(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?

(Male) The dream took place after a small scale uprising of zombies. Yeah, yeah, I know exactly where the dream came from. I was watching a stupid zombie movie the day before I had this dream. But the zombie uprising was very localized and contained. Even though there were zombies stumbling around, it really hadn’t disrupted society too much. At the most, the zombie attacks had thinned things out so the town had a slightly under populated, slightly run down feel. Oh, and everyone carried rifles with them where ever they went, just casually slung over their shoulders. In the dream it was the middle of the night and for some reason I needed some cash, so I ask everyone in my house if they want to go for a ride up to the bank. (Cash machines still worked. Heck, money still had value so it wasn’t a ful-scale zombie apocalypse at all.) Everyone in the house was still up even though it was the middle of the night. I didn’t get the sense that they were keeping watch, in fact, I think my son was playing video games. My daughter agreed to ride along with me. It was a nice summer night, not yet too hot. There were a few people out on the streets and heck, there were a few zombies out on the streets too. Just a good night for a walk… though all things being equal, I’m glad I was driving a car. There were no street lights though, now I think about it. The only illumination was from advertising, or signs in shop windows. I drive in the bank parking lot and it’s pretty safe because there’s a large parking lot and it’s entirely empty. I get some cash out of the money machine but as I’m getting back to the car, I see a zombie shambling toward me across the parking lot. It’s no big thing. I take my rifle off my shoulder, steady it against the hood of the car, take aim… and miss. Miss completely. I shoot again, very carefully lining up the shot. Again a miss. It’s getting closer and this shouldn’t be a big thing. It’s a rifle and the creature is maybe 20 feet away. I miss again and I’m scared because I’ve let the thing get so close I don’t think I can get in the car and drive off before it attacks. I’m afraid for my little girl because she’s in the car with the window rolled down and likely the zombie will get her first. Just then I woke up.

(Male) I was in prison but a weird prison, an ancient European kind of prison, dark, inhumane. It was a tower that was partially submerged in the ground. Prisoners entered through the top, through a door in the roof and walked down a spiral staircase to their cell. The cells were all wedge-shaped because the tower itself was circular. The walls were stone, thick, dirty stone with a very small window slot cut about eye level that let in air. The place must have been built when people were shorter because my head grazed the ceiling of my cell.

But none of this was the really terrifying. There were no other prisoners, at least none that I could see but as I walked down the stairs I heard the sounds of others in the cells. Furthermore, the cells didn’t lock at least not at night. This was to allow prisoners a chance to shuffle down to the very bottom of the prison to where the bathroom was. As I descended there, I found it harder and harder to breathe. There were no windows because this floor was underground. Down there was also the warden’s office, a thick wooden door with the word “Comando” carved in it. The sense very much was if you offended the other prisoners then they would be the ones who punished you. I told myself never to use the washrooms in the middle of the night but even then I realized that nothing would stop the other prisoners - who let’s face it were ghosts - that nothing would stop them from coming into my cell whenever they wanted and brutalizing me however they wished.

This nightmare took place after the zombie apocalypse had struck just about everywhere. We were living in this sprawling country farmhouse and had invited the neighbors and basically everyone we knew who were still alive for a potluck. (My conscious mind is rationalizing here that since the electricity had stopped we all had a lot of food spoiling in freezers that had to be used up.) Anyway it was getting dark and the guests were largely rather late. My wife started asking me about certain things that I didn’t think about, like we’d planned to feed everyone in the backyard but of course without electricity we couldn’t see anything. Not to mention the possible trouble if someone made yummy noises at the potluck and were mistaken for a zombie… We didn’t know if zombies would be attracted if we lit a big bonfire. But we got into the worst fight when she asked me about how much ammo we had for the guns, as if I could just run out to the store and pick up some more if we were running low. Well, we were running low. We panicked, argued a bit more and then decided that it must be possible to kill a zombie by hitting it really, really hard over the head. It became my job to come up with enough big heavy sticks so that our guests could each carry one around… while trying to balance a plate full of food in the other hand and eat at the same time.

Time crept on. We stopped fighting. The food got cold. No one showed up. Everything felt very silent and icy as that deep country dark fell around us.