(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.

(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!”

(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.

(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.

(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) 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.