(Female, 40’s) This dream started out as “merely” an anxiety dream but it became a true nightmare before the end.

In the dream, we were getting ready to have a big party at our house. It wasn’t our real house, but some weird mash-up of a bunch of different houses: the basement was from my childhood home, the kitchen was from an aunt’s house, and the huge living room was like something from a magazine, really big and modern with a wall of glass sliding doors. My whole family was helping to clean up the house and get organized for the party. My husband and my mother-in-law were setting up a dozen round tables in the living room and covering them with table cloths. It looked like a reception hall. The problem was that I just wasn’t sure why we were having a huge party at all.

Then I remembered: our daughter is graduating from high school so we must be having her graduation party. I was confused however– had we sent out invitations? I didn’t remember doing that! What were we having for food and drink? I didn’t remember doing anything about that either.

Some guests started showing up suddenly. I suggested they sit on the stairs until we were ready to get started. So they sat down and talked to each other and I ignored them.

…I kept saying, don’t worry– it’s under control…

I remembered that in the basement there was a box of party supply odd and ends: some pink plates, some red cups, napkins of various colors. If I could find that box, we’d be all set! So I went in the basement and started looking. I looked for a long time, interrupted by various people asking questions about food and drinks and guests and what time the party was going to start. I kept saying, don’t worry– it’s under control. And I kept looking, but I couldn’t find the party box.

Then I started looking for my daughter. It was her party after all so she should come and talk to her guests. No one had seen her. No one knew where she was. I was worried about her missing the poorly planned party, but I was more upset because I knew she was gone now. Just gone.

(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) I was in a living room with my brother-in-law. There was a large stone fireplace, similar to the fireplace in my own house but this wasn’t my house. There was a roaring fire in the fireplace that my brother-in-law had started. He was busy doing something with the fire. I moved close to see what he was doing. He had just finished burning a large collection of my belongings and he was now moving on to burn the belongings of my daughter. Just that moment in fact, he was stuffing a huge gnome hat into the fire. (?) I was furious with him but I couldn’t stop him. My stuff was already all gone!

…I was furious with him but I couldn’t stop him…

I think I know what is going on a little bit with the dream. The most recent time I’d seen my brother-in-law was around his birthday. He’s not very into things but he had received a large number of gifts. He was trying to find people to take away some of this stuff. The idea might have come up as a dream because my wife and I are considering selling the house where we live, which means we’ll have to pack and move all the stuff we have, including all the new stuff we’ve gotten since we’ve had our toddler. Moving: now THAT’S a REAL-LIFE nightmare!

(Male) It started out small. My partner and I were moving into an apartment and we were busy doing all the things necessary to make the space our own. I was fixing the frame on a mirror that would hang above the bed and my partner was meeting the neighbors who were a nice bi-racial lesbian couple. I could hear them talking through the open window. It was late spring and there was that lovely sunshine and smell of growth in the air.

The neighbors came over for a drink and I realized that the apartment also had access to a rather large first floor. In this part of the dream, in fact, it felt more like we were living in a sprawling old style farmhouse. Gradually more and more people were there, people who I only vaguely knew: the partner of a work associate, someone I think I might have gone to college with… Someone was expecting a baby so we took up a collection of spare change to buy camp pie makers from the dollar store, some thing we all thought would be a perfect gift for some reason. There was food, beer and even a couple folks off in the corner smoking marijuana, I think. The guests were all wearing somewhat shabby bohemian style clothing. This was turning into a party and I suppose I was the host.

…Then I realized that I must be the owner of the cursed mansion…

The next thing I knew, it was night. The house was now immense and very fancy. The entry way for instance had carved wood columns and carpeted steps like a movie theatre lobby. There was a huge crowd and everyone now was wearing flamboyant if not extreme evening wear, that in some cases verged on Hallow’en costumes. There was a guy there dressed like Marilyn Manson, for instance, sort of like the cover to “Mechanical Animals” but he also wore a tape measure that had been modified to indicate that he was 7′23″ tall. I asked him why and he said because that’s the day that Kennedy was shot. The food and drink had also become MUCH fancier. In an alcove, someone I used to work with several years ago was acting as bartender. He gave me a roundish glass of extremely fine Scotch. I can still remember the aroma of it as I write this. The unusual shape of the glass intensified the smell. I happened across my partner who was now dressed in evening wear as well and talking to a friend who had moved down South a few months ago. I offered a taste of my scotch which I was enjoying immensely but when I got the glass back it was nearly empty. I was furious but when I looked up from the glass, I couldn’t find my partner.

I searched the mansion. Down a steep stone corridor there was a rec room that had a ceiling maybe 30 feet high. There were leather couches with brass upholstery tacks, a sumptuous red carpet, interesting stone work on the walls. There were people lolling in here as well. My partner and friend were sitting at a fancy wooden table, each eating a huge bag of potato chips. My partner tried to hide inside the bag to avoid confronting me. I yelled a bit and then stormed off.

Then I realized where I was. I was in the family crypt of a haunted mansion. In the dream, I recalled seeing a home improvement show about how the grave stones had been covered with carpeting and how the whole crypt had been converted into useable living space. I felt very uncomfortable standing on top of what I knew were hidden bodies. I ran up the stone corridor to the main house. Then I realized that I must be the owner of the cursed mansion. The curse involved some monster from beyond the grave that claimed the owner on the first night of occupation. That would be tonight at midnight. All these crowds of people must have shown up to watch me get torn apart by the monster.

I decided to outsmart the monster. I found someone I work with, a timid secretary who at least in the dream was extremely poor. I offered to give her the entire mansion. She couldn’t believe I was making a real offer. We stepped outside. The front of the mansion was covered in ivy and there were many long black cars parked up and along the driveway which was cobblestone. The only paper I could find was the back of a handbill and the only thing I could find to write with was a black crayon. I wrote up the contract and signed it. While I was waiting for the secretary to make up her mind, I doodled on the paper and sketched this angry Aztec demon or something that for some reason I knew would be the monster that would be coming for me. She couldn’t decide. The moon started to rise, bright and full, over the trees. I knew it was too late.

(Male, 30’s) I woke heart racing and all I could think was, “Finally, something to send to the Grim Gnome!”

In an earlier thread of the dream I’d developed an unseemly crush on a Japanese lady I’d just met. This had just come to a close and I was feeling rather proud of myself for ceasing the flirtation as I wandered along some quasi-Boston streets that gave off a Venice vibe. The classic brownstones and familiar streets ran into what should’ve been the Charles River, sometimes neatly with sun-dappled willows lining unexpected parkways, other times the pavement and sidewalk terminating abruptly and requiring backtracking to equally unexpected bridges that crossed and recrossed the brown water.

My memory is fading somewhat but it was on this bit of walk that I began chatting with some college girl also walking there. My age hits me a bit; I’m not old, but she’s young enough to be right out as far as flirtation goes. The chatter is very much on the up and up end of small talk and so when we get to her house there’s nothing to read into her invitation for me to come in and meet her family. That being said, I’m constantly pushing to the back of my mind entirely inappropriate thoughts about how hot she is. Hawt. Very. Mm.

And something feels wrong, but I chalk it up to the inappropriate feelings. Still, crossing the threshold into her house, it’s hard to shake, this sense of wrongness. She’s talking about how she wants me to meet her grandmother, her parents, her brother. Something is out of place. The mood has inexplicably shifted.

I’m not kept in suspense long. We walk down the a tastefully appointed hallway and come to a bizarre room. The floor drops off to the right as though partially demolished and one can see the room below. To the left, opening directly onto the hallway are two rooms. As we approach, the contents of the nearest one remain obscured but the further one holds a woman. She’s sitting in a chair, wearing a white shift and as we draw nearer I can see that she’s an aged woman,
starved, with wirey grey and black hair tangled over a seamed face and eyes so sunken in their sockets as to almost be pits. In my shock I realize the girl who’s brought me here has stopped talking. She had been going a mile-a-minute practically since I met her, and now nothing. Am I looking at her grandmother? The horrible sense of wrongness comes over me again.

There’s a sort of noise from the storey below and I look down into the room and see a siamese twin, male and female, connected at the shoulder and torso. Both appear to be imbeciles but in good health - an impossibility given that one of the torsos ends in a twist of vertebrae. The sight is almost comic, like a really bad horror movie prop, but for some reason I know this set of twins is the girl’s parents. There’s something I don’t quite recall about her brother, who I saw next, a memory of something spiderish that’s swept aside as I realize I’ve come far enough to turn around and see the contents of the last room. There, scant feet from me is a creature that (now that I’m awake) I can only assume was inspired by Mattheson’s White Silk. It sat in a Victorian wheelchair, unable to rise. The hands were large, mis-shapen, pocked and clawed. The face was spider-eyed; there were no lips, no cheeks, just long, flat teeth like rodent’s incisors running the whole rim of the upper jaw. This was Grandmother; the other old woman was food.

I fled in terror away from the freakish family, but I fled deeper into the house.

Naturally, I lost my shit. I fled in terror away from the freakish family, but I fled deeper into the house. I made it to a room in which there was a ridiculously small window through which I know I should have been able to make myself fit, but I spent to long considering its smallness. When I quantified it as eight inches by four I knew I’d doomed myself. That’s simply impossible to fit through. The girl came to the room, all wolfish arousal and I tried to get a grip on how I was going to get out of this. As I played along with her entendres my mind scrabbled at my predicament the same way my hands had crabbed at the shrinking window moments earlier. Even though she knew I knew about her family I was still alive, so there were rules to this, if not reason.

I realized I was in a fairy tale. A misbegotten offshoot the Grimm Brothers. Had I actually heard this one somewhere? What were the rules for this story? She was panting and the climax which would either result in my escape or my demise was fast approaching. What to do? Continue? Flee? I was the Jack of every fable and had to come up with the unexpected solution…

And I woke up. Helluva dream.

(Male) I’m embarrassed to try to explain this nightmare since it sounds so wiggy but I have to tell you that I woke up in the middle of the night too scared even to turn on the light! I was at my Grandmother’s house which still had to be straightened up and sold, which is a little strange because she’s been dead for 20 years now. The house was never in the greatest part of town and in the dream at least, it seems to have gotten worse over time.

…It was near midnight and we were also waiting for a friend of mine to arrive…

It was near midnight and we were also waiting for a friend of mine to arrive. He was passing through town and needed a place to stay just for that night. We wanted to keep the front door open so we could see him when he arrived but we didn’t want to leave it all unlocked. Around midnight a car pulled up across the street and this very tall man gets out and walks up to my grandmother’s porch. I say “Craig, I’m so glad you found the place. Sorry I forgot to leave the porch light on. Come on in.” The man enters and said something about “We knew right where to look.” I noticed that the car across the street hadn’t pulled away yet.

But that all became of second importance when I remembered that one of the reasons we hadn’t cleaned out my Grandmother’s house was that it was haunted. I didn’t want the ghost to embarrass me in front of my friend so I started to say a prayer — in my dream, the ghost was very pious and obeyed God — and in the middle of my prayer, the ghost started talking to me, trying to interrupt me. It even told me its name which it just said over and over and over (and which I have forgotten now that I’m awake.) I became immediately afraid for a daughter I had in the dream. I actually have a daughter who is much older but in the dream my daughter was only 9 years old and peacefully asleep in an upstairs room. I was afraid that the ghost would hurt her even more than I was afraid that the man I had let in the house wasn’t my friend at all. When I got upstairs, I discovered the place crawling with creatures who liked to eat human flesh. They were very calm about it. They strolled through the rooms looking at the furnishing like they were window shopping at a store while they casually talked about their favorite ways to cook people. They didn’t seem to recognize that I was a human yet so I thought I could slip amongst them and get to my daughter’s room. But as I passed close enough to a pair of them, the squirted some kind of poison in my mouth. As I collapsed, I heard them say “And you’re the kind we like to roast.”