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.

Nightmare #115 – The New Guy in Human Resources

Posted on January 14, 2008 by admin

(Male, middle aged) In the dream, I had just been hired to be the human resources guy at a moderately large firm, maybe 200 employees. I frankly wasn’t very sure of what the company did but I was desperate for a job and the place was quite prosperous. The offices were very modern looking with lots of common spaces and internal glass which gave the areas a feeling of open-ness and air-iness. My first task was to hire someone to produce the company newsletter, just a 4 page weekly publication, primarily aimed at employees. There were two candidates and I decided to interview them both at the same time. We went to one of the open conference rooms and by open, I mean that there was no door. The room opened directly out on a lounge area and beyond that there was a glassed in hallway. I chose this spot because it showed off the design philosophy of the building and, I thought, of the company. I started going back and forth between the two candidates, one who was a man in his 30′s and the other a woman in her 20′s. I would ask a question of one then ask it of the other, alternating as to who answered first. The man had more experience and was perhaps more reliable but the woman had more insight and creativity.

…I was terrified, as much of getting shot by the police as by being attacked by their prisoners…

I was trying to make up my mind which set of skills would be more important in this position when a flurry of activity in the glass hallway distracted me. A phallanx of heavily armed police wearing black armor and carrying what looked like electronic shotguns were leading a group of people who were dressed in grey-brown rags and who had their hands on top of their heads. As this strange parade turned the corner though, something must have have happened to spook the cops because they opened fire on their prisoners, shooting off round after round. The glass did not break even though it must have been repeated hit by these electronic bullets. I was terrified, as much of getting shot by the police as by being attacked by their prisoners who must have been very dangerous to be treated like that and who must be very desperate. I hid as best I could under the table. The interviewees couldn’t seem to understand my response. “Don’t you see that they have everything under control?” Then the interviewees started talking between themselves about me. It was then that I realized the whole thing, the parade, the revolt even the interviews themselves had been some kind of test that the company was putting me through. I had failed the test.

Nightmare #106 – Icy Skyscraper, Snowy Death

Posted on December 8, 2007 by admin

(Male) I was in a very large city that was located right beside a large body of water. Could have been Chicago, could have been New York, could have been Toronto… The city had been hit with an unprecedented winter storm, one that had gone on for weeks… months? There certainly weren’t many people left and the sense that that they’d abandoned the city or died. Survivors were able to get from building to building through underground passages. I had gone from the main building where we had set up camp to a neighboring building. I looked out through a window at a skyscraper, one of those glass windowed skyscrapers. It stood really close to the water and the spray from the water would hit the side of the building and freeze immediately. The ice built up and built up over these weeks upon weeks until there was a strange ice sculpture attached to the side of the building, almost as large as the building itself. The ice swooped out like the arms of a ghost, like the shape of the wind itself. It seemed like the weight of the ice would have the power to topple the building over soon.

I went to a different window. This one was just underneath the “snow line.” Snow had fallen so deeply that the first few floors of all buildings were submerged in snow. I looked out one of the window that was covered in snow but not too deeply. Light still got in and I was able to see shapes outside. There was someone out there! It was someone I knew, someone from work. He was laughing and it seemed like he was trying to walk along on top of the snow, unaware how dangerous this was, how unevenly packed the snow was, how he could fall through the crust on the top and suffocate. For some reason I thought I could save him. I opened the window and snow poured in the window. I estimated I was just 20 feet away from him. The snow here seemed very soft and uncompacted. I thought somehow that I could “swim” up to the surface of the snow. I jumped out of the window. I stamped my feet and compressed the snow underneath me then scraped more off above my head, gradually moving upward. But I eventually loosened too much and made my little cave unstable. Snow started to tumble down on me. It was light at first but then it trapped my legs. It got more deeply buried. It hammered into my chest, trapped my arms. I tried to thrash but I was trapped. I was suffocating.

Nightmare #33 – The Avenging Spirit

Posted on March 26, 2007 by The Grim Gnome

(Male) This is such a politically incorrect dream, I can’t believe I’m telling you this but I was in a strip mall someplace and one of the stores was selling these just wonderful 100% Alpaca sweaters. All hand knitted. Earth-tones. Delicate patterns. Really lovely sweaters. The trouble was that a friend of mine had shoplifted one and now was experiencing threats on his life. And really odd threats, like poisonous blowdarts narrowly missing him

And I figured out somehow that it was a Central American avenging spirit or something that was getting even with him for stealing the sweater. So – and this made more sense in the dream – I was going to BUY a sweater and then give my friend the properly purchased sweater and return the stolen one so he’d be all squared up with the avenging spirit. Or something like that.

So I bought a sweater and then immediately I start finding poisonous blow darts aimed at ME. Which makes me realize – again this made more sense in the dream – that it was pissing off the avenging spirit that we even HAD these sweaters not so much how we had gotten them. So I figured, all macho John Wayne-like, that I’ll just have to kill the avenging spirit. I pull out the tiniest little hand gun, honestly the whole thing fit in the palm of my hand. And then instead of tiny little blow darts, I started getting hit with these six foot long spears. I returned fire and we went back and forth – and this is all happening in and among the little trendy shops of this strip mall. I have no idea how many bullets I had to start let alone how many I had left. Then the avenging spirit comes rushing toward me. I fire at it and I’m sure I hit it. Some how it continues running, running away, unaffected. I yelled out at the injustice “I totally hit you” like we were little boys playing.

The avenging spirit stopped running and turned to face me. It was my boss at work. He said “You can’t kill me with that.” I put the barrel right up against his temple. He said “That wouldn’t even penetrate my gray matter.” I pulled the trigger. I was out of bullets.

Nightmare #21 – Saviour, Monster

Posted on March 12, 2007 by The Grim Gnome

(Male, 40′s) For awhile I had a lot of dreams about zombies. I mean, a LOT. And they were all work-related which probably says a lot about how I viewed my job at the time.

I was in my office, which is at least a real, four-walls kind of office not a cubicle, even if it is very narrow and has no window. And an absurdly high ceiling, like at least 12 feet. I believe it used to be a storage closet because it’s got a steel door and a very secure lock. This isn’t part of the nightmare–or should I say, that’s just part of the nightmare that is my every day life. Even with my door open I can only barely hear what’s going on in the room outside, just the merest suggestions of what’s going on. I have two servers behind me that crank out a lot of heat and white noise. Again this is all my real life office and that’s pretty much exactly where the dream took place.

I’m in my office, working on my laptop when I hear the normal sounds of work in the other room stop. There’s the sound of a great rush, a great hurry. Then there’s a moment or two of quiet. I went to the door to look out. For the most part the room was abandoned, chairs knocked over, papers everywhere like folks left in a hurry. Then I heard a low moaning, a whole chorus of groaning voices. Zombies, of course. I mean, who doesn’t recognize the sound of a horde of mindless un-dead when they hear them, right? I grabbed my son who for some reason was standing in the room and pulled him into my office. I very quietly closed my door and locked it. The groaning got louder but I knew we’d be safe in this bunker of an office.

The terrifying part is what I heard next. Someone else, another human was out there. I could hear him crouching low next to the door, hiding so the zombies in the hallway couldn’t see him. He was begging me to open the door and to let him in. I hear the zombies come closer and I really, really just hoped they would kill him quickly before they realized that he was trying to get inside the door. I felt horrible. I had saved my son but I felt like a monster.