Nightmare #230 – Shot AGAIN

Posted on September 12, 2009 by admin

(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.

Other Haunts – Morbid Gnomes

Posted on July 4, 2009 by admin

HungGnomejpg
What else could the Grim Gnome do but grin when confronted with these statues of self-destructive garden gnomes? They depict scenes of grievous bodily harm, like an arrow skewering the head, a sword impaling the heart, swallowing the barrel of a handgun, all depicted with the maniacal glee one expects of a garden gnome. Collect ‘em all!

Morbid Gnomes

( Or http://www.amazon.co.uk/s?ie=UTF8&x=0&ref_=nb_ss_lp&y=0&field-keywords=dead%20gnome&url=search-alias%3Doutdoor )

Nightmare #221 – Well Armed Vacation

Posted on June 30, 2009 by admin

“…every adult who came into the county had a loaded hand gun with them at all times…”

(Male, 30′s) I was taking my family on vacation, a good old-fashioned pack-up-the-station-wagon, let’s-go-camping kind of family vacation. We drove to this wooded, semi-rural area and when we stopped at the tourist station / ranger post, a man in a uniform warned us that there was a known serial killer operating in this county. He’d killed at least 26 people and stolen at least 13,000 dollars. In fact, the authorities knew exactly who it was but they didn’t want to proceed on the case until they were certain they could have a case that would stand up in court. It was too important a case to have the guy just walk free on a technicality. In the meantime, the authorities were making sure that every adult who came into the county had a loaded hand gun with them at all times. My wife had never shot a hand gun, at least she hadn’t in the dream, and I was a little uncomfortable carrying around an unfamiliar firearm, especially not off into the wilds of this rural county. Anyway, off we go. We stopped in a store for supplies and the woman behind the counter was a little concerned. At first I thought it was because I was carrying a gun in her store, but actually it was because she’d been warned that the serial killer was headed in the direction of the store. Just then the door opened and she yelled “That’s him!” So I guess I shot at him. So did the store woman and I think my wife even got a few rounds off. Then we realized that it was just Bill, an old friend of mine who I haven’t seen in years. Thankfully, none of our bullets had landed anywhere near their mark.
Now I’m awake though, I wonder if we were supposed to think that my friend Bill actually WAS the serial killer. Anyway, it was one of those dreams where it seemed pretty clear that I was going to get killed one way or another, either by the serial killer or by some jackass shooting at me. Both funny and scary at the same time.

Nightmare #218 – Elevator Attack

Posted on June 13, 2009 by admin

(Male, 40′s) This was just a quick little nightmare I had after pushing the snooze alarm today. Got my heart racing.

“…The blond guy with the spiky hair grinned like he was going to take pleasure in killing me…”

I was in an unfamiliar city and I had just gotten on an elevator. I was alone and I counted the money in my wallet. Four ones and a five which I figured was enough for lunch. At the next floor a young man gets on. He’s a lot younger than I am and he has spiky blond hair. Instead of facing the door of the elevator, he just stares at me, right in my face. At the next floor another young man gets on, one with black hair and a black t-shirt as I remember. The blond guy pulls out a knife. It’s a stubby triangular shaped blade, easy to conceal, one that could do a lot of damage easily. “We’ll take your money,” he said. I sized them up and figured these punks were like half my age.

“All I’ve got is nine bucks”

“That won’t be anywhere near enough.” The blond guy with the spiky hair grinned like he was going to take pleasure in killing me. And then before I really knew what I was doing, I punched the blond guy as hard as I could in his Adam’s apple. He collapsed to his knees, suffocating. Then I grabbed the guy in the black t-shirt and pushed his chest onto the triangular knife. There was blood everywhere. At the next floor, I got off the elevator. The two guys weren’t dead yet but they were definitely in their death throes. I was still lost in a strange city and I had just murdered two men.

Nightmare #213 – Crime Gone Wrong

Posted on May 15, 2009 by admin

“…The other men were dead, shot in the head…”

(Male, 40′s) Last night I dreamed: I was in some caper with two friends and an out of towner. We stole some money, or played a harmless but elaborate trick on someone I’m not sure; the kind of “crime” that gets you on Jay Leno instead of cell block 4. Anyway, the one new guy- our hired schemer was funny, and charming and after the whole game was played and we met back at the agreed place, we shook hands to make our congenial get away, he reached into his coat and shot the other two grinning guys, and he shot me twice in the back. I felt it. It was shocking, like being hit hard with a phone book with a nail in it. I fell face down. He stepped over to me and set the gun down in my palm, so I could finish myself off. With his finger he tapped the back of my head, “Just here, can you do it?” I just nodded. I heard his footsteps move down the hallway. I was in pain, but I rolled over, and sat up. The other men were dead, shot in the head. I took the gun and wondered if I would screw it up. The gun was a tiny silver .22 with red trim, like something you’d see in an arcade. I could feel my insides, damaged, no blood yet, but a terrible soreness, and it was getting hard to breathe.

I went out to my car and drove to a friend’s house. Her name is Dawn. She was outside busy on her cell phone, so I had to wait till she got off to tell her I was probably going to die. I felt happy, and sleepy. I began coughing up what looked like red oatmeal, so think I couldn’t talk afterwards. She hung up, and ran off to a nearby hospital to see if anyone could come get me. I sat on the dark street, and lay down on my side, then rolled over on my face- this is how I sleep at night and felt the cool wet blacktop. The pain was less, but the weakness overcame me. I could people yelling and footsteps, but it all seemed very far away

Nightmare #211 – Kidnapped Daughter

Posted on May 1, 2009 by admin

(Male, 50′s) I dreamed that my daughter had been kidnapped and the kidnappers were threatening to kill her. In real life my daughter is grown up and on her own but in the dream she was much younger, in high school. She had long hair. There were no ransom demands. The kidnapper didn’t seem to want anything apart from someone to kill. For some reason, we knew that the kidnapper was going to blow her up with a bomb he had draped around her neck like a necklace.

“…There were no ransom demands…”

The real nightmarish part of the dream was what I felt. I spoke with the police. I was certain that the kidnapper didn’t know that someone cared about the girl he had, that she was someone’s daughter. I asked the police if we couldn’t find someway to substitute her for another girl, for someone that no one cared about, someone that no one would miss. It seemed so reasonable in my dream but I’m sick to my stomach thinking about it now I’m awake.

Nightmare #209 – Intruder Alert

Posted on April 22, 2009 by admin

(Male, 40′s) Strange dream, really violent but most important it was really detailed and vivid. Strange flashbacks to the past.

“…Here I am talking like I’m a big tough guy..”

It took place on the street where I grew up but sort of in the present day. Literally on the street, not in the houses, though I was living in one of the houses. It wasn’t the house I grew up in and in fact there were no houses like the one in my dream on this street. I had met up with a friend I knew from 20 years ago. It was in the afternoon and he said we should go someplace and get lunch. He was going to drive but I just wanted to make sure my door was locked and that I should pick up a hoodie.

When I went back to my house, which was a ranch style house, very modern with its entire yard a cement slab, I found that the side door was not only unlocked but open. I kicked it open and said, “OK fuckers. Come on out.” (Here I am talking like I’m a big tough guy.) I could see someone sitting at my computer which in the dream was one of those cute little iMacs from years back, the ones that were candy-colored. This guy stands up and he is a physical double for Lurch, the butler from the Addams Family TV show. He’s wearing a flannel shirt with a brown plaid pattern. He advanced on me and I grab him by the front of his shirt and sort of catapult him over top of me. He lands in a pile on the cement but gets right back up and charges at me again. Again I grab him by the front of his shirt and this time I toss him down a short flight of stairs that must have led to the basement. This time though as he’ll getting up I slip off one of my shoes and hit him repeatedly in the face with my heel. He goes down and out.

Like an idiot, I rush inside the house to find the other guy that I just *know* is there. I open the door to my kitchen and there he is. And this guy looks like Bruce Lee. Well, to be honest he looked like Bruce Lee if he lived to middle age and put on a few pounds. I mean, he still looked dangerous but he just looked a bit more manageable. But for some reason I can’t understand, this Bruce Lee guy decides to shoot at me. He’s got some kind of hand gun that apparently has an inexhaustible supply of bullets but that isn’t very powerful. I’m able to hide behind a wood door and not get hit. Then I hear him kick out a window and I look just in time to see him diving out this window. I go after him and again he starts shooting at me. So with my legs dangling out of the window, I kick him. And at that point I wake up.

As I write this down what’s striking are all the pop culture references. I really want to go back and watch “Enter the Dragon” now.

Nightmare #208 – Shopkeeper for the Mob

Posted on April 19, 2009 by admin

(Male, 40′s) This is another nightmare I had while I was battling the worst cold I’ve had in years. Feverish dreams are wild!

“”…everything was a front for the Mob..”

I operated a little shop of some kind in a canvas tent pitched in a parking lot beside a highway. There were big bags of coffee beans and by big, I mean probably 50 pounds or so. There also were different kinds of spices and bags of food like it all had been directly imported from other countries.

And everything was a front for the Mob. Though it wasn’t explained in the dream, the set up sounds like there were drugs or guns being smuggled in with the coffee and other items. My position was extremely tenuous. There was really no reason to have an outsider like me so intimately involved with Mob work and I knew it. It was only a matter of time until I was killed. The Mob guys would show up every couple days, cut open a bag of coffee, spill the beans everywhere and then take off. There would be someone holding a gun on me in case I wanted to make some kind of an objection. This one time the Mob people show up and they’ve got someone with them. In fact, it’s someone I work with, a nice enough guy. He chats with me, totally oblivious to the danger he’s in. He’s amazed that I run an import shop in addition to the other job. Then the Mob guys grab him and force him to his knees and without saying anything they shoot him to death right there in front of me. I am simply terrified. Shocked and terrified. I don’t know what to do. The Mob guys back out of the tent. I don’t know if I should run or call the police or what.

Then all of a sudden I’m in an apartment building. I get the sense that it’s also entirely owned by the Mob. I’m in one of the rooms possibly a room where I live and I look out of the door just in time to see a couple Mob guys drag another guy I know up the stairs and thrown him on the landing face down. They put these weights on his arms. The weights look like big coffee cans with a handle on the top. The guy is unconscious. One of the Mob guys prepares a syringe of something, maybe heroin for all I know. Then he backs up and makes like he’s going to throw the syringe like a dart. That part makes me cringe.

All of a sudden he realizes that I’m there, that I’ve been watching everything from just a couple feet away. He turned toward me and started walking. I backed up and at that instant I woke up.

Nightmare #207 – Apocalypse Party

Posted on April 19, 2009 by admin

(Male, 40′s) The last few days, I’ve had the worst cold I’ve had in years. Sweats, chills, sore throat, the works. There’s nothing like a nice fever to spike up the nightmares. This is one I had last night. I’ll send you another one too.

“…And of course, we were fighting for our lives….”

This nightmare STARTED after an apocalypse of some kind. Most of the world had been leveled into rubble. All the buildings as far as I could see were knocked flat and crushed. I just had the sense that I was in the last building left intact anywhere in the world. And the people in this building were the last humans. We were a weird group. It was sort of like a random collection of people you might get at a train station or a bus terminal. Little clumps of us were related to each other or knew each other but there was nothing in common really about the group as a whole. There was four or five guys, who wore overalls and straw hats, who looked like a cartoon cliche of a jug band. A couple of them were really muscular, a couple were pretty overweight. There was another group of women who I think were speaking Italian to each other. On and on like that, little clusters of people. I was on my own though, all alone. There were tables with white table cloths and punchbowls, though it didn’t seem like there was any food. Maybe we’d already eaten it all or maybe it had never been put out. Weird party. Weird collection of people.

And of course, we were fighting for our lives.

The earth had evidently been invaded by creatures from anther world. And by creatures, I mean exactly two. They were remarkably human-shaped, except for a couple key differences. One is that their heads were oriented 180 degrees backward which was incredibly unnerving. They were both bald, with extremely pale skin that glowed slightly. And they were really rather fat, like some of those statues of Buddha. At one point in the dream I saw them at the end of a hallway and I was seriously terrified. They saw me and invited me to take an elevator ride with them to the top of the building. There was nothing for me to hide behind, if that would have even done any good. I was in plain sight and they could have disintegrated me. But I declined. They chuckled to each other and got on the elevator.

The humans somehow thought we could fight these beings. We tried to come up with a plan, some strategy but before we could get ready the beings just appeared through the walls. We were thrown around, killed, exploded. There wasn’t any hope we could win. And then someone poured a bucket of water on one of these creatures. It sizzled, like short circuiting electricity and melted like the wicked witch of the west. The other being backed up toward a wall of windows, terrified by us for a change. Then it disappeared.

The last part of the dream was like the closing sequence of a movie. The camera pulled back and revealed the same building we’d all been in. It had been rebuilt and was full of people. The camera pulled back even further and showed that the whole city had been rebuilt. It was like the camera was in a helicopter and it was giving traffic reports. Humans had survived and rebuilt the world pretty much exactly as we did the first time.

This Just In – Man Bites… Man

Posted on April 9, 2009 by admin

I bet this one slipped by the leftist media cultural elitists:

Man Bites and Chews Off Part of Another Man’s Arm!

Much of the commentary that’s appeared on the blogosphere surrounding this event assumes that the attacker was a zombie. OK, fine, fair enough. I see the resemblance at least to the early Romero-style zombies. Some nit-picking kill-joys were hung up on the fact that the attacker didn’t go for the guy’s brains.

But let’s back up for a moment. It’s it terrifying enough to think that this guy came up out of nowhere and bit a chunk out of someone’s arm? Isn’t it even a bit creepier in fact that the guy WASN’T a zombie?

Nightmare #205 – Ceramic Death

Posted on April 5, 2009 by admin

“…And he jumped on the intruder and slashed at his throat…”

(Male, 30′s) A buddy of mine told me this dream. He’s a ceramicist, an artist who makes pots and jugs and cups and that kind of stuff. In his dream he had just finished making a vessel with this beautiful shino glaze. (I didn’t ask him for particulars but I looked it up on-line and a shino glaze is supposed to be an exceptionally warm and rich glaze, one that’s rather difficult to pull off flawlessly.) He’s always telling me about how deadly some of the chemicals are that he works with. Radioactive. Poisonous. Even the clay itself turns into a fine powder that collects in his lungs and will eventually kill him from cillicosis.
In his dream, an intruder broke into his house. So my friend smashed this vessel with the beautiful glaze and he took one of the larger fragments, one with a particularly sharp edge. And he jumped on the intruder and slashed at his throat. The pottery shard tore into the intruder more effectively than a knife; it hacked him open. He just went limp, dead in my friend’s arms. I asked if there was any blood and no, the particularly odd thing was there was an almost entire absence of blood.

Nightmare #201 – a Scissor Murder Escape

Posted on February 7, 2009 by admin

(Female, 40′s) This dream was so weird– so strange and violent– that I really don’t know what to make of it.

“…I saw nothing that I could use to kill the man…”

It started out that I was hiding with another woman in a closet-like space. There was a panel near the floor that opened into a hallway. We were being very quiet, cowering in the corner, as far as possible away from the opening. We could hear running in the hallway, men in boots, like soldiers maybe, the clank of guns. When it quieted down, we tried to peek out, but we were seen. We scrambled back into the dark corners of the little room while men hustled to the opening and started reaching in with their arms, trying to grab at us. There was cart coming down the hall so they had to move back. Then they were called away, so they left us.

We looked out again and saw two of our friends, sneaking down the now-empty hallway. We scurried out and joined them, sliding along the walls, eyes darting around. We came to a room, with two glass doors, so we went in, locking the doors behind us. This area appeared to be a sound studio or something like that. We thought we were safe because the doors were locked, but we were wrong.

We went down the hallway and found that the room opened up into a large warehouse. A line of soldiers were pointing guns at me, as a large man advanced toward me. I knew that in order to escape, I had to kill him. He grabbed at me and I ran behind him, jumping up on his back and trying to strangle him. I needed a knife. I looked over at a table top, which was covered with the contents of someone’s junk drawer (which looked much like my junk drawer in the kitchen)– rubber bands, twistie ties, batteries, a bent spoon, shoe laces, an odd cheese knife– and saw nothing that I could use to kill the man.

Then I saw a pair of sheers with an orange plastic handle, much like the sheers we own. I could slit his throat with the sheers, I knew. I couldn’t watch what I was about to do– in fact, I think I closed my eyes in my dream! I opened the sheers and drew the edge of the blade across the man’s throat. I knew it would take several strokes to kill him. With my eyes shut tight, I could feel the blood leaking from his neck. My hands were covered with warm sticky blood. It was awful, but I knew it was my only way out.

Nightmare # 195 – Shopping Can be Murder

Posted on December 20, 2008 by admin

(Female, 40′s) I was shopping in this dream. But I was shopping in the weirdest place I’d ever seen. This “shopping district” was a winding darn alley that looked like a cross between a horror movie set and a Dickens novel. There was a dark and damp, curving pedestrian pathway between these irregularly shaped stores, sitting close together. I swear there were gas lamps.

I went into a shoe store and spent some time trying on shoes. It was like Payless– a self-serve place. I was in the back of the store trying on boots when a man came up behind me and knocked me down, so I was sprawled on my stomach with my arms and legs sticking out. Very graceful. He knelt on my back with one knee and held something sharp against my back. He said, “Don’t move or I’ll have to hurt you.” I said, “Go ahead, you can take all my money.” “Of course I can,” he replied.

I thought about pushing him up and knocking him off my back. And beating him up. I was pretty sure I could do that. But I was worried about the lone clerk in the store, up by the front counter. She might get hurt. So I didn’t do anything. The robber was getting heavy. I kept thinking about what I should do. Then I woke up.

Nightmare #193 – Terrorized by Motorcycle Hooligans

Posted on December 18, 2008 by admin

(Male, 50′s) In the interests of full disclosure, I should admit that I bought a motorcycle a couple years back in the midst of mid-life crisis and that within the last week as it came time to winterize the thing, I’d been angry with myself that another season had passed and I hadn’t really gotten out on it.

I was with my wife and a female friend and we were crossing a parking lot, heading into a bar when this group of about a dozen motorcycle riders over took us. I started defending the women who were able to get away. This didn’t particularly make the hooligans mad. They just started messing with me instead.

This was a relatively outlandish group of motorcyclists really. Their bikes were all American made and chopped like very classic examples of the style. And by classic I mean original 40′s and 50′s era chopped bikes, simple, basic, with a few bits of chromed flair. And the guys themselves were straight out of a time capsule too, or at least they looked like they were trying to be. They had greased hair with big curls on the top. I bet there’s a word for that. They didn’t wear the bomber style jackets but rather something that looked more like a suit coat jacket that was made out of riding quality leather. They were a riding club – The Rockets – which actually, as I remember it now used to be a local band I really enjoyed back in the 70′s.

The Rockets pushed me around with a detached, ironic sort of torture, like a cat playing with a mouse, that bats it around between its paws. One of them had a package of metal “rockets” that sort of looked like those toys from back in the day that you could put a “cap” in and then toss up in the air and when it landed the cap would go off with a loud pop. Anyway, one of the gang members had a package of these, still on the cardboard like he’d bought it at a retro boutique or something. He took them off the card one by one and shoved them in my mouth til I was choking. I think this was some kind of a test of something to see if I’d choke or vomit. All the while they were laughing and joking while I was trying to keep from suffocating.

Nightmare #191 – A Knock in the Night

Posted on December 11, 2008 by admin

(Male, 50′s) This nightmare woke me up out of a sound sleep. I swear I was screaming, or at least trying to scream. When I woke up, I could have sworn I had just heard myself yelling out in a small, muffled voice.

In the dream, I’m at home with my wife and my daughter who must be home for the holidays or something. It’s night time and we’re getting ready to head off to bed. We’re all sitting on the couch in the living room, laughing, having a good time. Then there’s a knock on the front door. It’s really late, like the middle of the night and my wife and daughter don’t think we should answer the door. But I thought that someone must be in trouble to knock at the door so late. So I get up and I flip on the porch light to look out and see who was there. And damned if the porch light is out. So I open the door and there’s no one there. I speak out like I’m a tough guy or something and I say “OK step out where I can see you.”

And this huge man steps out of the shadows and with one or two strides, steps into the house. He’s broad and tall, like he’s just been scaled up in all dimensions. He’s got one of those cliched “bad guy” mustaches from the 40′s and he’s we’re a fedora and a trench coat like a black and white movie. He steps easily into the house and reaches out and wraps his hand cleanly around my throat. While he’s grabbing my throat, he lifts me off the ground effortlessly, with a smile. I try to yell, to scream and of course, I’m being choked so not much actual sound comes out.

I woke up trying to scream.

Nightmare #181 – The Dog Faced Slasher

Posted on September 12, 2008 by admin

(Male, 40′s) I haven’t seen a slasher movie for years but this nightmare was just like a bad slasher movie. It was night time and I was in an unfamiliar area, a farm. There was a barn, an old farmhouse, fruit trees, tractors in the yard. I think I was there with a bunch of friends or at least people I knew. We had the sense that there was something else around us somewhere but we all went along doing our normal everyday tasks, sort of relaxing since it wasn’t our farm and we didn’t have to do the work. But as I walked around, I would come across these acquaintances either tied up or taped up with packing tape. They were alive and well but no one could really explain how they got all tied up. I would help them out and then we’d go our separate ways… and then pretty soon I’d come across someone ELSE who was all bound up. It was starting to freak me out, like someone could come up on me while I was trying to undo someone. Then I came across two women, one blond one brunette and they were taped to the seats of this two seat tractor. Nope doesn’t make much sense. I started trying to take the tape off the blond woman and there was this look of absolute terror in her eyes, like she was seeing something over my shoulder. I turned around and there was the weirdest looking slasher I’d ever seen. He himself was all wrapped with clear packing tape. His face was elongated and it looked like he had a dog-shaped nose. His arms were taped straight with these long sticks and at the end of them was a long-handled rose bush shear. They were sharp and nasty looking. The only way he could work these shears though was by jerking his whole arm to snap them closed. He looked seriously deranged, powerful, perhaps not entirely human. It seemed that he wanted to use the shears to cut off the heads of one of the women. Or, honestly, maybe he was going to cut them free. I wasn’t entirely clear about his motivations or for that matter his ability to carry out his motivations either for good or for evil. One thing I knew though was that I was standing in between him and the two women. At that point, I woke up.

Nightmare #179 – Tough Neighborhood

Posted on September 10, 2008 by admin

(Male, 40′s) I haven’t had many dreams recently so that’s what makes this one stand out so strongly. I’m riding a bike and it at least starts in my old neighborhood, the one where I grew up as a kid. Just down the street from where I lived, two different sets of people have moved out and have left stuff they didn’t want by the street. One is just furniture but the other one has a bunch of really cool toys and models. Several of the toys are themed after Scooby-Doo and a couple of the models are monster-related. The trouble is that all the goodies are stacked in a pile, maybe 25 or 30 feet tall. I find a stick and am able to knock down the stuff I want. But now I have to carry it on my bicycle.
And things change, pretty quickly. I’m still on my bike but I have NO idea where I am. In fact, I’m pretty sure it’s not the same city. (I suspect it might be the city where my Grandmother lived, a pretty tough place.) It’s winter, or at least there’s snow on the ground. I’m trying to pedal the bike even though I’m still carrying all this stuff. I can barely keep it upright. Most important is that I’m lost. I think that if I just start going around in a systematic way up and down the streets, I’ll eventually find someplace that looks familiar. The whole first street I drive down is abandoned which is a little creepy. But the whole second street is worse. There are lots and lots of people, just standing on the sidewalk and on the street. It’s hard for me to keep the bike balanced let alone to ride around them. And stranger still, about a third of these folks are “short people” that’s what they’re called, right? It feels like a very bad music video. The short people in particular seem to have it in for me. They’re waving metal sticks around over their heads, trying to hit me as a ride by. Eventually I realize that I can’t pretend they’re NOT trying to hit me and I try seriously to ride away. That’s when one of these large “bouncer” type guys starts to run me down. He keeps blocking me in, forcing me off the road. I just know I’m going to be beaten up and robbed if I fall off the bike. Last thing I remember, I’m teetering toward the side of the road with the big guy close to me, trying to knock me over.

Nightmare #146 – The Obstinantly Haunted House

Posted on March 31, 2008 by admin

(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.”

Nightmare #144 – Backyard Hooligans

Posted on March 23, 2008 by admin

(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.

Nightmare #141 – Clumsy Bank Robber

Posted on March 14, 2008 by admin

(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.