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Nightmares

Nightmare #349: Deadly Jailbreak

Jail cells at the Southborough Police Station. Photo by my_southborough. Used under the Creative Commons License.
Jail cells at the Southborough Police Station. Photo by my_southborough. Used under the Creative Commons License.

(Male, 50’s) Just a dark and sad dream. I woke up really shaken so who’s to say this wasn’t a nightmare. I was on a 5-person team, and one of the guys was someone I used to work with at an old job. He was a good guy, creative, diligent, exactly the kind of guy I’d choose to bring along on whatever task we were supposed to perform. It was night, really late at night, maybe 3:00 AM, and we were in the courtyard of a stone building, just inside a tall stone fence that surrounded a large activity yard. It felt kind of like a prison. We weren’t supposed to be there. My job was to circumvent a computer-based lock, but the trick I used was a long metal rod, a mechanical exploit that bypassed all the fancy electrics. I felt pretty proud of the idea. We five were supposed to wait outside until something happened. We’d know it when we saw it. I leaned against the fence and started scribbling notes for a poem I was writing. Yes, I know that’s crazy, but I was writing a poem in my dream. If I had started writing down the dream earlier, I bet I could have remembered what it was about too. I remember that I was worried I wouldn’t be able to read my hand-writing because it was so dark. I looked up from my little black notebook and found the other guys on my team were gone. I was worried that I’d missed the cue.

Just then dozens of men in work shirts and khakis started filing up out of this building in a big hurry. The building was one story tall so the sense I had was that these guys were coming up from rooms underground. Maybe they were prisoners. Maybe factory workers though they “felt” like tough and clever guys, equal parts Marines and engineers. They ran down this corridor then out to the street where there were a lot of cars parked. Each guy knew which car he was heading to. They were rather strange vehicles by the way, half panel truck and half station wagon, weird looking with no windows. Each car could fit maybe 10 guys. I panicked because I thought we were going to take a helicopter out of here. I hadn’t expected cars and didn’t know what to do. I grabbed one of the guys running past me and he said to come along, that they’d find room for me. But there wasn’t any room for me in any of the wagons. I knew it was just a minute or two until the sirens would ring, and I’d be caught. The wagon-cars started racing down the road and I tried to run along behind them. I kept up pretty well.

It was a residential city neighborhood and I watched the car I was going to get in drive away down a street, only to hear it shot full of holes by machine guns. I thought that was pretty crazy, shooting machine guns in a residential neighborhood but there was no chance anyone survived. I ran the other way. I started to like my odds, figuring I could escape through the residential brownstones to escape the trigger-happy officials who were hunting us down. Worse case, I could go back to the woods that were across from the stone building we’d broken into. I’d be safe so long as they didn’t send out dogs. And just then I ran into two motion-sensor machine guns that had been positioned at an intersection. Who the hell puts motion-sensor controlled machine guns at a residential intersection? They pinned me down with crossfire and I couldn’t move, though I didn’t have the sense that I was hit. I hid behind a leafless bush, just some bare branches, trying hard not to move but totally exposed if the murderous officials came looking. It started to dawn on me that no one lived in this neighborhood, that maybe no one lived anywhere anymore. Those may have been the last humans living anywhere, those guys living underground. I hoped at least some of them escaped. Whatever set up those mechanized machine guns to strafe an intersection wasn’t interested in keeping a neighborhood safe. They would only be satisfied by killing every single one of us.

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Nightmares

Nightmare #316 – Interview Gone Wrong

(Male, 30’s) I was in a strange town for a job interview. I had just come in that morning and planned to head home that night if I didn’t get the job. I went to the building where the interview was supposed to take place, but it wasn’t an office. It was a parking structure as tall as a skyscraper. I started walking up, floor after floor. It was inhabited by street people. In the parking spaces, instead of cars, there was waiting room furniture: chairs, end tables, lamps that didn’t turn on. I could hear the sound of cars echoing through the cement walls but I guess the commuters had learned to park on other floors. Almost every seat was occupied with someone squatting with all their belongings in a garbage bag at their feet. Everyone wore too many layers of clothes, like a couple wool knit hats and several coats. I found a seat that wasn’t occupied and sat down.

Then I realized I had brought with me a couple strange items. One was an old brown comforter that I used to keep on my bed. I loved that comforter, as I recall. I don’t know whatever happened to it. I also had with me a leather briefcase, nicer and bigger than the one I own in real life. I had no idea what was in it. When I got up to leave, the comforter was gone. I felt a deep sense of loss but decided to let it go, decided not to hunt around finding it. I held onto that odd briefcase extra tightly though, so it wouldn’t disappear.

The homeless folks knew how to create some extremely powerful explosive. Occasionally for entertainment, it seems, they pour a bit of it into the gas tanks of the fancy racecars that are parked in the parking structure. These were not normal cars but rather were the very expensive racecars that folks watch on TV going around and around on oval tracks. When this explosive was added to their gas tanks, eventually they’d explode into a huge fireball. There wasn’t much concern from anyone about this. The commuters in their racecars seemed mostly just annoyed by the delays, not concerned about the carnage and destruction.

I started walking down the concrete staircase. I heard a roar from a few floors down. A whole stampede of commuters were heading up to their cars. I was likely going to be crushed underneath their feet. I looped my arms around one of the railings and hoped I could hold on. Then I realized I had a whole test tube full of that weird highly explosive liquid. It slipped from my fingers and fell, down, down, flight after flight of stairs until it hit on the ground floor.

It exploded with an earth shattering groan. Screams from thousands of voices, maybe more. I woke up.

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Nightmares

Nightmare #313 – The Lincoln Log Killer

(Male, 30’s) I haven’t had a scary dream in ages but this one really shook me up. I was alone in my house and I knew I wasn’t alone. I could hear someone upstairs, probably several people. They made the sound of Lincoln Logs being thrown together. Lincoln Logs were a toy I had as a kid, basically notched wooden sticks that you could build log cabins. I don’t know where I got them because they were a lot older than I was. But they had this really distinctive “tonk” sound, like tiny wooden logs, a little bit like a wind chime. Did I mention that I knew the people upstairs were here to kill me?

I tried calling the police but only got an answering machine. Then I realized I could just run out the front door. A strange thing happened then because I was outside the house where I grew up, not the one where I live now. And I was still carrying the phone, or at least the receiver of the phone. It didn’t matter how far down the street I ran, I could still hear the sound of those Lincoln Logs rattling around.

Then I was back in the house. I tried calling again and I just hit the answering machine. I had a message from my wife and daughter who for some reason were out of the country at a LAN party. And there was a message from the police saying they’d caught the people who’d stolen my bike (or was it my motorcycle?) they were only able to identify it from the serial number. They couldn’t give it back because they were still identifying the fingerprints and body parts (!!) they’d found with it but they listed out the names of the four people they’d apprehended. I then realized that there must be four people upstairs coming to kill me since they were mad I went to the police about the stolen motorcycle. Or something like that. I tried to escape the house again…

And I woke up terrified and for the first couple seconds even after I was awake I still heard those Lincoln Logs rattling.

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Nightmares

Nightmare #304 – Murder!

(Male, 30’s) All throughout my dreams last night, I kept coming across a murderer. He wasn’t always trying to kill me, though he was always threatening me – sometimes I saw him while he was either preparing to kill someone else, or disposing of the body. Once, I was at a funeral and at a certain point in the middle of a conversation with the mourners, I realized that this person must have been killed by the murderer. Another time, I came across him as he was speaking with someone who I later realized he was stalking. Another time I saw him driving a truck down a long winding mountain highway. He looked me right in the eyes and I was chilled to the core. He had another body with him and he was daring me to do something about it. I’d be next.

The most interesting thing about this dream is that it wasn’t primarily about the murderer. He was just a recurrent though highly disturbing character. And actually, if I had to physically describe the murderer, he looked different each time I saw him on a purely physical level. But he was in fact, the same guy, if not just the same malevolent force.

Eventually, he started stalking me. I was home in a house that isn’t actually my house. It was dark outside. A motion sensor light turned on in the back yard. I knew it was him. He was back there but I couldn’t see him. There were the reflective circles of a half dozen creatures out there, staring back at me – racoons, possum maybe. I couldn’t see their outlines, only their eyes. I knew that they could see me and see the murderer and they didn’t care if I was about to be murdered. I flipped on another light but couldn’t see him any better.

I was waiting for a bus. All the newspaper boxes had run out of local papers, which disturbed the other people waiting for the bus. I realized that I was standing in front of the factory where the murderer worked. I could confront him and turn the tables. It was a big brick building. I had to walk around it to find a door. I passed by a large window. Inside, I saw the murderer acting out his next murder. He held an absurdly large piece of glass as if it was an ax. He shouted “I’m going to kill you like this” and he waved the glass shard around and around like he was stabbing someone. Then the murderer saw me and he ran at the window. I stepped back, both the window and the glass shattered but I was unhurt. I pursued him around to a loading dock where there were other workers.

I finally got a good look at the murderer. His most disturbing feature was a poorly trimmed mustache. Half of it was cut extremely close while the other half was bushy. It looked like it had been hacked at with a knife. The workers were being called in for a staff meeting. I stretched my finger out at the murderer, accusingly. He was angry, viciously angry but he was broken, exhausted. I was extorting him to be good, to stop murdering people, to stop stalking me. He agreed.

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Nightmares

Nightmare #297 – Zombie U

(Female, 40’s) I’ve been watching *Lost* on dvd so maybe that’s what brought on this dream about a group of zombie apocalypse survivors.

My partner and I were on a camping trip in a mountainous area. We had put up our tent and were making dinner when a group of armed people came into our camp. They started asking us questions like who we were and what we were doing there. When we answered them, they seemed relieved. They explained that now they knew that we were okay. Because we could talk, we weren’t zombies. Somehow my partner and I had missed the news reports that there was a zombie outbreak in this place. We weren’t safe in the woods, they said, so those people led us out of the mountains and back into town.

The town had a large university campus, and most of the survivors had moved to this area, we were told. Everything looked normal, but we were not to let that fool us. Danger was everywhere and especially after dark. Zombies were fast and clever but unable to talk.

My partner and I stayed at the university. We made a few friends and got to know the area. We went out to the bars with friends in the evening. I didn’t understand how life could appear to be going along normally if there was this zombie problem. Everything looked like it was working normally: the university had classes, the electricity was on, college students were playing frisbee and getting suntans.

My view of that relative ‘safety’ changed abruptly. My partner and I were walking home from the bar with four friends and a zombie appeared. We all ran as fast as we could. Someone fell down, and someone ran back to help him, hitting the zombie with a shovel. Then we all ran into a house and collapsed in the chairs and on the floor, gasping and trying to catch our breath. We looked at the friend who fell. “Are you alright?” someone asked him. He just nodded, out of breath. We should have been worried at that point, but we weren’t paying attention.

My partner and I went into the kitchen for a drink of water and so did two of the others, leaving the falling down guy and another guy alone in the living room. When we came back into the room, we realized our mistake. Both of them were silent, staring at us, hungry-looking.

We had been told that zombies couldn’t talk, but no one had told me they could communicate. As we watched, one guy’s head turned into a gray wavering smokey head sitting on his shoulders, and the other guy opened his mouth wide and inhaled this entire head, nodding like he understood. He exhaled the smoke, and the head materialized like normal. Then the second guy’s head turned into the same kind of gray wavering smoke, and the first breathed him in. This was how the zombies communicated. If we hadn’t been so utterly fascinated, we would have hauled our asses out of there, but we survivors just stood there watching.

When the zombies turned toward us and started to advance, we scrambled out of the house, pulling the door shut and holding it. “Hurry! Get the fire department!” the guys holding the door shut told me. The fire department would come and set the house on fire. That was a change, right? But it was the only way to deal with zombies.

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Nightmares

Nightmare #295 – Armed Panic

(Male, 50’s) This happened at the end of a pretty normal, pretty boring dream. It was everyday life. I lived in a very old house, wood clapboards, gray paint, white trim, on a tree lined street with lots of bushes in the yard, the way people used to have yards full of plants and flowers and not much lawn. The houses were pretty close together like an old city. I was just sitting and something caught my eye outside the window. There were dozens of people running through the yard. They were scared of something and they were all fleeing the direction of down town. Some of them stopped running long enough to look behind but then they kept running. Clearly something was up.

I went outside and found things generally quiet. The first wave of panicked crowds had passed. Neighbors were on their porch but no one seemed to know what was going on. I looked next door and saw my son and daughter in law and I knew they didn’t know there was trouble. I entered their house and asked if they still had a shotgun. My son said he thought so but it would be in the attic. I offered to get it. I had to climb up a ladder that was built into a window. There was no actual entryway to the attic – I had to push my head through the ceiling. But the room upstairs was fully furnished, fully finished with hardwood floor (How did I force my way through that?) It was a baby’s room though my grand-daughter wasn’t there at all – and actually she’s a lot older than the age of the child this room was meant for. Leaning up against the wall – next to the crib! – was a shotgun.

I brought the firearm down to the first floor and went out on the porch again. There were more people in the streets. Everyone was tense and concerned but no one really knew what was going on. Agitation was rising. There was a team from the local hardware coming around and handing out weapons. The weapons looked like modified weed-whackers, like they wouldn’t do anything more than irritate a monster. He said he’d put it on my tab if I ended up having to use it. I asked him if he knew what we were up against, if he knew what was terrorizing the town.

“Not a clue,” he said.

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Nightmares

Nightmare #291 – Motorcycle Gang Chase

(Male, 40’s) I haven’t ridden a motorcycle in years but in this dream – no, it was a nightmare – I was on my old cycle. Except it wasn’t my bike. It had turned brown and it had shrunk. My bike used to be an old Touring model Harley, a big bike but the one in my dream was smaller than a Sportster. And it was in rather fragile condition too. The clutch wasn’t holding and it had extremely erratic acceleration. Which meant that I couldn’t exactly predict how fast I could be moving at any given instant. But still this was “my” bike. I was coaxing this thing along.

I was in the neighborhood where I grew up, riding along a street a couple blocks away from where I lived. Everything was dark. My bike was oddly silent which is particularly strange for a Harley. I used to love the sound of it, the way it vibrated in my chest. I took a right turn onto a divided highway. I thought I had plenty of time to turn out into traffic but the bike just stalled. It sort of glided, moving of its own accord regardless of how I tried to make it go faster.

Then all of a sudden I was in the midst of a motorcycle club. I didn’t recognize them but they didn’t lok friendly. They were riding real motorcycles, tuned and precise, not like this withered piece of junk I was pushing along. They were swarming around me, up to no good. I had no club affiliation so I wasn’t wearing any colors but then again, I had no protection from a club either. I wanted to get away from them but I also didn’t want to antagonize them either. The road had turned to dry dirt, like a wide motocross track with huge hills. I was never good on that kind of surface. I skidded around like a maniac oly barely able to keep from hitting these other bikers. I was able to get my bike going in the opposite direction from them and I thought just maybe they’d continue on where they were headed and let me go.

But then two of them started to follow me. One came up on my right and the last thing I remember was that my bike veered off so I cut this guy off and he started to go down. I figured I was finished.

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Nightmares

Nightmare #287 – Vampire Orgy

“…Something wasn’t right…”

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Nightmares

Nightmare #286 – Blindside Bus Driver

“…from where I was sitting, I couldn’t see anything …”

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Nightmares

Nightmare #268 – Toil, a Demon, Vampires and Wizards

“…I resumed my dream job which was taking apart greasy filthy machinery in order to salvage their screws, which is only slightly more demeaning than the job I do during my waking life…”

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Nightmares

Nightmare#267 – A Shining City Full of Decay

“…Nothing was happening here at all. It was a cultural low pressure zone…”

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Nightmares

Nightmare #264 – Awful Gray Buildings

“…The effect was absolutely sinister. With every step my good mood dissipated…”

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Nightmares

Nightmare #260 – Zombie Kill DIY

“…they hurried after me and got in too before the doors closed…”

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Nightmares

Nightmare #254 – Hunted Down

heard them coming up behind, on either side;

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Nightmares

Nightmare #253 – Secret Agent Shoot-out

“…This was somehow supposed to comfort the general populace…”

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Nightmares

Nightmare #248 – Bumper Tag

“…We weren’t playing anymore…”

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Nightmares

Nightmare #246 – Giant Spider Hay-Ride

…”Do NOT look the spider directly in the eyes.”…

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Nightmares

Nightmare #243 – The Neighborhood of Cages

“…The street was a maze of barbed wire….”

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Nightmares

Nightmare #237 – Party Gone Wrong

(Male, 30’s) I was with a group of friends, not people I actually know but within the dream, we were friends. We were tight, almost a gang. A half dozen or so. Maybe a few more. We were living inside an abandoned warehouse.

At one point, we were sitting around an old wooden table. There was an empty plate sitting in the middle of the table and then this strange whistling sound started. It’s like it was coming from the plate somehow. We picked it up and found there was a current of air coming from a hole in the floor, like a heating duct or something and that was making the edges of the plate ring like a bell.

“…these two were ritually murdering gang member for some kind of black magic…”

It was night. Actually it was night all the way through this dream but it came time to go to sleep. We had lit a fire on the dirt floor of the warehouse but it had pretty much died out. I tried to get it going again so we wouldn’t be cold. It was almost entirely burnt out. There were just a few very tiny embers buried in this large mound of ash. I sifted through it, trying to find these tiny embers since I hoped I could find enough to kindle a fire. Instead, I found a set of keys. The keyring was brass and had a stylized portrait of Saint Francis on it. It sifted through the ash and found more sets of keys. I knew immediately that these each belonged to former gang members who’d been murdered.

Just then, two of the other members, that is, two of my friends pulled out huge hunting knives and started toward me. I had discovered their secret. I had a knife too but there were two of them. I slowly edged around, trying to keep an eye on both of them while trying to exit and run off into the night. For some reason I knew that these two were ritually murdering gang members for some kind of black magic or something. I was climbing up on a stack of boxes which would have put me closer to a an open window when I woke up.

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Nightmares

Nightmare #233 – The Shrinking City

(Female, 40’s) This was a weird dream, with very slow-moving action taking place over what felt like a long time. I was in a city, with all the survivors. Outside the city were the zombies. They were the old-fashioned slow-moving kind. There was a big fence around the entire city keeping the zombies outside. We survivors on the inside felt rather smug.

“…the people you knew were slowly disappearing too…”

But the problem was that the city was getting a little smaller every day. The zombies would manage to break through in one spot and take over a building and kill all the people in it. Then we would move the fence in and life would go on. The people you knew were slowly disappearing too. Near the end of the dream, we were down to about a dozen buildings and maybe only 100 survivors.

Then I walked into a room where there were 3 or 4 people down on the floor. “Are they zombies?” I asked someone. Then I realized that no, they were survivors like me. They were down on their hands and knees eating the carpet, because it was all that was left to eat.

Things were looking pretty grim.