror: an immense rodent hole. It was probably a foot and a half in diameter and from the scratch marks all around it and from the way that all the grass had been torn up, I figured it was pretty well used. I tried to imagine whether it was occupied by lots and lots of regular sized rats or whether the inhabitants were just a few but much, much larger ones. I was frankly pretty scared. I tried to keep my mind focused and figured of course, before I do anything I should put on some shoes, possibly even some steel toed boots. As I head inside to put something on my feet however, I think that maybe I could start trying to scare the rats out of the hole. So I take the garden hose and I cautiously put the tip over the edge of the hole and turn on the water, hoping to flood them out. I can just tell that this isn’t going to end well but just at that moment, I wake up.

(Male, 30’s) I was at a big family reunion that was taking place in the woods. All of my in-laws were there, so many that the party was taking up a whole house and even a large tent outside.

…The bear then starts to chew its way up my arm…

I was standing around, eating and drinking with others when I noticed a huge grizzly bear coming toward the tent. It lumbered up to me and I put my arms out to fend it off, but it just opens its mouth and bites one of my hands. The bear then starts to chew its way up my arm. All during the attack the other people are watching me with a somewhat distracted look, not overly concerned that I was being somewhat slowly eaten by a bear. The strangest part of this attack though was that as the bear swallowed more and more of my arm, it started to become smaller and smaller. By the time it had reached my elbow it was the size I guess of a bear cub and by the time it swallowed my arm all the way to the shoulder it was just the size of a big dog. The final moment of the dream, I realized that it maybe hadn’t been a bear at all, that it really WAS just a big dog - a big dog that had somehow entirely ingested my arm - and for some reason I felt mildly embarrassed for making such a big fuss, even though the dog was still biting at my shoulder.

(Male, mid 40’s) I was a member of a scientific field study, the first to go into an area over run with a strange new creature. This area was an old abandoned amusement park. As part of the initial de-briefing, we were shown a home movie. In the movie, a family is riding on a train that traverses a large open plain. Roaming across this plain are life-size dinosaur robots that are skeletal dinosaurs. They move quite gracefully and effortlessly and are programmed to have interactions like real creatures. It’s sort of like a marionette show with self-directed marionettes that are larger than a house. There are also other kinds of animals living on this plain to make it feel like a real place — jackals, gorillas, etc. Then all of a sudden in this movie, a high school kid jumps out of the train and goes running out into the plain. The lead investigator stops the home movie and comments: He was never seen again. And furthermore, he was her brother. He had been depressed and her family had gone to this amusement park during spring break to cheer him up. This was nine years ago. The scandal had forced the park to close but it had been impossible to close down the plains fully because the dinosaur robots ran on solar powered batteries and they still roamed the area. Plus the living creatures were supported by a self-sustaining ecosphere. We were being sent in to see what was up, I think half expecting that everything would be dead.

…Roaming across this plain are life-size dinosaur robots that are skeletal dinosaurs…

Clearly that wasn’t the case. There were about a half dozen of us and none of us carried weapons, just scientific gear, pens, paper… I was a little concerned that we watched the de-briefing movie while we were inside the plain because it gave the resident creatures plenty of time to come over and size us up. There were jackals roaming around behind us but everyone’s attention was drawn to these gorillas. There were four or five of them. Some had heads with albino hair on bodies of chocolate brown and some that the exactly reversed pattern. For some reason we took that to mean they had been assembled from parts, that these were mechanical. Perhaps the boy who ran away had assembled them. The creatures kept getting closer and closer to the team and everyone just kept standing around taking notes. Finally a gorilla stood up and hammered on his chest threateningly. We realized the danger we were in and started running off down the track toward the amusement park’s offices.