(Female, middle-aged) It was so scary and so sad. The dream was one of those visions where I could only see things; I couldn’t interact or stop them.

…I couldn’t stop them…

There was a woman, blond, slender, relatively young. She had five small children of different ages. She wanted to go out or do something that wouldn’t have been possible with them so she handed them each a clear plastic bag and told them to crawl inside. The children were all very obedient and they did as they were told even though a couple of them said they were scared and started to cry. She told them they could poke a little hole in the bag but not too big. It was clear she wanted them all to suffocate.

Then the dream just faded.

You’re asleep. Dreaming. And you become aware that there is no air getting into your lungs. You try harder to decompress your chest but nothing works. You’re suffocating. You force yourself up, up, up through the layers of sleep, like a diver rising quickly too quickly toward the surface, aching for breath. Once awake enough to control your body again, you sit up quickly in bed, your chest heaving, forcing air into your lungs. Your heart hammers inside your chest. Perhaps a bit of vomit has begun to rise at the back of your throat. You sit on the edge of your bed, panting, confused as to when and where you are, peering into the dark room. Eventually you are able to breath regularly. The alarm clock tells you it’s still the middle of the night, that there are hours until morning. Adrenaline disapates and you feel the weariness of your body again. Do you go back to sleep and risk another terrifying incident of apnea, of premature burial, of nocturnal suffocation? Or do you choose to haunt your house yet another night, to surrender to insomnia and drift from room to room ’til dawn? Apnea seems more likely to strike following days when you’ve worked hard physically, on nights when you most need a deep rejuvenating sleep.

You’ve always snored but in recent years, you’ve been told it’s gotten worse. You find it hard to find a position to fall asleep in. You haven’t slept on your back in years; your throat closes off immediately. There’s one position, on your side, propped up with a pillow that allows sleep. All others are uncomfortable. Your body has become picky, peculiar about sleep, as finicky as an elderly cat that sniffs its bowl of food disdainfully before forcing down a couple mouthfuls.

Perhaps the treatments for apnea seem intrusive. Losing weight is recommended. Excess fat around the neck – that double chin – contribute to night time strangulation. But you’ve tried losing weight before and it keeps returning. There are also other treatments, masks that retain enough air pressure so that your passageways don’t collapse. But regardless of how much you read about them, the idea of wearing something on your face is sickening, terrifying. Yet another thing to get in the way of breath. An inanimate hand clamped around your face.

When you were younger, you joked with your friends about decadent rock stars who choked to death on their own vomit. Now, you think differently about those stories.

And this is the nightmare. It’s not one you wake from. It’s one you carry all day, every exhausted day, each horrified night. Sometimes it recedes, hides but the threat of night suffocation is always there.

(Male, 30′s) There were these brick lined hallways. Normal red brick and mortar. It was in the basement of some building. Perhaps they were used for ventilation because I’ve seen ventilation tunnels like that. I couldn’t find an exit. Everything was dark. Then there was a green gas. It glowed slightly. It floated up and stayed right in the middle of the hallways so I couldn’t move down the hallways without breathing some of it. It was poisonous. I got on my knees and continued moving though I still didn’t know what way to go. The poison was making me weaker even though I tried to breathe where there was less of the gas. When I was lying flat on the ground, I saw a three figures cross the hallway in front of me. They floated or glided though it looked like they were walking. They were glowing silver like space aliens. One was taller than the other two and I think it was their mother. They floated right by me like they didn’t care that I was dying.

(Male, early 40′s) I was at work but the building at work was half shopping mall, half military complex. The walls were all dreary cinderblock and the floorplan was a no nonsense labyrinth of corridors probably 15 feet wide. But every now and then you’d turn a corner and there’d be a picture window looking out on the mountains. It was some kind of research facility and maybe a dozen of us worked there but none of us seemed to know the layout of the building very well. The nightmare part started when a huge avalanche of ice pounded down on the facility from the mountains that surrounded us. It was pure ice, no snow, no rock because you could still find one of those windows and look out through yard after yard of diamond shimmering ice and see the mountains out there. We knew the building was pretty strong because it was made of cinderblock but we had no idea how much stress it could take, or for that matter how much ice was left to fall. The air started to feel compressed. It began to be hard to breathe. We all agreed to search the building and see what part seemed to have the least ice so we could begin tunneling out there. One of us, a woman, young, slender with long brown hair, in a mousy brown skirt and white blouse discovered a set of doors that had hardly any ice in front of them. She was able to push it away just by shoving on the door and once the door was open, she panicked. Across the parking lot , she could see some kind of fast food restaurant. She ran over to it, letting the door close and lock behind her, forgetting all about us trapped inside.

(Female, early 40′s) A powerful secret group was taking over the world in a very Big Brother sort of way. I was rounded up with a group of people who were “recruited” to join, although we didn’t have any choice. We were taken to this huge warehouse structure and held there. There were guards with us all the time and we were marched between the living quarters, and the mess hall, and the exercise yard. We were captives, but they gave each of us a small fluffy pet, this weird little creature like a cross between a tribble (you know those little guinea pig creatures from Star Trek!) and a yarn pompom. We suspected that they were going to try to drug us, so we refused to eat anything. Yet, one by one, people started giving in and joining them. I couldn’t figure out why. Then I realized that the cute cuddly “pets” we were being given were part of the brainwashing process. I pushed mine to the ground and all the pets suddenly swarmed me! I knocked at them with my hands, but they were shedding fibers on my clothes and hands and face and lips. I couldn’t get away from them.

(Female, 80′s) I was in a small room, maybe in a dormitory or an apartment and this immense dog was there sitting on top of me. It was brown and had a droopy jowly face. It was overwhelming me, smothering me. It held me down and made it impossible for me to breathe. I was suffocating and found that I couldn’t even call for help.

When I woke, I discovered that a pillow had fallen over my face. Maybe that’s what it all was.