(Male, 30’s) This nightmare I had kind of cracks me up when I write it down but there was nothing funny about it at the time. I’m almost embarrassed by how silly it sounds.

“…Seemed a pretty awful situation. …”

I was in the house where I grew up, a place I haven’t even seen in like 10 years. There were people on the front lawn who were doing something. I went out there to yell at them. They were painting the countertop of their kitchen cabinets. The paint was this hideous green, like a yellow green, a color from a 70’s rental property. I told them to get lost. And then there was a policeman who told me they’d be OK. See, their landlord was kicking them out because the building was being foreclosed and soon to be demolished so they were down on their luck. I asked the cop what was with the countertop and he said that the landlord was making them fix up the place or they’d lose their security deposit. Seemed a pretty awful situation.

I looked around the neighborhood and it was a decaying, urban nightmare. There were multi-story buildings that looked like they’d been bombed. Whole walls were missing, not just the windows which were all smashed out. The cop and I walked around a bit and there was just block after block of wasteland, tall buildings ready to collapse under their own weight.

“…”…It was a zombie. And it was a skunk. How much worse can you get from that!…”…”

That’s when we saw the skunk. It jumped out at the cop and started running for him like it wanted to bite him. The skunk was sealed in a plastic bag and chunks of its flesh were falling off. The cop was stupid, just standing there but I knew to start running away immediately. I knew somehow that this skunk was infected with the zombie plague, probably the same kind of epidemic that was causing the whole world to go to hell. The scientists has sealed it in a plastic bag to keep it safe because in this future skunks were an endangered specie. They were trying to protect the genetic material even though it was sick, er, I guess, dead. It was a zombie. And it was a skunk. How much worse can you get from that!

So I started running because I was afraid of what would happen when the cop turned to a zombie. Every pile of rubble I passed seemed to have another zombie creature creeping out of it. Possums, squirrels, a mangy old cat. I was just running and running, hopping over piles of rubble trying to get away and the terror was all around me.

(Male, 30’s) The weather around here has been crazy hot and humid the last couple days. That’s the only explanation I have for these couple nightmares. I sent them in together because they’re not too much on their own.

First Nightmare: I’m on a roller coaster, sort of. It’s also sort of like public transportation because it travels on city streets, just a little bit too high so the sides of the car are whipped by the tree branches. All the passengers are locked into our seats by a metal bar that locks down across our bellies. And everything is super hot, made even hotter by the costumes we have to wear. Yup, to ride on this trolly or streetcar or roller coaster you have to wear one of those full body, furry team mascot kind of costumes. They actually lock the head piece on top of the costume so you can’t take it off until the end of the ride. You can only see through these round holes in the side of this head. There’s no breeze and very little air getting inside too. So there’s this whole car of people dressed up like life sized teddy bears. I got through the ride – I don’t like roller coasters because I get nauseous pretty easily – and I get unlocked from the trolley car but I still have to stand around waiting to get out of the teddy bear costume. In the heat and the dark, I finally start to feel myself pass out and I’m terrified I’m just going to suffocate.

Second Nightmare: I’m at home and it’s evening. But instead of everything getting dark, the whole neighborhood is getting flooded. Like instead of darkness, there’s water. It’s warm, like skin temperature so it’s not shocking but it’s also not refreshing either. And it’s kind of invisible so I’m not really certain how deep the water is. I find it rather hard to breathe. Everyone else is gone inside and they all highly suggest that I do too before the bugs come out. The first thing I see that looks like a “bug” is something I take for a crawfish but it’s over a foot long. It’s flexing it’s tail and as I watch it, there are suddenly two of them, and then three of them. All this time, I feel like I’m getting bitten by mosquitos. I look down at my arm though and I see that I’m being attacked by tropical fish, like the kind that people keep in fish bowls except these fish are huge, like the size of a dinner plate. As I look around there are lots of things around me. The water must be as high as the tree tops now because there are weird creatures swimming around at least that high. I’m a little scared but since I’m standing on my front porch I’m not panicking too bad yet. Then I see some kind of a flat worm that’s bigger than I am. It’s translucent brown and it keeps appearing and disappearing, each time getting closer. It looks really scary, like if it bit me, it’d take a big chunk. I started pounding on the door but now no one inside seems to be able to hear me. And once I started to panic, I also started finding it hard to breathe again so even if I survived being attacked by the brown worm, I still would likely drown in this weird, warm water.

(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.