(Male, 40’s) In this nightmare, I was looking for my dog but I haven’t actually had a dog since I was a kid. It wasn’t in the house anywhere so I went outside. Our house now was on the edge of a very large park, one with mountains and pine trees instead of the suburbs that it actually is in. I yelled for my dog and then I saw it being carried in the mouth of a bear. This bear was on the edge of our backyard, just where it turned rough and started into the park. The dog, scraggy black fur, was obviously dead but I was concerned that if this bear was hungry or ornery enough to attack a dog, it wouldn’t think twice about attacking any of the people who seemed to be just standing around oblivious to the creature. I started yelling to folks to slowly move away and to get inside. There was one couple in the middle of the back yard who didn’t hear me or didn’t want to move or just didn’t understand. The man was wearing a black suit with a black bowler hat and the woman wore a full length white dress. She held a baby in her arms. I was foolishly brave and approached them. By the time I reached the couple, there was another bear within the same area, about 10 feet. These bears were large at least five feet from the ground to their backs when they walked on all fours. Their fur was long probably six to eight inches long and it was a rich golden color. It looked like honey, that same translucent color. I figured the couple were just panicking so I tried to make it easy for them. I said, “Just stand where you are and I will back away from you. I’ll get the bears to follow me.” No response from them. I started to back away, the bears followed me… and these stupid people started following me too! As I was backing up, I run into something incredibly solid which for some reason I know is yet another bear, this one much larger and more sturdy than the others. I am now literally penned in by these immense bears while two of them are sniffing toward the baby in the woman’s arms. Still this couple doesn’t seem able or willing to move. I say “Give me the child” so the woman handed me the bundle and about that time I realize that I can see through these two people, that they are actually transparent. They were ghosts. The full horror of my predicament flooded into me: I was surrounded by bears that were primed for an attack while I was carrying something like a ghostly supernatural baby. The last thing I remember is running purposefully and deliberately through a wooded area with pine branches lashing at my face. I knew I couldn’t outrun the bears but if I just moved deliberately toward the house I thought I could make it.

(Male, 30’s) I was trying to spend the night in what everyone thought was a haunted house. I knew deep down in my soul that there was just someone trying to scare myself and the other person who was there with me. I don’t think there was any reward involved, just the sense that if the place wasn’t really haunted that some kind of curse would be lifted, not like a supernatural curse but more like a psychological curse.

The house was dark but not entirely pitch black. We decided to try not to sleep at all that night so we just sat up awake in the dining room. The dining room opened into the living room through a large doorway but it was so dark in there that we couldn’t see what was going on in there. We could make out various whispy gray shapes moving but nothing more distinct. They shapes looked like window drapes and I for one wasn’t certain that wasn’t all they were. The guy I was with was pretty sure they were ghosts, though. There were also strange sounds coming from the other room. I thought they sounded like people knocking into the furniture as they walked around in the dark but my friend, as could be expected, thought they were ghosts. The hauntings seemed to come in waves, like there would be twenty or thirty minutes of nothing but boredom punctuated all at once by something happening. It drove my friend crazy but it just started to make me angry. I wanted to rush into the other room and catch the people in the act but my friend became hysterical at the idea of us separating. But one time, when one of these haunting assaults started, I picked up an end table and threw it into the living room. It didn’t seem to hit anything or make any difference. If anything, it just un-nerved by buddy more.

I was getting desperate to get rid of any sense of ghostly intervention, and angry and perhaps a bit scared. And this is where I literally don’t know what I was thinking in the context of the dream. I knew that there was a crack house next door, actually in the same building. The haunted house was like an attached brownstone, a brick building built into a long line of buildings. This one happened to be “haunted;” the next one happened to be a crack house. I knew that crack dealers and crack addicts could be dangerous in ways that fake ghosts and the people behind them can’t be. So the plan, I guess, to the extent that I had a plan was to alert the attention of the crack addicts next door and get them to terrify the people behind the haunting. I crawled down the staircase that connected the two parts of the building and somehow got the attention of the dope fiends. They ran out of their house and into the haunted house. The crack addicts flipped on the lights (why hadn’t WE thought to do that?) and there was gun fire going every where. I was hiding under a table with a table cloth on it. There was a guy with a semiautomatic weapon standing less than a foot away from me. For some reason, thankfully, he didn’t see me. There was yelling and shooting and eventually they just left.

That’s about where the dream ended, with no resolution. I don’t know what happened to my friend. I don’t know if we lifted the curse on the building. I don’t even know if the gun-toting crack heads killed the “ghosts.”

(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.

(Female, 40’s) This dream was something like a movie set in the 16th century. Everyone was dressed in period costumes, the women wearing long heavy dresses with velvet and brocade and the men in suits. The rooms were lit with candlelight and each had a fireplace or two. The walls were stone and very tall and shadowy. The whole house was drafty and dark.

…The house belonged to a crazy uncle who was a retired general and his wife…

I had been invited to this huge, old house in the countryside to be the companion to a cousin. We were both teenage girls in a household of older people. The house itself belonged to a crazy uncle who was a retired general and his wife. With them also lived several elderly aunts, another uncle, his mother and father, and his sister, who didn’t like children. That aunt made a point of casting disapproving looks at my cousin and me on every possible occasion. If she didn’t like the way we sat at the table, the speed at which we knitted, or the amount we talked, she’d glare at us. She was frightening.

My uncle was frightening as well, in an unhinged sort of way. We were called down to supper, which was set up in the kitchen at my uncle’s insistence. Usually we ate in the dining room but tonight he wanted to sit in where he could watch the food being prepared. The cook had made, among other things, Steak Tartar. My uncle explained to the cook that he couldn’t eat Steak Tartar because it reminded him of meals in the army. Unfortunately, the cook spoke only French, so he didn’t understand my uncle nor did my uncle understand him. My uncle insisted that the dish had to be removed from the table and thrown out. The cook insisted that the food was good and that there were many other dishes on the table to eat. Finally my uncle stood up and took the dish of Steak Tartar and began the smear it all over the front of the cook’s white apron, handfuls at a time. The cook stood there, shocked. The family also sat in horror as my uncle emptied all the plates of food onto the front of the cook’s apron.

Did I mention that the house was haunted as well? In the evening, my cousin and I were in our room. The aunt that disliked us came in to scold us about something. She left the door to the room open and stood talking loudly and firmly to us. Then through the door came a very tall and wispy ghost, at least 12 feet tall. She was constantly moving, her arms and the drapes of her dress swaying like they were blowing about in a gentle breeze. Her appearance wasn’t as frightening as it was ominous. She’d come to warn us about something but we couldn’t understand what. My aunt was surprised into silence, but after the ghost disappeared, she said, “See? That is what will happen is you disobey.” But we didn’t understand what she meant by that either.

(Male) I used to live in the old sprawling farmhouse that happened to located right next to a pretty busy road. The house had been broken up into apartments. Prior to the time I lived there, two of the former occupants, both older women, in totally separate incidents had been struck and killed by automobiles while trying to cross the road. All that really happened.

In the dream, I am laying down on a couch in the living room of the apartment. A woman who I don’t recognize shakes my shoulder, trying to get me to wake up. I open my eyes a little. She says “Go for a walk with me.” I close my eyes and try to go back to sleep. The woman is more insistent. “You must come for a walk with me. Now. Come.” I’m not certain about this next part because it’s hard to describe but it almost felt as if she was trying to push her arms into my body, to make me move from inside, almost as if she was trying to get inside my body to make me move. But I stayed on the couch and eventually she went away.

It wasn’t until I woke up that I remembered the women who had been killed going for a walk just outside. It still gives me shivers to tell this story.

(Male, early 30’s) I was in a house but not my house in the living room, sitting in a comfortable chair, relaxing. Then I realized that several objects in the room — lamps, books, that kind of thing — were gently floating and moving slowly around the room. At first I thought this was pretty cool and I sat back and enjoyed it but then I realized that each of these objects was held by a ghost who was carrying it around. I should tell you that I’m terrified of ghosts and, this is going to sound funny, but it goes back to when I first saw “Ghostbusters” as a kid. So in the dream, I’m sitting there surrounded by ghosts. But then I realize that the ghosts are moving this stuff around just to mess with me and I start to get mad. I pick things up and throw them at the ghosts, which of course go right through the ghosts. Then I got out of the chair and started to fight with the ghosts using my fists. This was about as useless as throwing things at them except now the ghosts all ganged up on me. I felt the sensation of two strong hand grasping my ankles. I was knocked to the floor and then the ghosts started swinging me around and around, holding on to my ankles. When I woke up I still felt dizzy. I woke up my wife and told her the dream and she said I was crazy.