Tag Archives: families

NIghtmare #216 – Haunted Panther

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“… if the folks there didn’t like you, you just might disappear….”

(Male, 50′s) I had a nightmare last night that was really unnerving in addition to having a couple really scary moments. I was riding around with my Dad. My Dad has been dead incidentally for a good 20 years. We were trying to get an old radio or something that belonged to him from someone in this dangerously small town. It was dangerously small because there was a real sense that if the folks there didn’t like you, you just might disappear. Like the gasoline in our car seemed to disappear, like it had been siphoned away and there of course were no gas stations in this town. And the vehicle we were driving kept getting parked in. You know, there would be someone parked at either end of it so we couldn’t get out. We ended up taking the radio which was immense. It was easily three foot by three foot by four foot tall. We strapped the radio on top of a scooter / three wheel motorcycle thing and headed out of town. I was riding on TOP on the radio. I told Dad that I really hoped he wasn’t planning on driving on any expressways. Even when we turned corners on the side streets, we’ve leaned like we were going to tip over. There were some scary moments on that ride. I just had to relax and hold on.

We drove through this industrial wasteland, factories that were shut down and rusting. Windows grey and smashed out. It was an urban hell. Finally we arrived at my grandmother’s house. My grandmother also has been dead for upwards of 30 years. She did used to live in a pretty run down and decrepit part of an urban factory town. In the dream she was dead but her house still lived on, so to speak. It was much larger than I remembered it and I mean the ceilings of the rooms were easily twenty foot tall. It was still filled with furniture. I asked Dad what he had wanted with the radio for, why we had to go to all that effort to retrieve something that we was just going to deliver to a house where no body lives. He didn’t reply at all and that was strange because in life at least he was a rather talkative person. I could tell that this was something big but hard to put into words, something like honor or the “principle of the thing.”

“…It moved silently so it would sometimes just walk into the room on those silent, deadly cat feet and it would start tracking….”

The scariest parts of the dream happened inside Grandmother’s house because it was haunted not by a ghost but by a panther. The panther was large, half way between the size of a real panther and a velociraptor. It only seemed to be able to see movement and even that movement it could see best from the corner of its eyes. The beast was also almost entirely deaf. It moved very quietly so it would sometimes just walk into the room on those silent, deadly cat feet and it would start tracking. Once it was right on top of me snuffling at the soft inner parts of my throat. One bite and I would have died immediately in a spray of blood. I threw something and distracted it enough that the creature moved away. It also got very interested in an empty plastic bag that was being blown around by the wind. Another time though this blood thirsty monster came up right between my legs and started to sniff at my crotch. It growled low. I figured that I could probably survive if the monster bit off my penis if I didn’t bleed to death before help could arrive. –where was the nearest hospital in the urban wasteland?– but all things being equal, I would rather keep all my parts attached. When it wandered away, I yelled at my Dad. “Why is that thing still here? Why didn’t you call a professional exterminator or something to get rid of it?” Again, Dad was silent like I was missing some very obvious point.

Nightmare #211 – Kidnapped Daughter

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(Male, 50′s) I dreamed that my daughter had been kidnapped and the kidnappers were threatening to kill her. In real life my daughter is grown up and on her own but in the dream she was much younger, in high school. She had long hair. There were no ransom demands. The kidnapper didn’t seem to want anything apart from someone to kill. For some reason, we knew that the kidnapper was going to blow her up with a bomb he had draped around her neck like a necklace.

“…There were no ransom demands…”

The real nightmarish part of the dream was what I felt. I spoke with the police. I was certain that the kidnapper didn’t know that someone cared about the girl he had, that she was someone’s daughter. I asked the police if we couldn’t find someway to substitute her for another girl, for someone that no one cared about, someone that no one would miss. It seemed so reasonable in my dream but I’m sick to my stomach thinking about it now I’m awake.

Nightmare #206 – Lost Hospital

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“…it felt like an empty warehouse: dark gray walls and very high ceiling, probably 40 feet up and filthy, not like a hospital at all…”

(Male, 40′s) I had taken my daughter to the hospital for something serious. I think it was serious and bloody like an accident. She was probably 7 or so in the dream though she’s 18 in everyday life. My wife was with me too. The doctors whisked her away to start working on her and we never saw her again. At first a nurse came and said she’d been moved to a certain ward somewhere down the hall. So my wife and I walked down this long cavernous hallway. Seriously, it felt like an empty warehouse: dark gray walls and very high ceiling, probably 40 feet up and filthy, not like a hospital at all. But at the end of it, there was the ward we were told about. By the time we got there, though evidently my daughter had been moved. A nurse very impatiently told us to follow her and she shot off though this extremely crowded ward. It wasn’t much like a hospital either. The rooms were too large, more like school class rooms. There were no actual beds, just mattresses laid so closely together that there was barely enough room to stand. The mattresses were each filled with at least one patient, sometimes two. Some of them were wrapped with bandages discolored with rust and black. Often visitors or family members stood in the small gap between the mattresses. The lights were off in the room so everything was a dim twilight. Many of the occupants were coughing like they were sick though the bandages made me think this ward was for physical trauma. Maybe they made no such distinctions in this hospital. The large grey windows were all thrown open for ventilation, I suppose and a torrential downpour of hot rain was coming down outside. The nurse we were following very deftly traversed the mattresses and crossed the room in no time while my wife and I stumbled slowly behind her. She disappeared out the door on the opposite side before we made it half way across the room.

The hallway on the other side of the room was completely different, much more like a hospital hall but not entirely. It had been painted white at least and there was the sense that there were many many rooms just like the room we’d just left, rooms crowded with patients. There was no sign of the nurse or of any hospital staff for that matter. My wife and I wandered down the hall and eventually we found an elevator. The door of the elevator was tarnished brass though the casing around it was quite fancy, filigreed. When the door opened, the elevator car was round, spherical in fact. You couldn’t stand up in it but rather had to sort of sit in it, leaning against the walls and bumping into the other passengers. At first we weren’t going to get on but the people who were already in encouraged us to come aboard. “We’ll make room” The doors closed and it became evident that no one really knew how to make it work. The “floor numbers” or the place where one would normally indicate what floor one wanted didn’t have numbers on them. And the car itself didn’t just seem to move up and down; it also rocked side to side and I think it actually moved side to side.

I don’t remember getting off the elevator but next I was in what felt like an upper floor. It was regally appointed. Brass, maybe even gold, rich red velvet, fancy rugs on polished floors. It was crawling with loud fraternity college students. They were all raucous and mostly drunk. There were different tables set up, I gathered, for different fraternities to recruit but based on their boorish behaviour, there was little difference between them. However, in the middle of this room there was a collection of fancy arm chairs. i think they’re called wing chairs because of the shape of the upholstery on the side. There was a collection of distinguished men sitting in these chairs, distinguished but not pretentious, just quietly powerful. None of the fraternity animals seemed even able to see that these gentlemen were in their presence. I walked over and spoke with one of these men. I can’t remember exactly what I said but I think I said I was looking for my daughter. The man said “Are you?”

Nightmare #177 – A Town in Panic

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(Male, 30′s) I want to start off saying that I don’t usually have nightmare and I don’t find zombie movies to be at all scary but after this dream, well, maybe.

“… I’m pretty sure things won’t be fine, even though I don’t know exactly what’s wrong at this point…

I was in the car with my family and we were driving home, back into town and there’s something not right. There are walls of tall chain link on either side of the road. There are folks trying to head away from us, out of town. They keep telling us it’s the wrong way, but we’re pretty sure that if we get back to our house we’ll be OK. Eventually we get to a place where the traffic is just entirely stopped so we have to abandon our car.

We start walking and walking with all our kids too and still there are people rushing off OUT of town. They’re all on the other side of this chain link fence. For some reason we get convinced that that’s the right side to be on so we get through the fence somehow. We try to make our way to our house but we can’t.

My wife just wants to sit down on a park bench. She thinks every thing will just be fine but I’m pretty sure things won’t be fine, even though I don’t know exactly what’s wrong at this point. I can’t make her come along but my son follows me and we start heading, I think, we’re still heading back to our house. The plan is that we can hole up there and be safe. She says she’ll meet us there in a little while.

We just get a little bit further away, not noticeably closer to safety, when I hear this sound. It’s like a concrete dragging along concrete but lower, much lower in pitch. Then I realize it’s a groan. We look around the next corner and there is a tidal wave of zombies. Slow moving but as far as the eye can see. I know I won’t be safe at home. And I don’t think we can even out run them. I pick up my boy and I start to run and that’s when I wake up.

Nightmare #205 – Baby napper

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…I found a ransom note, however, and I recognized the handwriting

(Female, 50′s) My 2 year old granddaughter was missing, and I knew she’d been kidnapped. Her parents were doubtful– why would anyone kidnap their child since they would be unable to pay any ransom demand? They seemed to think she was around the house, and if they kept looking they’d find her.

I found a ransom note, however, and I recognized the handwriting: it was my next-door neighbor’s. The note requested 2 million dollars for the return of the child. I knew now that he had the girl next-door in the basement, and that he was playing with her and keeping her occupied, and I knew he wouldn’t hurt her because our neighbors really want to have a child.

I showed my son and his wife the note and told them, “You see? She’s been kidnapped.”

My daughter in law said, “Do you think it’s serious?”

I replied, “Kidnapping is a federal felony.” (Which was really funny when I woke up and thought about the dream!)

All day long they tried to get enough money to pay the ransom. They called all their friends and relatives.

Finally, in the evening, I called my neighbors’ house. When he answered the phone, I said, “Doug, I know you have her. We want you to bring her back and we won’t press charges.”

“What about the ransom?” he asked.

“They cannot afford to pay the ransom.”

There was a pause. Then he spoke.

“Well, then. What do you think is reasonable?” He wanted them at least to pay him for watching her all day.

Nightmare #203 – Accident at the Alien Incinerator

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(Male, 30′s) It started off as a normal dream. I was being given a walk-through tour of a place like NASA or something. A large scientific facility and this was the tour for new employees. One of the things we were shown was the incinerator. I remember seeing a small pile of ashes in front of it. We were told to be very careful in cleaning the incinerator because this was where the bodies of the alien creatures were disposed of and if the incinerator wasn’t properly cleaned, we’d risk spreading some kind of alien infection. I made a special mental note to clean the incinerator really well. At the end of the tour, I told the guide that I knew it was all business as usual for them but that I was still finding it kind of hard to get my head around the idea that aliens were real!

“…It wasn’t clear actually whether it really was an accident or whether she did it on purpose….”

So I started working there and things went fine for a few weeks. Then a woman I worked with got careless with the incinerator. It wasn’t clear actually whether it really was an accident or whether she did it on purpose but some the alien virus got out and started infecting people. They turned into some kind of zombie monster. There were strict protocols for how to deal with virus in order to keep it contained.

But some how my 9 year old son got infected. We were locked in a room together. I knew that I had to contain the infection which meant I had to kill him. But he had just started to turn so most of the time I would look at him and he’d be normal. Only every every now and then he’d act very aggressive and throw me around the room. It was impossibly hard but I realized that I’d have to kill him. I got a knife. When he saw the knife he went crazy, so I hid it behind my back. He calmed down. I approached my son and I hugged him, and as I hugged him I sawed off his head with the knife. By that point it was clear that he was a monster but still somewhere inside he was my son. He died mercifully quickly. But his head didn’t fall off entirely. So I had to sort of twist it around and saw for awhile on the other side until it separated.”

Nightmare #184 – My Aunt’s Wound

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(Female, 40′s) This was a dream in two acts.

In the first part of the dream, I was with my natal family in a restaurant for breakfast. We were all very hungry. We sat at a big table in comfy captain’s chairs– my parents, my grown siblings, and I — and ordered breakfast for all of us. Something distracted me and I left the table for a few minutes. When I returned, the table was covered with the remains of a breakfast feast: big baskets, now almost empty of their contents. They were almost Easter-basket sized containers of scrambled eggs, bacon, sausage, toast, biscuits, and pancakes. My family were still eating like they were starving, but they had nearly emptied the baskets of food. I had to ask and ask for things to be passed to me; they seemed entirely unaware that I had not had anything to eat.

In the second part, I went outside. I was walking down the street, and I ran into one of my old aunts, who I hadn’t seen in a long while. I asked her how she was doing, and she said, “Pretty well, all things considered. Well, I have to see a doctor about this…” She lifted up her shirt and showed me a long, shallow crack in her skin, that ran along the side of her torso– almost like a gash, but just in her skin. “I really don’t know what to make of it,” she explained. Then I noticed that the wound was leaking a very thick white substance, that reminded me of Elmer’s glue. “Wow, I don’t have any idea either,” I said. What the hell was that stuff? White blood cells? Something alien? She coughed and a lot of the white goo oozed out of her. “Yeah, you better see a doctor soon,” I assured her.

Nightmare #190 – Amateur Surgery

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(Male, 40′s) It’s clear where this dream comes from, at least parts of it. My mom has cancer and just came home from the hospital with an IV that needs to be changed twice a day. She’s frail and thin, a nightmare in her own right, more like a skeleton or a zombie than the vibrant and energetic woman of her younger days. Her hair is wispy and thin.

Regardless, the nightmare starts like this: Mom and I have traveled far north to a city on the banks of a Great Lake. The beach isn’t made of sand but rather is black grit. There are also moderately large outcroppings of white quartz crystal. Mom is able to walk and we’re walking along the beach, though she needs my arm for support. There is a deep dark forest of ever greens — cedars, I believe, just like we had along one side of the house where I grew up. We reached this boardwalk which made walking much easier. It lead to a train station and we took a subway to a hospital. I got Mom situated in a hospital room but it was a strange feel to the room. She shared the room with two other people. One was asleep or anesthetized. The other was a small child whose mother was complaining loudly that there was a Bible in the room. I told her to shut the f*** up and she seemed equally horrified by cursing as she was by the presence of a Bible. But she quieted down enough for me to get to work.

I was to perform surgery on Mom. It was all that her insurance would pay for, I gather. She sat down in something that looked like a dentist’s chair. It had trays filled with shiny scalpels. I gather there was a tumor somewhere in Mom’s abdomen that was so close to the surface it was supposed to be a simple task. This would be outpatient surgery, though my sense is that was the only kind of surgery performed at this do-it-yourself clinic. I opened a little moist towelette, like the kind you get at fast food fried chicken places and swabbed down Mom’s belly. I gather that was supposed to sterilize the area. I didn’t feel any growth beneath the surface, just soft, almost gooey, formless skin. I picked up a scalpel and I tried to make myself make an incision but I didn’t know where I was supposed to be cutting or what I was supposed to be looking for. I told Mom to wait there and I’d ask at the desk.

The nurses’ desk at the end of the hall had a couple nurses entering information into computers and chatting amiably amongst themselves. They were dismissive of my concerns. “Go ahead. You’ll do fine. We’re right here if you need us.” Though it didn’t seem they’d be much help. They didn’t encourage me in the least. I returned to Mother’s room, or at least what I thought was Mother’s room but she wasn’t there. There were no patients in that room. I tried to make my way back to the nurses’ desk but I couldn’t find that either. (As I’m writing this down, I realize of course that in the nightmare, I “lost” my mother.) I tried retracing my footsteps all the way back to the train station. There was someone just ahead of me, ducking around corners, moving too quickly for me to get a good look at, but I knew that this person would be able to help me. I was never able to catch up with him.

Nightmare #178 – Abandoned on the Bus

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(Male, 30′s) This has been a re-current nightmare of mine since I was a kid. I would be on a long bus-ride with my Mom. It’s always just my Mom even though there are five people in my family. It’s a long bus ride so at some point we have to get off just long enough to eat a meal or something. Thing is, my Mom gets off but I get stuck on the bus. It rumbles out of the station and I’m trapped heading onto my next destination. Recently, the dream has changed to where I actually go to the next stop and get off there but that’s no less scary.
It’s a simple dream but it’s still meant that I hate buses. There’s a bus that runs straight to Chicago that my buddies always want to take but there’s no way I’d ride that. Even when I have to take a city bus, I ride right near the door so I can’t be left on there.

Nightmare #175 – Creatures in the Basement

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(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 #157 – The Wolfman’s Typewriter

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(Male, 40′s) It’s funny how I can see parts of my day reflected in this nightmare but all twisted and strange. I actually DID have a conversation with someone about typewriters

In the nightmare, a kid comes up to me – teenaged, maybe a bit older – and asks if I know where he could get a typewriter fixed. He’s all distraught because he barely knows how to work a typewriter let alone about anyplace that would fix one. I took one look at the thing and I could tell for some reason that it was haunted, that bad luck was going to befall whoever held onto that typewriter. I thought the best thing I could do for the kid would be to take the typewriter off his hands. The kid seems very relieved but if he knew it was haunted, he sure didn’t tell me.

I got in my car which was parked at the top of a long winding road. The car wouldn’t start but I figured that wouldn’t be too much of a problem because I could slip it into neutral, roll down the hill and likely coast to the typewriter repair store. It was that close. So I start rolling down the hill and the car stops abruptly right at the bottom. Rats. I have to get out and carry the typewriter up the street. When I get to the place that USED to have a typewriter repair shop, the shop has long gone out of business. It’s getting dark so I decide to take the typewriter home with me for safe keeping.

Around this time, it starts getting dark. It gets dark very fast so it is fully evening by the time I’m home. There is something following me in the bushes. I figured that if I just went into the house, the creature could simply follow me in so, in perfectly logical thinking, I climb up to the roof of my garage. I don’t really have a garage but this was one of those perfect suburban garages, white painted clapboards, asphalt shingles, the garage of my youth. From this vantage, I can’t see anything down there though I know it didn’t go away.

My wife sees me on the garage and joins me on the roof. She seems to think this whole business is pretty silly. I don’t really understand why or how, but my wife grabs me by the arm starts swinging me off the edge of the roof. Perhaps she was trying to lure out the creature because that’s exactly what happens. A long and lanky monster walks out, with the proportions of a man walking on all fours but covered with black dog hair. The creature jumps after me trying to claw and scrape me. I try to explain to my wife that this is probably not the best thing to be doing but right about then, I wake up.

Nightmare #154 – Loaning the Car

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(Female, 50′s) This is one of those weird dreams that are really hilarious when you try to explain it to someone but that probably mean some kind of strange buried anxiety.

In the dream, my son’s fiancé has borrowed my car for the afternoon. She comes back and enters the house and she looks exasperated. I asked her “How’d everything go?”

She said “There was a little problem. It’s just easier if you look.” So she leads me outside. The car is parked in the driveway. The driver’s side door is completely bent backwards on its hinge. Honestly, I didn’t know how it was still attached. But the roof was even more remarkable. The metal of the roof had been rolled back in a spiral like it was an opened sardine can.

I said “That doesn’t look like a little problem.”

And my son’s fiancé replied “That’s what I thought!”

Nightmare #136 – Undead Babies

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(Male, Middle aged) This wasn’t a nightmare in the sense that there was a monster jumping out at me or anything but it was pretty weird and just awfully sad. I was in the house where I grew up and I think I might have been a kid just because I looked at things like a kid would, looking for fun, having little responsibility. I was just playing around in the garage and the backyard. I had a wooden scythe – yup, like the Grim Reaper but I was waving it around like a drum major, spinning it around my hand. As I type it down now, I realize that I could have easily sliced my own head off with it but that fit perfectly with the dream, that sense of stupid self-confidence, of adolescence.

Then a car pulled into our driveway and pregnant woman in a pink jumpsuit got out. She was probably in her late twenties or so. It was my cousin’s ex-wife — I mean, back when she was this age and having babies, she was still married to my cousin but they aren’t together any more. She waved at me then went inside. I was curious so I followed her. She was talking to my cousin who I didn’t know was there. Strange but my parents weren’t in the house. The two of them looked concerned. One of them explained that she had just come from the doctor. Though she could still feel her baby moving and kicking inside her, the doctor could find absolutely no evidence that the child was alive or that she even was pregnant at all. No heart rate, nothing on an ultrasound. My cousin had his hand on her belly, I guess feeling the baby kick, but they looked so sad, so confused.

Nightmare #122 – Baby Traps

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(Male) Let me start by noting that I realize this nightmare is anatomically impossible for SEVERAL reasons — I paid attention in “Health” class enough to know that. I was visiting my mother who apparently lived in a different city. We were strolling through this nice, gentrified area that obviously used to be freight warehouses in a rail yard but that had been transformed into a series offices, coffee stands, lofts, places to eat over-priced lunches and small shops that sold small, expensive pieces of junk. I was very surprised when we came to one door that Mother indicated was her office, surprised because Mom retired something like 20 years ago. We entered and I found a dark and dirty room, cramped to begin with but that was made even more difficult to navigate by this huge, old-style dentist’s chair bolted right to the middle of the floor. It was in bad shape — the arm pads had been torn up by generations of fingernails clawing against the pain. Mom had me sit in the chair. She had an assistant in this tiny room as well, a burly young woman who stood quietly in the shadowy corner but seemed prepared to hold my legs down if it proved necessary.

…Mom asked me to open my mouth and she forced this bottle down my throat, open end down…

Mother explained that she needed to “harvest some babies” from me. She showed me a simple device that would do the work. It was a clear glass bottle, probably half a liter with a very wide mouth and this weird attachment that dangled from the mouth inside the bottle. The attachment looked a bit like a noose. Mom asked me to open my mouth and she forced this bottle down my throat, open end down. The way the trap worked, I was lead to believe, was that a developing fetus would eventually grow to be so large that it had to stick its head inside the bottle and once it did that, its head would be trapped inside the noose. The baby would be caught and Mom could then gently twist the bottle out of my throat and she’d have a baby. Yes, I realize how twisted this sounds. At least this was how Mom explained the procedure to me. I didn’t question why she kept putting another and another bottle down my throat, pushing them in hard, screwing them to force them down my esophagus. If the idea was that they were to catch a developing fetus, well, wouldn’t I only need one at a time? That is, even if guys DID develop fetuses at all! And why were they going down my throat? I woke up snoring so badly I was choking.

And since I bet you’d ask, no, my wife is not pregnant.

Nightmare #117 – A Fixer-Upper

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(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.

Nightmare #113 – Fields of Asphalt

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(Male) I don’t know if this is the kind of thing that you’re looking for but it’s a dream I’ve had for maybe twenty years now every once and awhile. The dream is extremely ominous and makes me feel extremely sad. The thing you have to know for the dream to make sense is that I used to spend summers on my aunt and uncle’s dairy farm. Just acre after acre of open fields. I learned how to drive on a tractor when I was like 12. There were periods of intense work like when they harvested hay but then other times when I had nothing better to do than gather wild strawberries.

Anyway, in the dream, I’m visiting the farm and my aunt and uncle. I look across the old dirt road and there a construction crew paving over the field where I used to gather wild strawberries. In the distance, near the woods, there were the beginning structures of a strip mall. I am horrified and I ask when this happened. It doesn’t seem like a big thing to my aunt and uncle. They seem so beaten down and fatalistic in the dream which is not what they’re like in everyday life.

In the version of the dream I had most recently, they were down to four cattle which they kept in their front yard (!) They were heading into town to see if they could barter with someone, to see if they could trade four bales of straw (which is bedding material) for one bale of hay (which is food.) Even with just four cattle, one bale of hay wasn’t going to go very far.

I’ve had some variant of this dream so many times that whenever I visit my aunt and uncle (which perhaps isn’t as often as I want to) I just stand and stare out over the fields, just making sure that they aren’t being paved over.

Nightmare #112 – Bad Shot

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(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.

Nightmare #111 – Morning Vampires

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(Male) In the dream it was morning. My mother and I had taken refuge for the night in the basement of a house. We were now waking up and then securing the house room by room in case something had gotten in during the night. By “something,” I of course mean vampires which seem to have over-run our small town. There was nothing in the kitchen, nothing in the living room or dining room. It was an old but not particularly spectacular farmhouse, high ceilings, painted wood work, drab flower wallpaper. Mom started making breakfast.

…I opened a small bedroom there were three vampires in there: a mom, a daughter and a son….

I continued searching the first floor and when I opened a small bedroom there were three vampires in there: a mom, a daughter and a son. I knew I couldn’t kill them all at once so I tried to let only one of them out. I succeeded in keeping the son-vampire locked in the room. I should note that the son-vampire looked like that kid from The Munsters only that he was a bit older, maybe high school aged. He looked VERY angry and vicious, with deep black rings around his eyes, but then again he was wearing the shorts and Little Lord Fauntleroy shirt of the Munster kid’s costume, so he was both ludicrous and terrifying. The mom-vampire looked about 50 and had wispy blond hair. The daughter was a little girl, maybe 6 or so. So they are flying around the room in a semi-human/semi-bat state. Yup, blond bats. Weird. I yell to my Mom for a little help but she says she’s in the middle of cooking the eggs or something and they’ll be ruined if she leaves them right then. So I’m trying not to get bit and in fact, I’m doing well enough fighting these things that I try to find something to stab them. All I can find is a foot long ruler. Like the kind you’d used to use in school. I snapped it in half to try to make it sharp on one end but it splintered, if anything making it even less sharp. All the while I’m fighting the two blond vampires. There’s sunlight streaming in the windows but it doesn’t seem to faze them. I give up on trying to kill them and resort to just swatting them away but I even get tired by doing this. The mom-vampire swoops in for the kill and I try to make a stand with that splintered ruler and just then, I wake up.

Nightmare #104 – Purge by Fire

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fire
(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!

Nightmare #96 – The Long Trip to the House that Wouldn’t let People Leave

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(Female, 40′s) My teenaged daughter and I were on a trip to Toronto together. We were staying in a hotel downtown and going to attend a play in which a friend of hers from high school was performing. We were on our way to the play, which was to be held at a big church far from downtown. We got as far as standing outside the huge church, an old fashioned colonial brick-style building that was surrounded by a wide lawn spotted with huge, old trees in full fall colors. My daughter remembered that she’d left something back at the hotel, something she needed desperately, so we started on the trip back to the hotel, hurrying, because we thought that we could make it back again in time for the play.

We walked for a long while, then we took a bus, then the subway. Then we came above ground and I looked around for the streetcar stop, but everything was different. We started walking, thinking that our hotel was nearby, wandering really. We went far enough that I realized we had been heading in the opposite direction. Along the beach, we saw piles of skeletons, a stack of bare white bones on the sand, and I told my daughter that that was from last winter’s storms!!

Then I thought I knew a short cut back to our hotel. We went into a shopping center and across some walkways and made a series of turns, and suddenly we were inside a children’s hospital. I asked a nurse if there was a way out of there. She looked at us very skeptically, and pointed to an elevator. My daughter walked in, though these plastic flaps that were not like real elevator doors, and pushed a button. I jumped in as the elevator started to descend. She told me it was freight elevator, not a people elevator.

…”You really don’t want to,” she said. But I insisted…

We came out of the building in a parking lot surrounded by a fence. So we went back into the building to go out the front door. We walked a long time, down a bunch of different hallways, looking for an exit. Finally, up ahead, I saw a staircase and a woman carrying a laundry basket. We hurried to the end of the hall, which narrowed as we went. The end was covered with thick wire mesh: you could see those stairs but you couldn’t get to them. I asked the woman, “How do we get over there?” “You really don’t want to,” she said. But I insisted. So she pointed to a door.

We went through the door and we found ourselves in the basement of a house. We followed the woman up the stairs. She was the mother of the family, now widowed, and she lived in the house with her teenaged son and daughter and another daughter who was 6 or 7. The house was full of all sorts of objects; it looked like a very crowded museum.
The woman began to bring out newspaper articles and programs to show us that she was a very famous musician. We said we had to get going because of the play! But the family looked at each other and smiled. “I’m sorry but there’s no way to leave. We are all trapped here. We never can go out. The house will not let us leave. ”

I looked around. All of the windows were covered with an incredibly thick ivy. They couldn’t be opened at all. The backdoor lead down to the basement, the basement where we’d come in from the hospital basement, maybe, but the door we came through had no doorknob on the inside. I opened the front door and stepped outside. There was a
small cement porch with a short brick wall around the perimeter and a rusty wrought iron gate opening to a sidewalk. I could see the whole city from where I stood. It smelled so good to be outside. I looked over my shoulder and saw the family standing inside the door, watching me. I started walking toward the sidewalk. As I did, the
wrought iron gate reached out and grabbed me and held on. I twisted and pulled, but it wouldn’t let go. It gripped and stretched, wrestling with me, until I was panting and sweating. When I backed up, toward the porch, it let go. If I moved again toward the sidewalk, it grabbed me. I want back inside where the family and my daughter were waiting. “Do you see what we mean?”

We stood there in the hallway, trying to assess the situation. “What about food? How do you get groceries?” “Boxes of groceries get dropped off in the yard.” Their crazy claim seemed to be true. Then I saw a metal switch that I hadn’t seem before, like a built-in key that you could turn. I thought maybe that was the way out. So I turned it. A whole series of gears began spinning like I’d set an enormous machine in motion. There were these shiny columns composed
of hundreds of little gears all turning. A huge rumbling noise came up from the basement and a heavy metal drawbridge covered the front door and held it shut permanently.