Nightmare #312 – Ghostly Dinosaurs

Posted on December 15, 2011 by The Grim Gnome

(Male, 40′s) This was definitely a nightmare and it seemed so real at the time. Honestly, it seemed real while I was dreaming even though this is all going to sound pretty crazy.

I was at work, though for some reason the office was set up in a house. The house was on a normal suburban street but the back yard was a graveyard. The grave stones started right outside the back door. The other strange thing was that it was night. I was working at night with someone else, someone I don’t really work with.

Whenever there was a computer glitch or problem, it manifested itself as an image on the screen. Mostly they looked like decaying humans. Ghosts, I guess.

The guy I was working with got tired which was understandable because for some reason I knew it was about 4:00 AM. He went to take a nap on the couch in the living room. And about that moment, there was a knock on the back door. I looked out the window and there were three of the ghosts that appeared on the computer screen. They were full sized human ghosts. For some reason they couldn’t come in, even though I had opened the door. Towering in the trees was another ghost, a monster about as tall as the roof. It looked like a minature Godzilla. Needless to say, I closed the door.

Then there was a knock at the front door. I opened it, thinking that the ghost wouldn’t be able to come in. But this ghost walked right past me and went over to my co-worker who was sleeping. I think it must have possessed him – or something – because the guy woke up and ran outside terrified. I ran outside to chase him. or at least warn him that there are ghosts all around. I had to wrestle him down because he seemed quite panicked or perhaps determined to cause himself harm.

Then we heard the pterodactyl.

It swooped in and attack this guy. We hid around the base of an apple tree. The guy was totally useless. I tried to keep the tree branches between the Pterodactyl and us. Every now and then the monster would reach out with this long bony claw and try to grab us. For some reason, I figured that it was just basically a big bird and there fore it’s bones must be light, hollow in fact. Therefore, it would be easy to break them. None of that is rationalization after the fact. I very clearly remember going through that thought process inside the dream.

So the next time the monster reached out to grab me, I grabbed it by the forearm and tried to crack its wrist against one of the branches. I didn’t succeed but I Knew I would. Eventually, if I could just keep that panicky co-worker safe – I’d be able to beat that dinosaur.

Nightmare #311 – So Large, So Unprepared

Posted on December 8, 2011 by The Grim Gnome

(Female, 20′s) The dream I had last night was not a ‘scary’ dream per se, but one of those uneasy dreams that become increasingly uneasy.

So I show up to teach my composition class. I’m running late and feeling
rushed. I’m carrying an enormous amount of stuff with me, weighed down
with papers and books. I have a backpack that’s stuffed full and a
briefcase too, just brimming with manila folders and papers bursting out.
I’m out of breath as I arrive at class– only to discover that we’ve been
moved to a new room, a bigger room — almost a conference center room or an
auditorium.

My students are already there, spread out over a dozen tables, and since
there are only 20 of them, the wide expanse of tables look a little empty.
I have to turn my head back and forth to see everyone who is there.

And then I notice that the “audience” is made up of more than just my
students– there’s also a number of other people there. One notable person
seated at a table, pen in hand, is one of my old professors. In real life,
he is dead now, but in my dream I realize that he’s there to “observe” my
class and report on my teaching.

Unfortunately, I can’t recall what I have planned to teach in this class
session. Or more accurately, *if* I have *anything* planned for the class
today. Then I really start to panic. I open my briefcase, rifling
through, but my files of stuffed full of papers to grade. Crap– all those
papers turn my stomach.

So I step to the podium, which has a microphone and desk lamp– I wasn’t
expecting those. I speak into the microphone, asking my students to settle
down and get out their books and class work. I glance at my watch– we’re
already running late.

As I look around, I see that the room is even larger than I realized– like
really, really big. Almost a football field-sized room. Along the sides
of the room, there are shops and houses. Some of the buildings have lights
on and some boarded up.

Then a mass of people start to move into the room, marching in formations,
in between the tables. They are practicing for something. They’d reserved
the space earlier and they have no idea how the room was double-booked.

Neither do I. I have no idea what is going on, but I’m pretty sure I’m not
going to get a very good evaluation.

Nightmare #228 – Dead Horses

Posted on August 29, 2009 by admin

(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.

Nightmare #224 – Workplace Panic

Posted on August 7, 2009 by admin

“…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.

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 #203 – Accident at the Alien Incinerator

Posted on March 11, 2009 by admin

(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.”

Nightmare #188 – Bubble People

Posted on November 26, 2008 by admin

(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.

Nightmare #182 – Bugs Everywhere

Posted on September 20, 2008 by admin

(Male, 30′s) I’m not usually creeped out by insects in everyday life however…

In this dream, I was working at a brand new research facility. Incidentally, the building where I work is actually less than a year old too.) In the dream, everything in this new place was white and all the lights were extremely bright, either from sunlight or from overhead lights. There was just the faintest pattern on the floor, linoleum tile in very light gray and white checkerboard pattern. What all this white helped reveal was that we had a pretty significant problem with cockroaches. Whenever I’d open a cupboard, easily a dozen of the little things would fall out from the shelves almost like a black liquid spilling to the floor where they’d reform into a coherent mass and then run into some nook or cranny. It happened all the time, all day long. They’d appear from the cupboards, the drawers, the desk… everywhere. They were clearly not just an isolated group of bugs, rather we were infested.

I had gotten to the point where the puddles of black roaches almost — ALMOST — didn’t shock me or bother me when my boss in the dream insisted that a female co-worker and myself needed to canvas the neighborhood and find out who was sending us all these roaches. Yes, there was very definitely the sense in my boss’ mind that these bugs were somehow some kind of sabotage or something. So this co-worker and myself stop doing all of the work that WE have to do and go off on this pointless road show. We’re touring all the factories in the area and giving the same lecture. The factories are these ancient monstrosities, red brick with tiny windows very very high up that makes the work floors dark and makes them feel like they’re sunk deep into the ground. They were like factory buildings out of Charles Dickens’ time.

So we’re at one of these factories and it’s my turn to give the talk about roaches and if anyone sees any to let us know. The podium to address all the workers is about ten feet tall and made from soft red clay bricks. I climb to the top of the podium and at this instant I can see myself from the perspective of the crowd. I’m up there talking about roaches… when in fact the ENTIRE FLOOR of this factory is a mass of roaches, running here and there. It’s almost like a carpet or a field where the stalks of grain are all just black and are being blown back and forth by the wind. The roaches are running over the toes of people’s work boots and over the toes of my co-worker’s shoes but no one seems to mind. Do I have to point out that since I was now watching the speech from the perspective of the audience that these bugs were crawling over ME as well? I tried not to lift my feet because I could just imagine them crawling up my pant legs. But I did move my feet a little and it felt like I was stuck in molasses or scorched motor oil. Sticky. Black. There was absolutely no possibility that I could run away.

When I reach the part of my speech where I’m explaining that we’re concerned about the roaches, all of the bugs stop and prick up their antennae like they’re listening. Then they all start pouring, literally as if they were a shiny black liquid, they start pouring down this brass drain in the floor. For some reason, I had the sense that they were all heading for our brand new facility, that they were going to flood the place. Our speech wasn’t successful; our boss was going to be very upset.

Nightmare #176 – The Stone Vampires

Posted on August 21, 2008 by admin

(Male, 40′s) Despite the fact that this nightmare was about vampires, the overall feel I had was frustration more than fear. I was a member of a team of about 5 professionals who were looking over a building with the perspective of renting it or buying it. It was a standard building by which I mean a generic office space without cubicles. And it was completely windowless. Sound like the office where you work?

The weird thing was that the place had about a half dozen life-sized marble statues. As we sort of wandered the space, these statues would quickly turn into flesh and blood, living (or I guess non-living) vampires, attack one of our group, then change back to a statue. We’d rush over and would notice the mutilated corpse and not realize that the statue had anything to do with it. This happened over and over but no one listened when I suggested “Hey, maybe we should get out of here.” Then I actually *saw* one of the attacks but again, no one was much concerned. It was down to me and the Boss, who incidentally looked like Jean-Luc Picard from Star Trek: The Next Generation. One of the statues changed and tried to attack him but he was able to hold it at an arm’s distance and do something to it to kill it. Now the trick became trying to kill the vampires when they changed but obviously before they changed back to stone which was much harder.

At one point there were two vampires attacking me — it probably doesn’t matter but they were female vampires with flowing glittery skirts, like they were nightclub vampires — and the only thing they could grab onto was one of my fingers which I kept them from biting, though I must confess I was getting pretty tired of being human at that point with all the drudgery of office work, the stupidity of my co-workers and the arrogance of my boss. But we defeated the vampires that were in the main room of the office.

My dream ended when I opened the double doors of a closet and there were two more, female vampires.

Nightmare #174 – Co-worker’s Dogs

Posted on August 14, 2008 by admin

(Male, 30′s) I’ve recently been transferred at work from one building to another and I have to say I’m pretty happy I don’t have to deal with a particular woman at the other location anymore. She was one of those people who can’t stop talking and furthermore, who only talk on and on about themselves. I think she may have liked me because my sense was that she gravitated to me especially.

In the dream, I had gone back to the old location for some reason. I think it was just to say hi to my co-workers. I looked down this long corridor and I saw this talkative woman. She waved at me enthusiastically. She had beside her two very large dogs. I think they were terriers. I waved back to be polite and when the dogs saw me, they took off running down this long corridor toward me. I’m not a “dog person” in life that is I don’t have a dog but I like dogs. When these large creatures bounded down to me, I wasn’t afraid, even though they were barking. Some dogs do that when they’re glad to see someone. I started petting one of them and someone said, “Oh you shouldn’t have started to pet it. That just makes ‘em angry.” The next thing I knew the dog had literally swallowed my entire left hand right up to the wrist. The other dog bit onto my arm a little higher up. I started to panic. It wasn’t so much because it hurt because it didn’t really hurt. Rather, I was trapped, held in place by these large dogs. I looked down the hallway for the woman to see if she was going to, well, call off the dogs. And she was gone. For that matter, there was no one anywhere. I didn’t want to cry out but I was really getting scared. I didn’t know what the dogs were going to do to me next.

Nightmare #145 – The Airless, Shadow-filled School

Posted on March 24, 2008 by admin

(Male, 40′s) I had this dream three times last night, that is, I woke up twice and fell back asleep into this dream. I wear one of those breathing masks for sleep apnea so I suspect that figured in there.

In the dream, I was wearing something like diving gear or like a very light weight space suit and I was inside a very futuristic school. The school was held inside an eight sided room. The walls were thick at the bottom, probably 3 feet thick, and gradually got thinner as they approached the ceiling. They were some kind of dark metal. I got the sense that there might only be four rooms aboard this school. I say aboard because it felt like we were floating, maybe in space, maybe in water. The whole craft would sometimes shift a little to one side of the other like a boat on a lake.

But there was nothing sinister about any of that. The strange part was that we had been boarded by darkness or something that gave off darkness. I know that sounds crazy but darkness poured into the room initially almost like a fluid, like a gas. But it didn’t behave according to gravity, that is it flowed up along the walls at times and it also didn’t seem to dare enter the whole room. The darkness would flow upwards and fill areas of the craft. The hallway outside was filled first, perhaps before we even knew what was going on. We heard sounds inside the dark, loud scraping sounds like extremely heavy metallic chairs being dragged along metal floors. The darkness was inside the room too. Everything seemed discontinuous, like different moments had been cut and pasted together. We kept losing people. They would be there one instant and entirely gone the next. We had no weapons, no way to defend ourselves but as of yet there was nothing to defend ourselves against: there was just nothing there. This was pretty much how things were for the first two parts of the dream: an evil foreboding darkness that crept ever closer with some unclear but evil purpose.

In the third part of the dream the school had changed. It was now immense but the same geometry of the rooms hadn’t changed. It was almost as if that small school I had been inside before was just a cell that had just started to grow and divide and now it was full grown. The floor didn’t move anymore so perhaps it had anchored itself on something. The hallways were much larger and the darkness no longer roamed the halls and rooms; it had grown into the structure of the school itself. The hallways were patrolled by tanks, actual armored tanks with gun turrets though they to were shaped to be overly broad on the base. In this part of the dream, there were more people, not many maybe a dozen, but they were offering absolutely no resistance to the darkness. I was trying to sneak along one of these hallways and get access to a library. I could see the room I needed to get to. It was filled floor to ceiling with actual books on shelves which felt kind of strange because everything else in this dream was so high-tech. The only thing keeping me from there was the patrolling tank that seemed to scan the halls erratically, randomly. The dream faded just as I slipped inside the library.