Nightmare #175 – Creatures in the Basement

Posted on August 19, 2008 by admin

(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.

Nightmare #174 – Co-worker’s Dogs

Posted on August 14, 2008 by admin

(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.

Nightmare #114 – Contraband in a Deadly Wrapper

Posted on January 11, 2008 by admin

(Male, 40′s) A friend of mine was performing in a play that was being staged in someone’s living room. There must have been 30 people in the “audience” sitting on couchs or chairs or standing. I was in the kitchen and was able to watch the play through the doorway. I started making myself some tea when the front door is kicked in and probably two dozen policemen pour in all dressed in riot gear. They forcibly subdue everyone, and I mean everyone, from the people sitting on chairs to the actors on stage. I drop to the floor and roll myself under a shelf full of cookbooks to a place where it’s highly unlikely anyone would see me. I can overhear what’s going on and watch a bit of it. Once about half the people have been dragged out of the room, bleeding and unconscious and in shackles, there’s a team of policemen who begin scouring the house looking for something.

“It’s in the couch.” I hear one of the policemen tell the sergeant. “But it seems to be wrapped in animal hides.” The police start tearing the couch apart and sure enough there appears to be a large trunk, like a foot locker that is wrapped in what looks like the pelts from male lions, complete with shaggy manes. But these pelts also still have their paws and claws.

There are six of these skins draped over the box. The police suspect a trap and they are right to. What appear to be skins are actually werewolves that have been hibernating during the journey while the package was being shipped. Now they are exposed to light and the noise and commotion of the police action, the top werewolf comes to life. It growls and actually inflates itself with breath while it snarls and howls. As the police begin to fire on the werewolf that is fully re-animated, the next werewolf on the pile begins to stir. It is clear that the police weapons are going to be totally ineffective as they begin to be torn apart by the monsters that rise from the pile, one after another. The lucky audience members were the ones who were beaten and dragged off first. I cowered in my hiding spot, hoping that the werewolves would be too busy with the police and with securing their cargo and wouldn’t pay attention to me.

Nightmare #93 – Alligator Children

Posted on October 23, 2007 by admin

(Male, early 20′s) This one qualifies more as a weird dream, I think, than as an actual nightmare but it was vivid enough to keep me thinking about it all day.

There were these three small alligators playing in a dried up creek bed. The sand was a dark green and the little alligators were blue or at least they has a bluish color to them. A mother-alligator was watching over them. But all of a sudden another alligator showed up. It was huge and scary and it pushed the mother-alligator out of the way. The evil alligator was able to open its jaws so wide that they stretched from one side of the creek bed to the other which allowed the alligator children no way to escape. They were trapped and facing imminent death. The little alligators looked at each other and decided to charge. They ran straight into the mouth of the large alligator. They ran down his throat straight to its belly – I could see them bulging against the skin of the large alligator – but they didn’t stop at its belly. The small alligators kept running inside the large alligator down its tail until they reached the tip which they made look like an over-stuffed alligator-skinned bag.

That’s when the dream ended but I can imagine that a pretty one-sided battle continued with the large alligator being devoured from within by these three small but feisty creatures.

Nightmare #92 – Gotcha!

Posted on October 7, 2007 by admin

This wasn’t a nightmare like the other one on your site but it still gave me a fright.

I just laid down the other afternoon to take a little nap. I mean that’s what weekends are for, right? I started to dream about my kitchen about walking along past the cupboards when all of a sudden a black cat jumps out from nowhere with claws fully extended and it slashes me across the back of both my calves. I literally yelled out loud so forcefully that it woke me up.

After that I wasn’t in the mood so much for a nap!

Nightmare #84 Bees and Spiders…and Nazis?

Posted on September 2, 2007 by admin

I was at a summer camp area for grown ups with those typical uninsulated, wooden cabins and a large meeting building that had lots of windows. The person in charge of the camp raised bees, normal, safe, honey-producing bees. They seemed almost domesticated, peaceful. But there was some kind of threat from up the road, or further out in the county from more violent, invasive bees. The person in charge of the camp could tell this somehow by a little crust of honeycomb he found on one of the paths. The bees knew there was something up too since they all took to flight and there was a very loud and intense buzzing sound everywhere. We all gathered in the meeting hall – probably two dozen men and women – and kept looking up the road for the invasion to happen. But I looked behind us, to the garden area where I saw these huge spiders advancing on us in huge hops. The spiders were probably two meters across with hairy arms striped black and a vivid yellow green. I yelled to alert our troops but the spiders had already started to spray our building with web. But either it was a strange kind of web or it dissolved when it contacted the honey because the webs dissolved and the liquid poured down the windows, trapping the dead soldiers in a clear wall of something that felt like liquid glass. As it hardened, this glass-like substance gave off fumes that sort of drove people crazy. Everyone who had survived stripped off all their clothes and started running around naked, yelling with great excitement about the important things they were going to do with their lives, now that they’d survived this attack. One by one, they ran out of the building, which I didn’t think was a good idea mostly because I wasn’t certain that the battle was over. Then a marrionette entered from the back of the building, from the door where the survivors had exited. He was probably three feet tall and was dressed like an SS Nazi field officer. I knew that couldn’t be good so I jumped on him and easily over-powered him (killed him? Can you really kill a marionette?) Just inside his jacket I found a folded up piece of heavy paper that had the invasion plans. But before I could open it up, I woke.

Nightmare #81 – Ghost + Cat

Posted on August 15, 2007 by admin

I was in someone else’s house, a bright modern style house, on the second story in the bedroom the owners were letting me stay in. I became aware of the fact, somehow, that there was ghost lurking behind this small, gold painted door in the wall. The door was probably no bigger than 9″ or 10″ but it opened up into another full-sized room. I couldn’t resist opening the door and taking a peek. That’s how I learned both about the ghost and the full-sized room. I quickly closed the door and said some kind of prayer that God would keep the ghost on the other side of the door. It made perfect sense in the dream.

But then I realized that the family’s housecat had snuck into the room while I had the door open. I had to come up with a way to open the door, lure the cat out and keep the ghost locked away. At that point the dream became less a nightmare and more an anxiety dream, one verging on slapstick.

Nightmare #76 – Sucker Bats

Posted on July 18, 2007 by admin

(Male, early 30′s) I don’t know if this is exactly a nightmare but it was really annoying. I was outside trying to cross this yard to someone’s house and there were all of these huge bats swarming around trying to attack me. Their wingspan was probably three feet across and they were covered in short, dark colored hair. And the weirdest thing about them is that their entire face was one big suction cup. Somehow I knew that they wanted to affix that suction cup right over my face and then drain out my vital fluids. I kept swatting them away and that seemed to be good enough to keep them out of my face. In the dream, I didn’t get to the house but then I didn’t get the life sucked out of me either.

Nightmare #75 – Snakes and Straw

Posted on July 14, 2007 by admin

tentacles
(Male) I had my own farm which is something I’ve wanted for most of my life. I was just out wandering through the fields when I came across a gray tarp. Underneath the tarp were eggs that were white and roughly the size of watermelons. I thought to myself “This can’t be good” and I thought for a second about smashing them. They were so large they looked like dinosaur eggs. However, before I could act, one of them hatched and hundred of tiny snakes came out. They weren’t much larger than earthworms but they were black and there were hundreds of them, maybe a thousand or so. I knew they weren’t good.

I retreated to an outbuilding. It wasn’t quite big enough to call a barn but it had bales of straw all stacked up. The snakes followed me which was my plan. I took down a hunting bow and nocked a piece of straw in it and sent it sailing off into the mass of snakes. I skewered one right through the skull like I was an archery pro. In fact, in the dream, I think I was supposed to be an archery pro. I kept shooting off pieces of straw that kept killing the snakes, one by one. The area in front of the barn looked like a weird patch of grass because there were all those tiny snakes in their death throes struck through the head with pieces of straw. The straw stuck up straight and waved gently back and forth like it was blowing in the wind.

Though it was impressive and though I was able to shoot just about every second, it became evident that the whole strategy was flawed. If I kept killing them only one at a time, I wouldn’t be able to kill enough of them fast enough to keep them from over running me. The mass of snakes kept advancing, closer and closer.

Nightmare #71 – Snakes and Chain Fence

Posted on July 1, 2007 by admin

(Male) Two chain link fences ran up and down this green yard. They were only probably 6 to 8 inches apart. My conscious mind figures that there must have been a property dispute. The owner on one side erected a fence where he thought the boundary was and the owner on the other side did the same. Trouble was, a nest of snakes had taken up living in this “no one’s land” between the fences.

They were relatively small snakes like garter snakes, black and there seemed to be dozens of them. For some reason I thought these were the young and that there must be larger adults still hiding in the nest. But I just didn’t know exactly where the nest was. It was my job to kill them all though. Someone considered them a deadly pest.

I climbed the fenced and eased my way down between the fences. It was extremely tight. I was wearing my steel toed boots which are a little larger than my street shoes so I had to splay my feet out to fit in the narrow area. And I started stepping on snakes. I crushed their heads with the heel or the toe of my boot. I’d kill a couple with my right foot and a couple with my left foot.

And then I lost my balance. I fell over between the fences and got myself wedged in there pretty well. I was wearing cloth gloves so they weren’t going to give me any protection. And I started to panic because I couldn’t get myself back up to a standing position and I was finding it hard to breathe as well. Just then I looked down and saw an opening in the grass. I had fallen directly on top of the snake’s nest. Inside it were two huge snakes at least as big around as my wrist with heads the size of my fist. I started to yell but I woke up.

Nightmare #50 – Weiner Dog Attacks

Posted on April 30, 2007 by admin

(Male) Massively strange dream. I was walking down a row of shops and all of them seemed to sell relatively strange things. Like one of the shops sold exclusively cartoon art. Not comic books but large canvases and boards with single panel cartoons on them. There was someone in the crowd who resembled one of the figures in the cartoons and he found that funny.

Down the street a little way was a window box / display case. The frame to this case looked like an extremely thin, young fawn. It was extremely odd. I walked up close to it to see if it had been in fact made from a fawn – actually it was made from very small twigs nailed on their side. A dog started barking at me. The dog apparently belonged to a Japanese couple who didn’t speak very much English at all. I tried to indicate that I wasn’t afraid of dogs. The dog, a dachshund, kept barking at me angrily. The couple laughed like they were embarrassed by the poor behavior of their dog. I stretched my palms out to show the dog I had no ill will toward it. It ran toward me, jumped up about two feet and bit the pinky of my left hand. It didn’t bit hard enough to break the skin but it bit hard enough to hold on. I shook the dog off. I shook my finger at the dog and said “No!” in this deep growling voice. The dog’s owner told me “good voice” but did nothing to discipline or restrain the dog that continued to bark furiously at me. I thought maybe this is how they treat dogs in Japan, maybe they do what they want.

Then amazingly from a dead stop this tiny little dog jumped up five feet all the way to my face and bit me on my eyebrow above my left eye. Again, it did not break the skin but it held on tightly enough to hand there. I was terrified. I had this dog – albeit a tiny one – biting my face and growling. I had no idea what to do, nor did anyone around me.

That’s when I woke up.

Nightmare #26 – Monstrous Bees

Posted on March 17, 2007 by The Grim Gnome

(Male, mid-40′s) This dream was like a movie, a post-apocalyptic / giant monster movie. I was one of a handful of survivors. We were all more or less trapped inside this one house. It was a relatively large house but still there were probably about a dozen of us. And for some reason, everyone — at least everyone other than me was stupid, doing things that were incredibly dangerous considering our situation. I suppose that’s a lot like a movie too.

The dream took place in the near future where bees had taken over the world at least all of it we could see. And by bees I mean bees that had probably 4 foot wingspan and were intelligent. The bees were able somehow to plant crops. They had planted every square inch of soil for miles around this house with sun flowers. The sunflowers grew right up to the walls of the house, right beside the road and the sidewalk. They were every where. Miles and miles of bright yellow flowers. But the sunflowers short and weren’t tall enough to hide humans if we went outside. And of course everyone wanted to go outside.

For some reason, our big project was to try to scoop up some of these sunflowers and bring them inside and get them to grow in the bathtub. (Did I mention that everyone seemed stupid? I thought this was a stupid goal even in the dream but I wasn’t able to convince anyone of that.) One guy went outside and tried carrying in a sunflower, which seems to be very fragile which meant you had to move very slowly, and of course he was attacked and stung to death.

I awoke as we were organizing a party, including lookouts to keep watching the skies.

Nightmare #23 – A Freaky Cat and a Creepy Psychic

Posted on March 15, 2007 by The Grim Gnome

(Male, 44) This may not sound too scary but the mood woke me up from a dead sleep.

I was sprawled out on the floor of my living room watching TV, which is strange in itself because I haven’t had a TV in years and I was playing with my pet cat which is also strange because I haven’t had a cat in, well, decades. If it matters, though the living room looks exactly like it does now.

On TV was an episode of the X-Files. Scully was walking across a pitch black courtyard with another woman. The other woman had blond hair if it matters. They were looking for Mulder but had no leads. The two women were having that typical X-files conversation about science vs. intuition, except the blond woman was a psychic, far more extreme and out there than Mulder ever was. She kept mentioning how she was picking up strange vibrations as they were walking, supernatural disturbances. These vibrations meant something was going to happen, something significant, possibly very dangerous. Eventually the psychic stopped walking and said “I can’t believe you can’t feel these vibrations too.” At that moment in the background between the two women a light flared on in a second story room to reveal Mulder bound in thick brown leather straps. I don’t know if he was actually hanging from his throat but it was clear he was in some kind of immediate danger. The women didn’t notice him but rather continued talking.

What was strange was that through most of the scene, the cat I was petting was calm and relaxed. But as soon as the psychic started talking about the strange vibrations she was picking up, the cat kept getting more and more agitated. She walked up and down over my lap, kneading her claws into my legs and into the rug. When the psychic stopped and said “I can’t believe you can’t feel these vibrations too,” the cat stared up at me and her hair all stood up on end, not soft like it was a puff ball but sharp and bristly like it was preparing to defend itself against some danger.

Nightmare #22 – Animals Amok, Monstrously Immense

Posted on March 14, 2007 by The Grim Gnome

(Male, early 30′s) I’m with a small crowd of people on some tropical island; unnamed, but dream-sense tells me I’m somewhere around Guam. Ponderous steps shake the earth and this bizarre hulk comes into view over the treeline: a gigantic rhinocerous, truly a behemoth thing. The only way to appreciate it’s size is to note that strapped to it’s back is an elephant. By comparison, the elephant appears small, but then strapped to _its_ back is a full-sized dump truck. So it’s larger than your average elephant.

The rhino rears and looses it’s balance; the elephant slides off its back. When it hits the ground the dumptruck’s restraining ropes give way it crashes free of the elephant. The elephant hesitates for a moment, then goes to the rhino and starts pushing at it, as though to help it back on its feet. This initial mis-perception is corrected as the elephant, enraged, gores its over-sized target with its tusks, over and over and over.

About this time the crowd and I get over our initial shock and decide it’s time to run like hell. Because that’s one big, pissed off pachyderm and we know coming after us next…

A chase that follows; then the dream just got weird and not so much scary, so I’ll leave off here.

Nightmare #20 – Scraping, scratching

Posted on March 12, 2007 by The Grim Gnome

(Male, 40′s) I was alone in the house. It was dark and I was watching TV in the living room. The layout of our house is that there’s a living room at the front of the house then an archway leading to a dining room and a doorway leading to the kitchen. All three rooms are in a row so you could see into the kitchen from the living room. The dining room and kitchen were dark, probably the only light on was coming from the TV. I started hearing scratching coming from the kitchen. Just every now and then. I knew that there was no one else there, no people, no pets. I ignored the sound. Then the sound got more regular, a scraping, scratching sound. Still I watched TV. Eventually the sound turned into a constant scraping and I looked and squinted and tried to see what was going on.

There were branches slowly being pushed into the kitchen from just beyond my line of sight. There were branches, and paper and trash. Something was pushing all of this stuff slowly into the kitchen. I didn’t want to go back there and confront it directly but I wanted to know what was going on so I went out the front door. I switched on the light and looked down the side of the house. I couldn’t see what was pushing the stuff inside but there was a huge white wolf. Gleaming white. Larger than a Labrador. It bared its teeth at me and snarled silently, menacingly. I tried to move, whether to get away or investigate I don’t know but every move I made, the wolf countered and continued to threaten.

Nightmare #19 – The Dogs, the Un-dead

Posted on March 12, 2007 by The Grim Gnome

(Male, mid-40′s) I dreamt that my partner was, well, he was dead. I didn’t realize it at first so I tried to talk with him but he kept moving toward me, slowly, very slowly. Then I got a good look at him. His skin was grey and his eyes were red. In the dream, I figured he had caught some kind of vampire thing that was going around. He kept coming and I knew I couldn’t let him catch me. I got to the staircase of our place and was going to escape downstairs. But our two dogs were down there. They were MUCH larger than in real life. They kept circling, circling at the foot of the stairs, waiting for me. I figured I’d take my chances with the dogs so I stood at the top of the stairs and took a huge leap to jump to the bottom just as my partner got to the top.
And I just hung there in space. I moved slowly, slowly like I was moving through water. I tried to grab onto the banister to pull myself along but I couldn’t reach it. I glided slowly down through the air and my undead-zombie-vampire partner was able to keep up, step by step, even moving as slowly as he was.

Nightmare #14 – Conspiracy of Fluff

Posted on February 25, 2007 by The Grim Gnome

(Female, early 40′s) A powerful secret group was taking over the world in a very Big Brother sort of way. I was rounded up with a group of people who were “recruited” to join, although we didn’t have any choice. We were taken to this huge warehouse structure and held there. There were guards with us all the time and we were marched between the living quarters, and the mess hall, and the exercise yard. We were captives, but they gave each of us a small fluffy pet, this weird little creature like a cross between a tribble (you know those little guinea pig creatures from Star Trek!) and a yarn pompom. We suspected that they were going to try to drug us, so we refused to eat anything. Yet, one by one, people started giving in and joining them. I couldn’t figure out why. Then I realized that the cute cuddly “pets” we were being given were part of the brainwashing process. I pushed mine to the ground and all the pets suddenly swarmed me! I knocked at them with my hands, but they were shedding fibers on my clothes and hands and face and lips. I couldn’t get away from them.

Nightmare #11 – Smothered

Posted on February 20, 2007 by The Grim Gnome

(Female, 80′s) I was in a small room, maybe in a dormitory or an apartment and this immense dog was there sitting on top of me. It was brown and had a droopy jowly face. It was overwhelming me, smothering me. It held me down and made it impossible for me to breathe. I was suffocating and found that I couldn’t even call for help.

When I woke, I discovered that a pillow had fallen over my face. Maybe that’s what it all was.