(Male, 40’s) I was at home. Most of the time when I dream about houses that are supposed to be my home, it’s not really the house where I actually live. But in this dream, it was really my home and what’s more it looked like it does right now. This is remarkable because much of the furniture was moved around recently. I was in the front room. I was looking out the front window. It was night. A very large panther walked down the side walk and it saw that I noticed it.

The panther was huge, svelte, sleek muscles, serious expression on its face. It took a couple strides and then made a bounding leap at the front window. The glass in the pane didn’t break but it sort of bowed inward under the blow. The panther bounced off back into the night.

“…nearly a dozen household pets from the neighborhood, all dead and bloody…”

I looked out the smaller window by the door. At first I thought I saw a mass of curly auburn hair but when I looked again, it was just a Christmas wreath hanging on the door. What really caught my attention though was what was on the lawn. Scattered across the front yard were nearly a dozen household pets from the neighborhood, all dead and bloody. It resembled the empty beer bottles in front of a frat house after a party.

One of the cats nearest the door wasn’t dead. It was only maimed. It stared out at me, pleading with me for help but I knew if I went outside, if I even opened the door, that the panther would attack me. The panther was trying to lure me out.

(Male, 40’s) Unbelievable dream, maybe not a nightmare but a dark dream. Really dark.

“…if I stopped I’d likely be hit by another car and end up like the bits of wreckage….”

I was driving down a gravel road, a familiar gravel road, one that’s kept in pretty good condition usually. I know this road. I was in my car, the familiar car that I drive every day. It was night and it was raining. Visibility was horrible but as I said this was all pretty familiar territory. But the road started to get extremely bad. Not icy or slippery but there was junk on the road. Bits of cars and things. Like something that looked like the entire undercarriage of a car that had just dropped off. I could swerve around them because they just kept popping up in my headlights. But every time I ran over one of these things, the alignment on my car would go just a little bit more skewed. By skewed, I mean that the car was pointing a good 20 degrees to the right different from where the car was actually heading. I couldn’t see where I was going very well because the windsheild wipers only cleared the glass in front and I was headed in a much different direction. I kept running over things, on one side then the other. By the end of the dream, the car was facing exactly perpendicular to the road, a full 90 degrees. I was still somehow able to control it by turning the steering wheel. Don’t ask how the wheels must have been moving. All I knew was that I had to keep going, that if I stopped I’d likely be hit by another car and end up like the bits of wreckage. And I knew that there were pretty steep ditches on both sides of the road so I had to be careful not to go into them. But I really couldn’t slow down either because I had to get somewhere. But I couldn’t see anything. I had to look out through my side window because that was the direction the car was heading. I finally decided to roll down the window but all that did was let in the stinging spray of icy rain. It bit into my face and I couldn’t keep my eyes open. So I closed them. And I woke up.

(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, 40’s) I had this dream three times last night, that is, I woke up twice and fell back asleep into this dream. I wear one of those breathing masks for sleep apnea so I suspect that figured in there.

In the dream, I was wearing something like diving gear or like a very light weight space suit and I was inside a very futuristic school. The school was held inside an eight sided room. The walls were thick at the bottom, probably 3 feet thick, and gradually got thinner as they approached the ceiling. They were some kind of dark metal. I got the sense that there might only be four rooms aboard this school. I say aboard because it felt like we were floating, maybe in space, maybe in water. The whole craft would sometimes shift a little to one side of the other like a boat on a lake.

But there was nothing sinister about any of that. The strange part was that we had been boarded by darkness or something that gave off darkness. I know that sounds crazy but darkness poured into the room initially almost like a fluid, like a gas. But it didn’t behave according to gravity, that is it flowed up along the walls at times and it also didn’t seem to dare enter the whole room. The darkness would flow upwards and fill areas of the craft. The hallway outside was filled first, perhaps before we even knew what was going on. We heard sounds inside the dark, loud scraping sounds like extremely heavy metallic chairs being dragged along metal floors. The darkness was inside the room too. Everything seemed discontinuous, like different moments had been cut and pasted together. We kept losing people. They would be there one instant and entirely gone the next. We had no weapons, no way to defend ourselves but as of yet there was nothing to defend ourselves against: there was just nothing there. This was pretty much how things were for the first two parts of the dream: an evil foreboding darkness that crept ever closer with some unclear but evil purpose.

In the third part of the dream the school had changed. It was now immense but the same geometry of the rooms hadn’t changed. It was almost as if that small school I had been inside before was just a cell that had just started to grow and divide and now it was full grown. The floor didn’t move anymore so perhaps it had anchored itself on something. The hallways were much larger and the darkness no longer roamed the halls and rooms; it had grown into the structure of the school itself. The hallways were patrolled by tanks, actual armored tanks with gun turrets though they to were shaped to be overly broad on the base. In this part of the dream, there were more people, not many maybe a dozen, but they were offering absolutely no resistance to the darkness. I was trying to sneak along one of these hallways and get access to a library. I could see the room I needed to get to. It was filled floor to ceiling with actual books on shelves which felt kind of strange because everything else in this dream was so high-tech. The only thing keeping me from there was the patrolling tank that seemed to scan the halls erratically, randomly. The dream faded just as I slipped inside the library.

(Male, 40’s) Bruce is out of town for some reason, so I decide to go see a movie alone. I drive into Detroit in a long black luxury sedan of some kind. The movie is long, a kind of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and it gets out late. As I leave the theater, some kid with a straw spits a soggy wad onto my windshield. As I turn out of the lot, I’m suddenly on foot. No problem. I know I have to walk a few blocks to the highway to catch a.. or to where I parked..? Whatever. But I’m walking in the late afternoon sun through a grassy back alley. Broken concrete slabs and tall abandoned condos with narrow streets to my left.

…This particular clown is tall, about 7 or 8 feet. Dressed in a white outfit, billowy collar and stovepipe hat. But his eyes are strange…

No one is around. I pass a street, and walking towards me in the middle of the road is a clown. This must be Detroit’s famous Clown-Town, I realize. I didn’t know I was so far South. I should have known by the graffiti. This particular clown is tall, about 7 or 8 feet. Dressed in a white outfit, billowy collar and stovepipe hat. But his eyes are strange. They’re perfectly round and large, like white tennis balls. Black dots in the middle like they’ve been drawn on with a marker. There’s no one else around, yet he’s performing. His step is light and he skips every other step or so. He’s looking side to side, waving and nodding to unseen crowds. There’s no sound but the highway hum ahead. I move on. Behind me I hear the scuff of someone walking, skipping. I look back and Stovepipe has turned the corner. He’s behind me waving with his hand high in the air. He stops and there’s and tumble of color and cloth as another clown cartwheels out from a hedge Stove pipe catches his ankles and slows him. They both pantomime a happy greeting and then turn toward me. I start to feel like I have a long way to go before the safety of the on-ramp. I don’t know why, but I’m nervous. Clowns have never been seen to leave the few blocks the city has reserved for them before, but these two seem pretty mobile- and coming up fast. Also, it’s never been reported that our clowns have ever hurt anyone. I’ve never heard of it anyway. Still. On the next block there are two, no three more happy, skipping, staring clowns heading my way. Then the dream logic, the feeling that this is all an everyday situation falls away. Stovepipe is taller than any human I’ve ever seen and his unblinking eyes are just dry balls of plastic. I’m outnumbered and I can’t seem to get any faster than a stroll. The clowns are up to about 8 now, and still completely silent, still coming after me. I try to drag myself along the pavement and to get moving faster. The air is like water and I’m fighting the current. I find that I’m laying on the cement, trying to crawl away. My hands feel gravel and glass, and grass in the cracks of the sidewalk. I hear the horrible scuffing of a dozen big shoes just over my shoulder.

(Male) This was perhaps more just a strange dream or perhaps just a strange thing that happened while I was dreaming. But I was visiting a friend in some downtown area. My guess is that it was Toronto. It was evening and we decided to go out and hit some of the night life so we exited the skyscraper, crossed the street and started walking down the steps into the subway tunnel. It was so much fun to see this person – whoever it was, I don’t even remember if the person was male or female or if it was someone I actually know – but it was so much fun and it felt so comfortable to be with this person that we were laughing and joking as we descended into the subway.

…And we didn’t really notice that there were absolutely no lights on in the tunnel, that the subway was totally pitch black…

And we didn’t really notice that there were absolutely no lights on in the tunnel, that the subway was totally pitch black. It wasn’t until we got down to the bottom of the stairs that we sort of realized that the lights were out. And at that point we also realized that we were surrounded by people screaming, men and women screaming at the top of their lungs, in terror and in pain. I woke up from the dream at this point and felt the pillow under my head BUT I STILL HEARD THE SCREAMING for probably a good 4 or 5 seconds. I knew I was awake. I sat up in bed and looked around and only gradually did the screaming disappear. Weird, eh?