(Male, 40’s) I have this enduring fear that I’ll end up living on the street in a damp cardboard box and this nightmare for some reason called that up.

“…the carriage itself was jet black as were all four of the horses…”

I was downtown in a big city. It had a pretty thriving city life, though things were very grimy and a big run-down. Like there were two extremely tall wooden houses built with timbers probably a foot or two thick and covered with dirty yellow clapboards. These houses must have been ten stories tall and then BETWEEN them, that is, over the street another house had been built that was supported by being wedged between them. It was a busy street and the supports to the middle house were obviously falling apart. It was just a matter of time until it fell.

I was dressed like a street person. I’m not sure that I actually wasn’t a street person. In one hand I held a large clear plastic bag with ice water and a couple dozen cans of soda. I guess I made my living selling soda to the commuters as they came out of the buildings to evacuate the city and go home to the suburbs.

There was a crowd of people. I had made enough for the day to cover expenses and get a meal so I was about ready to sell the leftovers to this other street person who had the same gig. Then a loud clackitty clanging sound came up the street. It was a horse drawn carriage. It looked like a couple had just gotten married, because the woman was dressed in a frilly white dress and the guy was in a tux complete with a tall top hat. Except the carriage itself was jet black as were all four of the horses.

And the strangest part was that three of the four horses were dead. They hung lifeless in their harnesses while the fourth and final horse dragged the whole carriage along. The people in the carriage acted as if it was nothing to have three dead horses attached to the carriage, perhaps as long as things kept moving along they didn’t really care about how it happened.

“…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.

(Male, 40’s) I had this nightmare earlier this week and I’ve been telling everyone about it. It’s sounds so funny but trust me I was simply terrified in the middle of it.

“…I tried to greet the students and found that I had no voice….”

In the nightmare, I was a science teacher and this was my first day at work. I had the dim sense that I’d quit my current job and that I was finally doing something I really wanted to do. (And this sort of touches with reality. I’ve been giving a series of presentations at work recently. “Teaching” sort of, and I really enjoy it. I do wish I could do that full time.) So I’m a science teacher and this is my first day teaching… and I’m teaching in the exact same classroom where my Dad taught. He was a middle school science teacher. I loved his room when I was a kid. All those weird displays like a human skeleton, animals preserved in jars, oversized models of the human heart… So I was teaching in that very same room.

And just to make sure I did well on my first day, along had come my Mother who sat behind me off to the left. And my wife, who sat behind me off to the right. They periodically said vaguely encouraging things as I prepared for class.

The bell rang and students started to shuffle in. Up until this point I had felt relatively good in the dream, despite the presence of my watchers. I tried to greet the students and found that I had no voice. I busied myself passing out handouts all the while desperately hoping that my voice would return before I had to speak.

(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.

(Male, 30’s) It started off as a normal dream. I was being given a walk-through tour of a place like NASA or something. A large scientific facility and this was the tour for new employees. One of the things we were shown was the incinerator. I remember seeing a small pile of ashes in front of it. We were told to be very careful in cleaning the incinerator because this was where the bodies of the alien creatures were disposed of and if the incinerator wasn’t properly cleaned, we’d risk spreading some kind of alien infection. I made a special mental note to clean the incinerator really well. At the end of the tour, I told the guide that I knew it was all business as usual for them but that I was still finding it kind of hard to get my head around the idea that aliens were real!

“…It wasn’t clear actually whether it really was an accident or whether she did it on purpose….”

So I started working there and things went fine for a few weeks. Then a woman I worked with got careless with the incinerator. It wasn’t clear actually whether it really was an accident or whether she did it on purpose but some the alien virus got out and started infecting people. They turned into some kind of zombie monster. There were strict protocols for how to deal with virus in order to keep it contained.

But some how my 9 year old son got infected. We were locked in a room together. I knew that I had to contain the infection which meant I had to kill him. But he had just started to turn so most of the time I would look at him and he’d be normal. Only every every now and then he’d act very aggressive and throw me around the room. It was impossibly hard but I realized that I’d have to kill him. I got a knife. When he saw the knife he went crazy, so I hid it behind my back. He calmed down. I approached my son and I hugged him, and as I hugged him I sawed off his head with the knife. By that point it was clear that he was a monster but still somewhere inside he was my son. He died mercifully quickly. But his head didn’t fall off entirely. So I had to sort of twist it around and saw for awhile on the other side until it separated.”

(Male, 40’s) This was pretty much a standard work dream except for the twist at the end. I was at work, though of course the building didn’t resemble the actual building where I work in the least. The dream building was a very tall structure of relatively short hallways, maybe 30 feet long. And by tall I mean absurdly tall, 30 plus stories so tall that is slightly swayed in the wind. The only way to get up and down this long tall building was to use the freight elevator that was on one end of this short hallway. It was a standard freigh elevator, extremely noisy, wide open and quite slow moving. So that was the NORMAL situation.

The NIGHTMARE part of the dream started when we had to evacuate the building quickly. I think it had something to do with zombies but at least within the part of the dream that I remember there were no actual zombies. However, there were people from the upper floors who were somehow flooding down to our floor to use the elevator, I guess. There was something wrong about them. They weren’t zombies and they weren’t even the threat we knew we were supposed to be avoiding. They were smiling broadly and dressed in normal business suits. Except they weren’t walking; they were floating down the hallway toward me. As they approached it became obvious that they weren’t human but they were actually BALLOONS, like balloon animals tied in the shape of humans. They floated with their menacing smiles. I picked up a broom and tried to keep them from touching any of my co-workers as they tried to escape onto the elevator. For some reason, I knew that if the balloon people touched you, their balloon skin would stick to you and you’d be done for. One by one, more of them would stick to you and… well, I didn’t know exactly what would happen but I knew you’d stop being human and you’d end up being like them. Lucky for me it was rather easy to keep them away with the broom because they were so light. However more and more of them kept pushing into the hallway.

I awoke feeling very anxious, uncertain whether I’d saved anyone at all.