(Male, early 30’s)

…There was no way out and nowhere really to run…

I was in a hunting lodge out in the woods. The standard log cabin kind of lodge with a big stone fireplace and everything. I was alone but it wasn’t the peaceful feeling of being alone in the woods; it was a more sinister, lonesome, vulnerable sense of being alone. Then I realized what was wrong. The animals that were mounted on the wall were alive. There were some pretty serious animals here too, like bears and cheetahs. At first I thought if I just didn’t move around very much that maybe the animals wouldn’t notice me, that maybe they wouldn’t attack me. But they did notice me. The animals started to chase me around the lodge. There was no way out and nowhere really to run.

(Female, 40’s) My teenaged daughter and I were on a trip to Toronto together. We were staying in a hotel downtown and going to attend a play in which a friend of hers from high school was performing. We were on our way to the play, which was to be held at a big church far from downtown. We got as far as standing outside the huge church, an old fashioned colonial brick-style building that was surrounded by a wide lawn spotted with huge, old trees in full fall colors. My daughter remembered that she’d left something back at the hotel, something she needed desperately, so we started on the trip back to the hotel, hurrying, because we thought that we could make it back again in time for the play.

We walked for a long while, then we took a bus, then the subway. Then we came above ground and I looked around for the streetcar stop, but everything was different. We started walking, thinking that our hotel was nearby, wandering really. We went far enough that I realized we had been heading in the opposite direction. Along the beach, we saw piles of skeletons, a stack of bare white bones on the sand, and I told my daughter that that was from last winter’s storms!!

Then I thought I knew a short cut back to our hotel. We went into a shopping center and across some walkways and made a series of turns, and suddenly we were inside a children’s hospital. I asked a nurse if there was a way out of there. She looked at us very skeptically, and pointed to an elevator. My daughter walked in, though these plastic flaps that were not like real elevator doors, and pushed a button. I jumped in as the elevator started to descend. She told me it was freight elevator, not a people elevator.

…”You really don’t want to,” she said. But I insisted…

We came out of the building in a parking lot surrounded by a fence. So we went back into the building to go out the front door. We walked a long time, down a bunch of different hallways, looking for an exit. Finally, up ahead, I saw a staircase and a woman carrying a laundry basket. We hurried to the end of the hall, which narrowed as we went. The end was covered with thick wire mesh: you could see those stairs but you couldn’t get to them. I asked the woman, “How do we get over there?” “You really don’t want to,” she said. But I insisted. So she pointed to a door.

We went through the door and we found ourselves in the basement of a house. We followed the woman up the stairs. She was the mother of the family, now widowed, and she lived in the house with her teenaged son and daughter and another daughter who was 6 or 7. The house was full of all sorts of objects; it looked like a very crowded museum.
The woman began to bring out newspaper articles and programs to show us that she was a very famous musician. We said we had to get going because of the play! But the family looked at each other and smiled. “I’m sorry but there’s no way to leave. We are all trapped here. We never can go out. The house will not let us leave. ”

I looked around. All of the windows were covered with an incredibly thick ivy. They couldn’t be opened at all. The backdoor lead down to the basement, the basement where we’d come in from the hospital basement, maybe, but the door we came through had no doorknob on the inside. I opened the front door and stepped outside. There was a
small cement porch with a short brick wall around the perimeter and a rusty wrought iron gate opening to a sidewalk. I could see the whole city from where I stood. It smelled so good to be outside. I looked over my shoulder and saw the family standing inside the door, watching me. I started walking toward the sidewalk. As I did, the
wrought iron gate reached out and grabbed me and held on. I twisted and pulled, but it wouldn’t let go. It gripped and stretched, wrestling with me, until I was panting and sweating. When I backed up, toward the porch, it let go. If I moved again toward the sidewalk, it grabbed me. I want back inside where the family and my daughter were waiting. “Do you see what we mean?”

We stood there in the hallway, trying to assess the situation. “What about food? How do you get groceries?” “Boxes of groceries get dropped off in the yard.” Their crazy claim seemed to be true. Then I saw a metal switch that I hadn’t seem before, like a built-in key that you could turn. I thought maybe that was the way out. So I turned it. A whole series of gears began spinning like I’d set an enormous machine in motion. There were these shiny columns composed
of hundreds of little gears all turning. A huge rumbling noise came up from the basement and a heavy metal drawbridge covered the front door and held it shut permanently.

(Male) Two chain link fences ran up and down this green yard. They were only probably 6 to 8 inches apart. My conscious mind figures that there must have been a property dispute. The owner on one side erected a fence where he thought the boundary was and the owner on the other side did the same. Trouble was, a nest of snakes had taken up living in this “no one’s land” between the fences.

They were relatively small snakes like garter snakes, black and there seemed to be dozens of them. For some reason I thought these were the young and that there must be larger adults still hiding in the nest. But I just didn’t know exactly where the nest was. It was my job to kill them all though. Someone considered them a deadly pest.

I climbed the fenced and eased my way down between the fences. It was extremely tight. I was wearing my steel toed boots which are a little larger than my street shoes so I had to splay my feet out to fit in the narrow area. And I started stepping on snakes. I crushed their heads with the heel or the toe of my boot. I’d kill a couple with my right foot and a couple with my left foot.

And then I lost my balance. I fell over between the fences and got myself wedged in there pretty well. I was wearing cloth gloves so they weren’t going to give me any protection. And I started to panic because I couldn’t get myself back up to a standing position and I was finding it hard to breathe as well. Just then I looked down and saw an opening in the grass. I had fallen directly on top of the snake’s nest. Inside it were two huge snakes at least as big around as my wrist with heads the size of my fist. I started to yell but I woke up.

(Female, mid 40’s) It was dark evening in this dream and I was riding my bike back to my car, which is not something I do in real life. My car was parked in a huge parking lot, like at a football stadium or the airport, and I couldn’t quite remember where I’d left it. I was biking up and down the aisles of the parking lot, watching as car upon car drove off. Soon the parking lot was nearly empty and that made it easier to find my little blue Honda, the car I really drive.

I put my bike into the trunk of the car, where it really wouldn’t fit in real life. Then I got in the car and started driving. I thought I knew which way I was going, but the streets didn’t look familiar at all. Still I kept driving, turning down different streets and trying to find my way. I turned down one street, but it turned out to be an alley running behind the backs of a row of buildings, rather than a street. I thought I would go around and come back out on the street, but the alley turned at odd angles. I turned down another alley, a narrower alley, that I thought would bring me back to the main road, but it didn’t. My only way to go was a narrower alley still, either right or left. There wasn’t room to turn around. Now the fences and doors and garages were even narrower. But I kept driving, slowly inching along. The sides of the alley were nearly touching my car on both sides, so I decided I’d better go back. I put the car in reverse and started backing up. It was so narrow that I had a hard time moving without scraping the sides of the car. Then I saw a door that looked really familiar– like it actually was the place I was going. I backed up the car far enough that I could open the door and I got out.

…”Finally!” she yelled, “finally you come but it’s too late! You are too late!”…

I opened the door to find this sort of hippie-gypsy looking room. There was draped cloth decorating the room, and incense, and lava lamps (!) I knew this place: it belonged to my step-mother! (I don’t have a step-mother in real life!) She was there, very angry, dressed like a hippie gypsy herself. “Finally!” she said, “finally you come but it’s too late! You are too late!” She was holding a baby, who was supposed to be my step-sister too. “You are too late to save her!” Then the step-mother knocked over a lava lamp, smashing it and making a little spark of fire catch on one of the shimmery draped cloths. In real-life, I know that the fire would have spread much faster than it did in this dream. She put down the baby to start more fires; she began to light matches from the incense and started dropping them around the room, laughing hysterically, like she was out-of-control crazy. I picked up the baby and carried her to the car and strapped her into her carseat in the back. Then I went back in for baby supplies. The crazy step-mother was still laughing and lighting fires. I knew I couldn’t do anything to stop her, so I left, closing the door behind me. Then I got back in the car and began to back out of the alley very slowly.

(Female, 60’s) In my dream, we were getting ready for my second daughter’s wedding. It was going to be a huge wedding — at least as big an affair as my first daughter’s wedding the year before. I wanted everything to be just perfect. Finally it was the day before the wedding and I went for the final fitting on my dress, a really lovely mother’s of the bride dress. The rest of the bridal party was also trying on their dresses for the last time before the wedding. I was in the dressing room putting on my dress. As I slipped it over my head, the dress stuck because it was suddenly way too small. I’ve always had a tendency to be overweight, but I could not believe that the dress would not fit me! I must have gained 20 pounds from when the dress had been fitted. I couldn’t get it on by myself and I couldn’t get it off. I was completely stuck! I had to call for help, and I started to cry because there was absolutely no way that I could wear that dress to the wedding! I didn’t know what I was going to do! And when the door opened everyone saw me stuck in the dress.

(When I woke up, I was in such a panic. I had to try on my dress immediately and, fortunately, the real-life dress was the right size!)

(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.