(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.

(Male, 30’s) The weather around here has been crazy hot and humid the last couple days. That’s the only explanation I have for these couple nightmares. I sent them in together because they’re not too much on their own.

First Nightmare: I’m on a roller coaster, sort of. It’s also sort of like public transportation because it travels on city streets, just a little bit too high so the sides of the car are whipped by the tree branches. All the passengers are locked into our seats by a metal bar that locks down across our bellies. And everything is super hot, made even hotter by the costumes we have to wear. Yup, to ride on this trolly or streetcar or roller coaster you have to wear one of those full body, furry team mascot kind of costumes. They actually lock the head piece on top of the costume so you can’t take it off until the end of the ride. You can only see through these round holes in the side of this head. There’s no breeze and very little air getting inside too. So there’s this whole car of people dressed up like life sized teddy bears. I got through the ride – I don’t like roller coasters because I get nauseous pretty easily – and I get unlocked from the trolley car but I still have to stand around waiting to get out of the teddy bear costume. In the heat and the dark, I finally start to feel myself pass out and I’m terrified I’m just going to suffocate.

Second Nightmare: I’m at home and it’s evening. But instead of everything getting dark, the whole neighborhood is getting flooded. Like instead of darkness, there’s water. It’s warm, like skin temperature so it’s not shocking but it’s also not refreshing either. And it’s kind of invisible so I’m not really certain how deep the water is. I find it rather hard to breathe. Everyone else is gone inside and they all highly suggest that I do too before the bugs come out. The first thing I see that looks like a “bug” is something I take for a crawfish but it’s over a foot long. It’s flexing it’s tail and as I watch it, there are suddenly two of them, and then three of them. All this time, I feel like I’m getting bitten by mosquitos. I look down at my arm though and I see that I’m being attacked by tropical fish, like the kind that people keep in fish bowls except these fish are huge, like the size of a dinner plate. As I look around there are lots of things around me. The water must be as high as the tree tops now because there are weird creatures swimming around at least that high. I’m a little scared but since I’m standing on my front porch I’m not panicking too bad yet. Then I see some kind of a flat worm that’s bigger than I am. It’s translucent brown and it keeps appearing and disappearing, each time getting closer. It looks really scary, like if it bit me, it’d take a big chunk. I started pounding on the door but now no one inside seems to be able to hear me. And once I started to panic, I also started finding it hard to breathe again so even if I survived being attacked by the brown worm, I still would likely drown in this weird, warm water.

(Male, 50’s) In the interests of full disclosure, I should admit that I bought a motorcycle a couple years back in the midst of mid-life crisis and that within the last week as it came time to winterize the thing, I’d been angry with myself that another season had passed and I hadn’t really gotten out on it.

I was with my wife and a female friend and we were crossing a parking lot, heading into a bar when this group of about a dozen motorcycle riders over took us. I started defending the women who were able to get away. This didn’t particularly make the hooligans mad. They just started messing with me instead.

This was a relatively outlandish group of motorcyclists really. Their bikes were all American made and chopped like very classic examples of the style. And by classic I mean original 40’s and 50’s era chopped bikes, simple, basic, with a few bits of chromed flair. And the guys themselves were straight out of a time capsule too, or at least they looked like they were trying to be. They had greased hair with big curls on the top. I bet there’s a word for that. They didn’t wear the bomber style jackets but rather something that looked more like a suit coat jacket that was made out of riding quality leather. They were a riding club – The Rockets – which actually, as I remember it now used to be a local band I really enjoyed back in the 70’s.

The Rockets pushed me around with a detached, ironic sort of torture, like a cat playing with a mouse, that bats it around between its paws. One of them had a package of metal “rockets” that sort of looked like those toys from back in the day that you could put a “cap” in and then toss up in the air and when it landed the cap would go off with a loud pop. Anyway, one of the gang members had a package of these, still on the cardboard like he’d bought it at a retro boutique or something. He took them off the card one by one and shoved them in my mouth til I was choking. I think this was some kind of a test of something to see if I’d choke or vomit. All the while they were laughing and joking while I was trying to keep from suffocating.

(Male, 50’s) This nightmare woke me up out of a sound sleep. I swear I was screaming, or at least trying to scream. When I woke up, I could have sworn I had just heard myself yelling out in a small, muffled voice.

In the dream, I’m at home with my wife and my daughter who must be home for the holidays or something. It’s night time and we’re getting ready to head off to bed. We’re all sitting on the couch in the living room, laughing, having a good time. Then there’s a knock on the front door. It’s really late, like the middle of the night and my wife and daughter don’t think we should answer the door. But I thought that someone must be in trouble to knock at the door so late. So I get up and I flip on the porch light to look out and see who was there. And damned if the porch light is out. So I open the door and there’s no one there. I speak out like I’m a tough guy or something and I say “OK step out where I can see you.”

And this huge man steps out of the shadows and with one or two strides, steps into the house. He’s broad and tall, like he’s just been scaled up in all dimensions. He’s got one of those cliched “bad guy” mustaches from the 40’s and he’s we’re a fedora and a trench coat like a black and white movie. He steps easily into the house and reaches out and wraps his hand cleanly around my throat. While he’s grabbing my throat, he lifts me off the ground effortlessly, with a smile. I try to yell, to scream and of course, I’m being choked so not much actual sound comes out.

I woke up trying to scream.

(Male, 40’s) This nightmare was epic length, a whole story. It took place in the distant past, thousands of years ago. I was a trainee to be a shaman or something and this was my final trial. It was sunset and the whole landscape was a reddish-brown color, burnt sienna, I think they call it. We may have traveled all day to get there. There were a few trees, small scrub-like ones but mostly this rocky, dusty red soil. As I write this down, there’s a sense that this place felt like the pictures I’ve seen of Mars.

I had no idea how much farther we were traveling but we stopped and all of a sudden I looked down and there are these carefully carved stone steps, leading down to a large closed door. I take a few things from my pack, paints and a straw. I get a good look at the other members of the party. There are probably six of us and our skin is almost identically colored to the earth around us. Everyone is bald and has several geometrically patterned tattoos.

The task is that I’m supposed to descend these steps and go through the doors into a cave where I’ll be locked in all night. Somewhere inside – I’m just supposed to “know” where – I am to draw a picture of the spirit being that will watch over me all my life… or something. Initially, I was going to take some tinder to make a fire but the elders suggest that there is only a very little oxygen in the cave so I’d better not do that. And for some reason that makes sense to me, that I’m going to draw a picture of something while I’m sealed up in a cave where I might suffocate.

The next thing I’m doing is snaking my way through this twisty, rocky cave. I think the floor is sandy though so it’s not too unpleasant to walk through which is good because the walls seem pretty rough. I can feel things – images – scraped into the walls which I figure is where other initiates have depicted their spirit creatures. I keep going in a bit further until I no longer feel the scratches but before I get my gear out, I get the sense that there is someone else in the cave with me. Maybe it’s someTHING else. The cave is completely dark but there’s something between me and the cave entrance. I can’t see it but I know that it is entirely covered in hair, thick hair, fur like a bear or a water buffalo. I can hear it breathing but I can’t see it. That’s when I woke up.

(Male) I was in a very large city that was located right beside a large body of water. Could have been Chicago, could have been New York, could have been Toronto… The city had been hit with an unprecedented winter storm, one that had gone on for weeks… months? There certainly weren’t many people left and the sense that that they’d abandoned the city or died. Survivors were able to get from building to building through underground passages. I had gone from the main building where we had set up camp to a neighboring building. I looked out through a window at a skyscraper, one of those glass windowed skyscrapers. It stood really close to the water and the spray from the water would hit the side of the building and freeze immediately. The ice built up and built up over these weeks upon weeks until there was a strange ice sculpture attached to the side of the building, almost as large as the building itself. The ice swooped out like the arms of a ghost, like the shape of the wind itself. It seemed like the weight of the ice would have the power to topple the building over soon.

I went to a different window. This one was just underneath the “snow line.” Snow had fallen so deeply that the first few floors of all buildings were submerged in snow. I looked out one of the window that was covered in snow but not too deeply. Light still got in and I was able to see shapes outside. There was someone out there! It was someone I knew, someone from work. He was laughing and it seemed like he was trying to walk along on top of the snow, unaware how dangerous this was, how unevenly packed the snow was, how he could fall through the crust on the top and suffocate. For some reason I thought I could save him. I opened the window and snow poured in the window. I estimated I was just 20 feet away from him. The snow here seemed very soft and uncompacted. I thought somehow that I could “swim” up to the surface of the snow. I jumped out of the window. I stamped my feet and compressed the snow underneath me then scraped more off above my head, gradually moving upward. But I eventually loosened too much and made my little cave unstable. Snow started to tumble down on me. It was light at first but then it trapped my legs. It got more deeply buried. It hammered into my chest, trapped my arms. I tried to thrash but I was trapped. I was suffocating.