Tag Archives: urban horror

Nightmare #304 – Murder!

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(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.

Nightmare #297 – Zombie U

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(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.

Nightmare #295 – Armed Panic

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(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.

Nightmare #291 – Motorcycle Gang Chase

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(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.

Nightmare #237 – Party Gone Wrong

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(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.

Nightmare #233 – The Shrinking City

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(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.

Nightmare #231 – Zombie Skunk

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(Male, 30′s) This nightmare I had kind of cracks me up when I write it down but there was nothing funny about it at the time. I’m almost embarrassed by how silly it sounds.

“…Seemed a pretty awful situation. …”

I was in the house where I grew up, a place I haven’t even seen in like 10 years. There were people on the front lawn who were doing something. I went out there to yell at them. They were painting the countertop of their kitchen cabinets. The paint was this hideous green, like a yellow green, a color from a 70′s rental property. I told them to get lost. And then there was a policeman who told me they’d be OK. See, their landlord was kicking them out because the building was being foreclosed and soon to be demolished so they were down on their luck. I asked the cop what was with the countertop and he said that the landlord was making them fix up the place or they’d lose their security deposit. Seemed a pretty awful situation.

I looked around the neighborhood and it was a decaying, urban nightmare. There were multi-story buildings that looked like they’d been bombed. Whole walls were missing, not just the windows which were all smashed out. The cop and I walked around a bit and there was just block after block of wasteland, tall buildings ready to collapse under their own weight.

“…”…It was a zombie. And it was a skunk. How much worse can you get from that!…”…”

That’s when we saw the skunk. It jumped out at the cop and started running for him like it wanted to bite him. The skunk was sealed in a plastic bag and chunks of its flesh were falling off. The cop was stupid, just standing there but I knew to start running away immediately. I knew somehow that this skunk was infected with the zombie plague, probably the same kind of epidemic that was causing the whole world to go to hell. The scientists has sealed it in a plastic bag to keep it safe because in this future skunks were an endangered specie. They were trying to protect the genetic material even though it was sick, er, I guess, dead. It was a zombie. And it was a skunk. How much worse can you get from that!

So I started running because I was afraid of what would happen when the cop turned to a zombie. Every pile of rubble I passed seemed to have another zombie creature creeping out of it. Possums, squirrels, a mangy old cat. I was just running and running, hopping over piles of rubble trying to get away and the terror was all around me.

Nightmare #230 – Shot AGAIN

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(Male, 40′s) Twice this week, I’ve had dreams that involved being shot or nearly shot with a handgun. I have woken up with my heart just pounding. The second one wasn’t very remarkable apart from getting shot – I should probably mention that I don’t own a handgun and I’ve never been shot, nor is it one of my great fears.

However.

“…I get him to put the knife down…”

In the first nightmare, I am visiting my grandmother’s house, a grandmother who’s been dead for decades now. Her house was never in a great part of town and it’s only gotten worse, like far worse over time. I am responsible for cleaning out her stuff, all her furniture and belongings. When I go to the door my daughter greets me and I’m a little shocked that she’s there and not at college. I ask her if she’s alone in the house and she says no. And then I ask if she’s safe. She shakes her head like she’s answering a different question, “Oh Daddy, it’s not like that at all.” I ask her to go and wait outside with her mom in the car. I enter the house and the first thing I notice is that there is a huge whole in one wall like someone has driven a car into it. And there’s a man with a knife. I ask him if he’s OK. I offer to get him some food. I get him to put the knife down. I explain that I’ve got to get rid of the stuff in the house. And he starts acting as if it all belongs to him simply because he’s in the house. I simply reach over and take the knife from where he’s set it down and I throw it behind me because in a fair fight I’m pretty sure I could take this guy. “No, you don’t own any of this stuff and you better get moving before I call the cops.” He says he’s got a gun in his pocket, which I think is pretty unlikely but I don’t want to take the chance so I jump him. We wrestle. He’s trying to get his hand in his pocket. I keep hitting him, trying to knock him out. All of a sudden a shot is fired. I don’t hear it as much as I feel it shooting straight through my heart. It felt more like I was getting an electric shock. I woke up with my heart simply racing, pounding hard like I actually had been in a fight.

Nightmare #224 – Workplace Panic

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“…As I kept talking, my voice started to fail. I was unable to make any words, just the honks and squeaks that might come out of a saxophone…”

(Male, 40′s) To my knowledge I’ve never had an actual “panic attack” but those are exactly the words I’d use to describe this terrifying dream I had the other night. I was at work talking with a co-worker in the hallway of an unfamiliar building. She was explaining how the IT department, that is, our department were entirely unable to manage certain key attributes of the computers we’d deployed just last spring. As I asked more questions about what that actually meant, I learned that the computers couldn’t communicate on the network, though there would be no error given to suggest the attempt didn’t succeed, and what’s even better, these computers couldn’t reliably be counted upon even to save data to their own hard drives. Again, no error message would be given. My co-worker was telling me all of this in a matter-of-fact, world-weary sort of way, I gather the same way that we were supposed to inform the users. But I started going crazy. I couldn’t believe the callous attitude. I also couldn’t believe that there hadn’t been daily if not weekly memos from the IT director warning the users that, basically, none of the work they were performing was safe in any way. As I kept talking, my voice started to fail. I was unable to make any words, just the honks and squeaks that might come out of a saxophone if you didn’t know how to play it. My direct manager had been listening in but at some point, she had wandered off and this frustrated me because she needed to hear about these problems.

At this point, I found it impossible to stand still anymore so I just walked off down the hall. It was an unfamiliar, one-story building with offices that looked like elementary school classrooms. I was trying to find my cell phone. Inside these offices were large desks that were covered in construction paper, safety scissors (remember those? the kind with blunt tips so students couldn’t stab each other?) pots of that sticky white glue like they used to have in kindergarten… all this stuff on the surface of these executive’s desks. I needed to find my cell phone because I could tell there was a conversation I needed to be a part of. I could “hear” part of it when I held a can of spray paint. But it was white paint. I needed to find a spray can of black paint because I needed to spray paint my hair black. I started just running up and down this hallway, looking into similar offices, entirely unable to relax. I grabbed onto the can of spray paint tighter and tighter until my muscles were shaking. It was horrible.

Boy am I glad there’s a weekend coming up.