(Male, 30’s) I was trying to spend the night in what everyone thought was a haunted house. I knew deep down in my soul that there was just someone trying to scare myself and the other person who was there with me. I don’t think there was any reward involved, just the sense that if the place wasn’t really haunted that some kind of curse would be lifted, not like a supernatural curse but more like a psychological curse.

The house was dark but not entirely pitch black. We decided to try not to sleep at all that night so we just sat up awake in the dining room. The dining room opened into the living room through a large doorway but it was so dark in there that we couldn’t see what was going on in there. We could make out various whispy gray shapes moving but nothing more distinct. They shapes looked like window drapes and I for one wasn’t certain that wasn’t all they were. The guy I was with was pretty sure they were ghosts, though. There were also strange sounds coming from the other room. I thought they sounded like people knocking into the furniture as they walked around in the dark but my friend, as could be expected, thought they were ghosts. The hauntings seemed to come in waves, like there would be twenty or thirty minutes of nothing but boredom punctuated all at once by something happening. It drove my friend crazy but it just started to make me angry. I wanted to rush into the other room and catch the people in the act but my friend became hysterical at the idea of us separating. But one time, when one of these haunting assaults started, I picked up an end table and threw it into the living room. It didn’t seem to hit anything or make any difference. If anything, it just un-nerved by buddy more.

I was getting desperate to get rid of any sense of ghostly intervention, and angry and perhaps a bit scared. And this is where I literally don’t know what I was thinking in the context of the dream. I knew that there was a crack house next door, actually in the same building. The haunted house was like an attached brownstone, a brick building built into a long line of buildings. This one happened to be “haunted;” the next one happened to be a crack house. I knew that crack dealers and crack addicts could be dangerous in ways that fake ghosts and the people behind them can’t be. So the plan, I guess, to the extent that I had a plan was to alert the attention of the crack addicts next door and get them to terrify the people behind the haunting. I crawled down the staircase that connected the two parts of the building and somehow got the attention of the dope fiends. They ran out of their house and into the haunted house. The crack addicts flipped on the lights (why hadn’t WE thought to do that?) and there was gun fire going every where. I was hiding under a table with a table cloth on it. There was a guy with a semiautomatic weapon standing less than a foot away from me. For some reason, thankfully, he didn’t see me. There was yelling and shooting and eventually they just left.

That’s about where the dream ended, with no resolution. I don’t know what happened to my friend. I don’t know if we lifted the curse on the building. I don’t even know if the gun-toting crack heads killed the “ghosts.”

(Female, 40’s) I was standing washing dishes in my kitchen sink– not an unusual situation at all, unfortunately. I heard the loud zoom and roar of a car engine. I moved to the window, looking down toward the street, assuming the noise was coming from there, and suddenly this golden Porsche raced down my relatively-short driveway, going extremely fast and somewhat out of control, tires spinning in the gravel. The driver’s side of the car scraped along the side of our beautiful new garage as the driver slammed on the breaks, and the car came to an abrupt halt. I went out the backdoor of my house and approached the car, bending over to see if the driver was all right. His head lolled back and forth, like he was fighting to gain consciousness or like he was on drugs, but he didn’t appear to be hurt at all. No blood. He was glaring at me through his heavy eyelids.

I went back inside to call the police. But first I called to my son. I asked him to sneak outside and get the license plate number of the car in the yard. Then I started looking in the phone book for the phone number for the police. I thought about calling 911, but I remembered reading a public service announcement that asked us not to call 911 except for true emergencies, not for car accidents. Whatever. So I got the yellow pages and started looking for the phone number there.

Meanwhile, the driver of the golden Porsche was attempting to flee the scene of the accident. He’d turned off his car lights and was slowly backing down the driveway, careful to avoid scraping any more buildings. I went to the front door and looked around, but I couldn’t see the car any where. I asked my son if he’d gotten the license plate, but he said “No” very loudly. I felt annoyed with him — “What the heck?” Then I noticed he was winking at me– he was covering, pretending he hadn’t gotten the license number because the golden Porsche was now parked in front of our house, among all the cars parked on our street. We went inside and my son jotted down the license plate number. His handwriting was terrible and I had to ask him what the numbers were!

Then I called the police station. I was routed through a series of push-button requests and put on hold, listening to musak. Then I heard the noise of a dozen car engines, racing and zooming in my driveway. The Porsche driver had returned with a bunch of his friends and they were driving 3 cars wide into our yard, making a terrible racket with their cars and their shouts. I went to the second floor, still holding the phone to my ear with the long cord trailing behind me, and I looked out on the rutkas. I leaned out of the window to see better, and I lost my balance and fell out, a whole story down, but I didn’t get hurt. The hooligans laughed at me. One produced a pair of shears and made a show of cutting the telephone cord.

I scrambled up and ran back inside the house, locking the door behind me. Then I got my cellphone and dialed the police again. I waited patiently on hold again, musak playing in the background, wondering who was going to pay for repairing the big scrapes in my new garage.

(Male) I dreamed last night that I was waiting in line at the bank. As I neared the tellers I realized that I was carrying a handgun with me. I was flooded with a sense of embarrassment and fear but I figured the best way out of the situation was to rob the bank. So I stepped out of line and yelled at everyone to get down on the ground. I waved the gun around a little bit to show everyone just how serious I was. And I dropped the gun. I didn’t just drop it but rather I let go of it and watched it go sliding along the floor ending up probably twenty feet away from me.

…As I neared the tellers I realized that I was carrying a handgun with me…

There was a painfully awkward moment when the crowd at the bank wasn’t sure what I was going to do and when I myself didn’t know what I was going to do. At just about that point I saw someone I knew in line. He was extremely angry at me. I guess we had gone to the bank together that day with the idea of robbing the bank but that now I was messing things up, he didn’t know if he could save the situation. I felt so clumsy and alone. There were guards and security cameras. I was going to jail forever.

(Male, 30’s) This dream was very convoluted and crazy and parts were just so very sick and tawdry. I kept trying to do the smart thing but the situation just kept getting worse and worse. I was a college student and I was trying to fit in. There was a group that seemed very popular, not quite as organized as a fraternity, but perhaps more like a secret society. It was made up of at least 40 athletic guys and one very attractive brunette girl. They let me hang out with them for awhile but then, for no apparent reason, a half dozen of the guys beat me up, knocked me to the ground and kicked me until I couldn’t move. I think one of the guys peed on me when I was lying there nearly unconscious. They laughed and said it was part of the “hazing.” I wish the nightmare ended there but it just continued on and on.

…this secret society of thugs would do something simply horrible if they had that key…

I knew that this secret society of thugs would do something simply horrible if they had that key so I asked them for time to think about it. I used that time to gather together my family, my mother and father and our pet dogs (?) and get us all into a station wagon so we could flee. I didn’t know exactly how powerful this society was but I had reason to believe they could hurt my parents and it would be best if we just re-located to someplace far far away. This station wagon was a mess by the way, it barely ran at all. It was gray and dingy on the outside. I drove it down these heavily rutted gravel roads because I was trying to avoid the major roads that might have been watched.

As I turned a corner, the car flipped over into a ditch. There was another vehicle there, conveniently, a small red car. We piled out of the station wagon and started carrying our luggage over to the red car. It was clear we were going to have to leave many things behind, probably most of our things. Just then a big truck appeared with a dozen or so of the society thugs. I stopped loading up the car we were using to escape. I turned to face the truck as it pulled up and right then, I woke up.

(Male, 30’s) Maybe this isn’t a traditional nightmare but I woke up pretty shaken. I dreamed there were riots in my home town, riots about unemployment. The economy had gotten so bad that most people didn’t have jobs and they were really angry. At first I saw on TV how crowds of people were standing beside the major highways, throwing stuff at the cars that went by. I think that the thought was if you had enough money to buy gasoline, you must be in management and therefore responsible for the people being out of work. I was trying to get across town, actually not even going through downtown and I was walking since I was unemployed like everyone else. But as I walked across a smaller street, there were already dozens of people lining that road as well.

…Everyone was so angry…

I was amazed that there were that many people living in the city. I tried to make it down an even smaller street, a residential street. There was a package I had to deliver. The sense was almost that if you weren’t standing beside the road you were breaking a picket line. Everyone was so angry. I finally found the house where I was to deliver the package. Someone accepted it at the door, though he was initially unwilling to open the door. I had hoped he would invite me inside at least until things got a bit safer on the streets but he didn’t. I turned and started the long journey home through the riots.

(Female, 20’s) - Maybe this isn’t exactly a nightmare but it was pretty exciting and I remember it vividly to this day even though I had this dream about ten years ago.

…There were many men, a whole carload full of them, all with guns…

I was riding in the car with my mother and we pulled into a convenience store to get some gas. We were getting ready to pump some gas when we looked over at the store and saw it was being robbed. There were many men, a whole carload full of them, all with guns. At that moment they saw us and started to pour out of the store. They ran right toward us. My mom said “Get back in the car.” But even when I got in the car, I wasn’t safe. The robbers started firing their guns at us. The bullets shot right through the windows and the doors of the car. My mother said “Get down” while she started the car and pulled out of the gas station. It was just like she was an action adventure heroine!