Tag Archives: house

Nightmare #307 – Trapped in Reality TV

Posted on by
Reply

(Female, 50′s) I had slept in because it was the weekend and I remember that when I woke up I had a horrible headache likely because my brain was caffeine starved.

I was in one of those surprise remodel TV shows. It seems like my whole family had gotten together to redo our kitchen. My husband and I have been remodeling the kitchen bit by bit improving it whenever possible for several years now. So the buildup to the big reveal comes… and the remodeled kitchen is just horrible.

It was worse than horrible; it’s a collection of everything dreadful that we’d ever gotten rid of dating back from just about every kitchen throughout our marriage. The fridge is this old white model — we finally upgraded to one with a nice stainless steel front. The cupboard were from our old condo. And they had the door handles right in the middle of the doors, which is a silly place for handles. There were dishes out on open air shelves which I hate because they just collect dust. It was horrible.

And everyone was standing around looking so pleased with themselves for what they accomplished. They handed me a bottle of wine and I was so upset I smashed it against the table.

And I woke up!

Nightmare# 299 – Bad, Bad Roommates

Posted on by
Reply

(Male, 20′s) I had this nightmare about an hour after I fell asleep and when I woke up, I seriously considered just not going back to sleep.

I was in a house with a half dozen other guys. It felt like we were in college and we had rented a house together. What a weird house though. It was like a hollowed out tower but a loft had been built inside that stretched up three full stories. The top floor had a floor entirely covered with mattresses, so I guess that was the bed room.

Most of the guys seemed friendly but shallow, always smiling but just skin deep. I didn’t know if they really were dumb or if there was something else underneath that silly happiness.

One of the guys was very disturbed and very disturbing. He gave off “serial killer vibes.” Tall, wore a wide brimmed hat and a black raincoat that always seemed to be wet. On one occasion he was actually dragging in a plastic bag that looked like it could have contained a dead human body.

I accidentally crossed his path. I was using my computer and I was watching a movie / playing a game about a serial killer. It was a horror survival thing. But then I realized that I had somehow hacked into his computer and I was actually seeing what was live on his screen. And worse, he knew I had seen him. He used the camera in my computer to spy on me all the time.

I was freaked. He was coming for me but I figured I’d be safest if I climbed up to the top of lofts, to the bedroom floor. There were two other guys there. They told me not to worry, that the crazy serial killer guy never climbed up the ladder. We started wrestling for some reason and then I discovered gradually that I couldn’t move my arms or legs. One of the guys laughed, “That’s because we drugged you.” I started to foam at the mouth. “We’re going to rape you and then give you to the serial killer so he can chop up the evidence.” I fell over face down on the mattress, paralyzed, my mouth filled with foam. I was unable to scream but eventually I shook myself hard enough that I woke up.

Nightmare #292 – Ghostly Dance Floor

Posted on by
Reply

(Male, 40′s) It’s my own fault. I ate a couple slices of pizza right before bed. I just can’t handle green peppers anymore. This nightmare was an EPIC length ghost story. I hope I made it sound half as scary as I thought it was.

It was night and I was waiting for my girlfriend at a church. I was inside the church, an old style, stone church, not much different from the one I grew up attending in fact it felt like that church even though there was no room in that building like the one in my nightmare. It was getting late and I couldn’t really remember why I was waiting, what was keeping my girlfriend. I couldn’t remember much about her in fact (sorry, dear!) She might have been a professor so I thought maybe she had a night class and then I thought maybe she was a high school principal so she had a long meeting … but I wasn’t 100% certain of anything, only that I was waiting in a pretty large room – one large enough to be a dance hall – so late at night that all the electricity had turned off.

Yeah, that was the first real scary thing. It was like the electricity was timed to turn off at 10:00 or something. I couldn’t turn the lights on even if I wanted to. There was a surprising amount of ambient light, however – through the windows, through the open doors – not enough to see into the corners but enough to make out the general contours of the room. And there was enough light for me to realize that the floor was extremely dirty. There were actual clods of dried mud, like a large group of people had come in from hiking cross country and stood around in this room until the mud fell off their shoes. I didn’t have anything better to do so I grabbed a broom and started to sweep up. I figured that might make the ghosts happy.

Because by this time, I was pretty sure there were ghosts everywhere inside this church. I was hearing strange sounds that I kept telling myself was just the furnace… though now I think about it, a building that shut off the electricity at night probably shut off the heat too. It was white noise that was sculpted almost to sound like music but it also sounded like human voices singing. I also thought I saw lights – shimmering crescents of light – out of the corner of my eye, over where a big storage closet was. But I started sweeping, if for no other reason than to keep my mind off the creepy things in the room. And that’s when the really weird stuff started.

I would no sooner get a pile of dirt swept up and it would dissolve into the floor. I thought at first a breeze had blow it away – which would have been scary enough but it actually was dissolving IN to the floor. I didn’t really care too much. No need to find a dust pan, I guess. But right about this time I realized that there were two large trees growing out of the floor over by where this storage closet was. They were cedars, with long rope-y bark. The diameter of the trunk was over a foot so these were quite strong trees. They came right up through the tiled floor, like the church had been built around them. There was definitely paranormal activity being active over there so I approached to check it out. I was extremely scared but I kept moving closer. A bright bluish glow had started coming out of the closet. Then a dimmer orangeish glow started from one of the trees.

I started hearing a voice-over in my head, like a book-on-tape or a long interview on NPR. The author had written a book called “The Apple and the Cedar” and it was about these very trees. I didn’t have too much faith in his patient, long-winded analysis because for one thing, he entirely mis-indentified one of the trees. The author seemed to think the trees were harmless and they were part of some grand circle of death and re-birth. I was pretty sure that he wasn’t telling the whole story, that there was actually something slightly more dangerous about these trees but I knew what I had to do. I don’t know how I knew it, but I knew it. The long ropes of bark were strangling the trees. If they were going to live, the bark needed to be pulled away. I didn’t know if removing the bark would antagonize the ghosts / spirits but I felt I simply had to do this. I started unknotting the bark from around the trees. It was hard work. Every now and then I’d see a flash of light out of the corner of my eye and hear an angry buzz in my ear so I knew the ghosts were paying attention. I just couldn’t tell what they were thinking. But as I unwrapped the cedar, the light it gave off grew more intense. I could see the buds of new life growing on the undersides of the stems.

That’s the last thing I remember about the dream, looking up at the branches of this cedar, branches that reached all the way to the ceiling and beyond, an seeing all the beautiful new growth on them. As it sounds here, this was a positive ending but I woke up quite disturbed. I didn’t ever figure out whether the ghosts were angry about what I’d done with the cedars. I sat up in my bed. It felt like my whole house was haunted.

Nightmare #234 – The Half-Pint Haunted House

Posted on by
Reply

(Male, 30′s) In this dream, I went to a Halloween haunted house. It was rather unique because attendees arrived before dark and the house was actually built around us. There were no secrets. We watched the frame work go up, the walls, everything. It kept getting closer and closer to dark.

“…they were doing there best to be scary…”

There was a dim kind of illumination, very suitable for a haunted house. Then arms started reaching out from the walls. Very creepy, very Bergmanesque. Or at least for a moment. It was as if the arms were reaching out between the rolls of wallpaper, as if the walls themselves had disappeared. Then we were able to see who was behind the walls. All of them wore those cheesy rubber monster masks. And these masks all looked particularly ludicrous because all of these people looked like they were 5 or 6 years old. The masks flopped on their heads because they were all way too large for these kids. But they were doing their best to be scary.

But these tiny monster were getting a bit rough. Their hands were grabbing with a bit too much force, their fingers pinching. For some reason, I had a plastic tube, like a hollow baseball bat. Was it part of my costume or something? I gently hit a couple of these grabbing hands. Before I knew it, the little creatures were pushing between the tattered sheets that once were walls. They kept pressing in, more and more of them.I tried to keep them at bay with the plastic bat but soon they had knocked me down. It wasn’t that their flaying arms were particularly forceful or that the blows were painful. Rather it was more a problem that I was becoming crushed, suffocated by the weight of their bodies. More and more of them. Eventually, I woke up.

NIghtmare #216 – Haunted Panther

Posted on by
Reply

“… 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 #214 – Not A Very Safe Haven

Posted on by
Reply

(Male, 40′s) This started off a much more normal dream but became a nightmare around this point. I had just exited a cottage, like a Hansel and Gretel kind of cottage, but it was on a suburban street of suburban style houses. All those houses though were empty and dark. Abandoned. It was evening, the last part of evening before things become totally dark, before it’s night. There was a woman there with me who had long blond hair. She stood facing the street like she was on guard watching for something.

“…They are more powerful than you can imagine…”

There was another woman, powerfully attractive, with long black hair. She stepped up to me, so close to me our bodies over lapped. It’s hard to describe but it felt like she was standing in the exact spot where my feet were standing. There was no point to embracing each other with our arms because we were already as close as we could possibly be. The woman with the black hair whispered in my ear. “Don’t be afraid of the wolves.” I looked down and a dozen wolves ran by us in slow motion. Some of them were real, flesh and blood wolves but others were the merest suggestions of wolves, like a wolf-shaped cloud or a wolf-shaped mist. The woman said “They are more powerful than you can imagine. They are always all around us. In the middle ages, astrologers thought it was the movement of the stars that determined our actions when really it is the movement of the wolves.” Despite what she’d told me, I was terrified of the wolves.

Just then the blond haired woman alerted us that she had seen something. When the black haired woman moved away from me, I found it hard to breath. We all retreated into the cottage. I was the last to enter and as I closed the door, I heard a gun fire many times. The bullets came toward me in slow motion and I was able to watch them and I knew they would miss. I watched them spinning in the air. Except they weren’t bullets; they were golden screws. Five of them. I watched them impact the door jam and slowly screw themselves deep into the dark wood. They were clustered tightly together, like a shotgun blast. I closed the door and I woke up

Nightmare #125 – Attack of the Dayglow Trolls

Posted on by
1

(Male, early 30′s) When I was just a little kid, I went through a period where I sleepwalked and this was one of the really intense dreams I remember from that time. My house was surrounded by trolls, monsters with knobby faces and weird tufts of hair. And if that wasn’t strange enough, these trolls were all very vivid colors, like day-glow fluorescent type colors of green and pink and yellow. They completely surrounded the house and then they started throwing things at me. It was fruit. I was being pelted my fruit thrown by trolls. They threw so much fruit that the house was starting to fill up. I thought I should warn my parents. I ran into their bedroom and tried to explain about the day glow trolls and fruit but in fact, I was just sleepwalking. My mom threw a glass of water on me to wake me up.

Nightmare #101 – Don’t fight with Ghosts

Posted on by
Reply

ghost

(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.

Nightmare #92 – Gotcha!

Posted on by
Reply

This wasn’t a nightmare like the other one on your site but it still gave me a fright.

I just laid down the other afternoon to take a little nap. I mean that’s what weekends are for, right? I started to dream about my kitchen about walking along past the cupboards when all of a sudden a black cat jumps out from nowhere with claws fully extended and it slashes me across the back of both my calves. I literally yelled out loud so forcefully that it woke me up.

After that I wasn’t in the mood so much for a nap!

Nightmare #81 – Ghost + Cat

Posted on by
Reply

I was in someone else’s house, a bright modern style house, on the second story in the bedroom the owners were letting me stay in. I became aware of the fact, somehow, that there was ghost lurking behind this small, gold painted door in the wall. The door was probably no bigger than 9″ or 10″ but it opened up into another full-sized room. I couldn’t resist opening the door and taking a peek. That’s how I learned both about the ghost and the full-sized room. I quickly closed the door and said some kind of prayer that God would keep the ghost on the other side of the door. It made perfect sense in the dream.

But then I realized that the family’s housecat had snuck into the room while I had the door open. I had to come up with a way to open the door, lure the cat out and keep the ghost locked away. At that point the dream became less a nightmare and more an anxiety dream, one verging on slapstick.

Nightmare #40 – Demonic Garage

Posted on by
Reply

(Male) This is going to sound funny I’m sure as I tell it but as a dream it was pretty intense. I was going out to the garage of my parent’s house. Which is strange in itself because they haven’t lived in this particular house for probably 15 years but it was the place where I grew up. I opened the big garage door and I was rather amazed that the place was, relatively speaking, pretty clean and tidy. There were still all sorts of strange things hanging from hooks on the walls and there were boxes stacked on top of each other off to the side. But there was clearly enough room to get a car in there and that was definitely not the normal condition of the place.

I mean, you could have gotten a car in there except that set up right in the middle of the garage was a ping pong table. I stepped inside to investigate but it was extremely dark inside. Luckily there were probably a half dozen bare light bulbs hanging down over the table. I yanked on their pull cords one by one and they each turn on but each bulb is really dim and doesn’t illuminate much. It almost seems darker with the lights turned on than when they were off. I stepped outside the garage to find someone to play ping pong with and when I step back in, all the lights are off. I tried pulling the cords again and they were all dead, all burned out. And at that point I’m standing right inside this entirely pitch black space looking out at the dark grey twilight of the big garage door and I hear, behind me, all around me, this low rumbling growl. It feels sort of like I’ve stepped into the mouth of some enormous monster thinking it was a cave. I realize in a flash – and this didn’t seem that strange within the dream, oddly enough – “Oh, the old garage must be possessed.” Not haunted but possessed for some reason. So I get down on my knees and start performing, get this, an exorcism ritual – like I’d know how to do one of those, right? – And in the dream, I’ve got this really commanding and authoritative voice. And I somehow know exactly what to say. The garage starts to shake around me, dust and leaves falling on me from the rafters but I keep concentrating, keep talking and then suddenly a great surging wind gathers up around me and blows out the garage door. That’s when I woke up so I never did get to play ping pong.

Nightmare #36 – Stuck in Time

Posted on by
Reply

(Female, early 50′s) I had this really weird dream where I was a newspaper reporter and also about 25 years younger. I was sent on an assignment to this large mansion out in the country, and I was to interview someone who lived there. I drove far out of the city, in a vacation area in the mountains with hotels and cottages all around– a place that had been popular long ago. I knocked on the door and waited a long while before someone came. It was a very old woman. Evidently she was the person I had come to interview. I followed her up three flights of stairs to a small room. It was barely large enough to hold a single bed and a nightstand. Everything in the room was old and faded and dusty. Even though this was a huge mansion, this was the only room of it that was hers. I didn’t quite understand.

I asked her lots of questions, trying to figure out her story. I discovered that she had been living there for more than 50 years. She’d had a summer job when she was young, and something happened and she could never leave. “I’m 75 years old now,” she said, “and when the phone rings, I have to go down 3 flights of stairs to tell him.”

Who?

The “him” turned out to be some boy she had an affair with that summer. Now he owned the hotel. Why did she stay here? What reason did he have for keeping her around or did she have for not leaving? Who was punishing whom? I couldn’t get her to answer those questions directly.

Another strange thing was that there was no phone in her room. Where did she answer these phone calls for “him?”

When the old woman was tired of answering questions she pulled up the window shade and revealed this huge beautiful green golf course he’d built. “That’s all new. It’s his too. But I’ve never been there.”

I couldn’t figure out how she got stuck there, like she was stuck in time and unable to change.

Nightmare #32 – Appliances Amok

Posted on by
Reply

(Female, early 20′s) I was visiting a friend, an actual person I knew in high school but I guess we were supposed to be friends now. We were at her place and we decided to watch TV. After a little while, cockroaches started to pour out of the TV. She apologized saying that usually the place is pretty clean.

There was also this guy there who was never really introduced to me. He was in the bathroom and he dropped something. Before it could hit the ground, the toilet sucked had sucked it up and swallowed it. The guy was confused but he stood a little too close to the toilet for a little too long and then HE was sucked down the toilet too. All of him. Gone.

About that time we realized that all the appliances in the apartment were going on a rampage. The computer printer for instance had slices of meat feeding into it like a paper shredder, only they weren’t coming out the other side. It was devouring them. We noticed many little objects gone, presumably swallowed by the appliances. My friend said “Gather up your valuables and let’s get out of here.” So I started looking for my jewelry – like I have jewelry – and I say “I can’t find my engagement ring.” And my friend says “I didn’t know you were engaged.” And I said “I’m not, but I’m engaged to be engaged.” And my friend said “And you’ve got a ring for that?” And I said “I guess I don’t.” So then we started running down the street away from this apartment.

Nightmare #26 – Monstrous Bees

Posted on by
Reply

(Male, mid-40′s) This dream was like a movie, a post-apocalyptic / giant monster movie. I was one of a handful of survivors. We were all more or less trapped inside this one house. It was a relatively large house but still there were probably about a dozen of us. And for some reason, everyone — at least everyone other than me was stupid, doing things that were incredibly dangerous considering our situation. I suppose that’s a lot like a movie too.

The dream took place in the near future where bees had taken over the world at least all of it we could see. And by bees I mean bees that had probably 4 foot wingspan and were intelligent. The bees were able somehow to plant crops. They had planted every square inch of soil for miles around this house with sun flowers. The sunflowers grew right up to the walls of the house, right beside the road and the sidewalk. They were every where. Miles and miles of bright yellow flowers. But the sunflowers short and weren’t tall enough to hide humans if we went outside. And of course everyone wanted to go outside.

For some reason, our big project was to try to scoop up some of these sunflowers and bring them inside and get them to grow in the bathtub. (Did I mention that everyone seemed stupid? I thought this was a stupid goal even in the dream but I wasn’t able to convince anyone of that.) One guy went outside and tried carrying in a sunflower, which seems to be very fragile which meant you had to move very slowly, and of course he was attacked and stung to death.

I awoke as we were organizing a party, including lookouts to keep watching the skies.

Nightmare #20 – Scraping, scratching

Posted on by
Reply

(Male, 40′s) I was alone in the house. It was dark and I was watching TV in the living room. The layout of our house is that there’s a living room at the front of the house then an archway leading to a dining room and a doorway leading to the kitchen. All three rooms are in a row so you could see into the kitchen from the living room. The dining room and kitchen were dark, probably the only light on was coming from the TV. I started hearing scratching coming from the kitchen. Just every now and then. I knew that there was no one else there, no people, no pets. I ignored the sound. Then the sound got more regular, a scraping, scratching sound. Still I watched TV. Eventually the sound turned into a constant scraping and I looked and squinted and tried to see what was going on.

There were branches slowly being pushed into the kitchen from just beyond my line of sight. There were branches, and paper and trash. Something was pushing all of this stuff slowly into the kitchen. I didn’t want to go back there and confront it directly but I wanted to know what was going on so I went out the front door. I switched on the light and looked down the side of the house. I couldn’t see what was pushing the stuff inside but there was a huge white wolf. Gleaming white. Larger than a Labrador. It bared its teeth at me and snarled silently, menacingly. I tried to move, whether to get away or investigate I don’t know but every move I made, the wolf countered and continued to threaten.