(Female, 40s) I was at a party at someone’s house who was supposed to be my friend. However, I’ve never actually been in the house before in my life. There was music, general revelry. I was standing in a hallway with my back to the party talking to a young man who was supposedly a friend of mine though actually, I’ve never seen him before in my life. He was much younger than me, probably in his twenties. Then a young woman came up to us. She was also very much younger than myself, again perhaps early twenties. The woman had long blond hair. The man introduced me to her and at that moment I realized that she had no hands. Her arms just stopped at the wrists, rounded over into knobs. The young woman, I could tell, didn’t like me at all. I didn’t know exactly why. Perhaps it was because I noticed that she didn’t have any hands. Perhaps for another reason. I didn’t feel comfortable at the party anymore.
Month: May 2008
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Nightmare #160 – Dangerous Driving
(Male, 40’s) I am CERTAIN that this nightmare is not a commentary on my wife’s driving skills — she’s got a MUCH longer commute than I do and she’s never had an accident — but it does call into question perhaps something more important.
The nightmare began in a building of the college I attended. The halls had changed a great deal and I couldn’t find the room I was seeking so I asked a custodian who was the only person I saw even close to my age. He said to consult one of the bulletin boards that had been installed at points up and down the hall. “They’re all controlled by computer now,” he said but I wasn’t sure from the way he spoke if he meant that the boards are more or less reliable than previously. I continued walking around the hall which now had started to curve. I was in a cafeteria area, still not what I was looking for but I continued. The hall got narrower and narrower, the arc of the curve got tighter and tighter and it began to slope upward, at first gradually and then dramatically. I refused to turn around. At the end, the corridor — now a tunnel — erupted into a round hole like a utility hole. I climbed out quite winded to find my wife, standing impatiently next to our car. I must have been looking for her.
I hopped in the passenger seat and she zoomed off. We drove across the college green, up and down over the curbs. We were in quite a hurry evidently. My wife drove quickly and deftly, though she drove on the sidewalk of the residential neighborhood we traversed. As she drove, a small dog ran out after a large bird and were hit by the car. My wife stopped and backed up. I got out. The bird was still alive but a strange bird it was. It had the mottled gray and black of a pigeon but the size and shape of a swan. It staggered around like its back was broken, flapping its wings, trying to fly. The dog, a small creature the size of a mop head covered entirely with reddish brown hair, was clearly dead. A neighbor yelled from the window, starting to make a fuss about the dead animals.
Then I realized that my wife had never gotten out of the car, that I stood staring at her still behind the wheel, the engine still revving. It was obvious that she was going to run ME down with the car. I started running, swerving she drove after me. I could never out run a car. I woke just at the point of impact.
(Male, 50’s) I had this nightmare during a nap so only bits and pieces of it are coming back to me but it’s pretty weird.
It started that my wife and I were picking up our daughter from day care — which is bizarre for several reasons one of which is that our real daughter is graduating high school, hardly the daycare age. The second bizarre thing is that our daughter looks exactly like my wife except smaller. And by smaller I mean scaled smaller like an image in photoshop: shorter, narrower. And the most bizarre thing, I think, is that she never looks us in the face. Our daughter is always facing away from us, like she’s pouting or something or maybe like she doesn’t actually *have* a face… By the time we get to the daycare, it’s getting dark and the lady at the daycare is angry, pissy. Her door is locked with multiple locks. She’s upset that we’ve left it so late again, so close to dark when the zombies come out.
Oh yeah, another bizarre part of this dream is that everything gets over run by zombies at night fall. Life goes on pretty much the same during the day but once the sun goes down and things get dark… it’s the living dead EVERYWHERE. As we’re heading away from the daycare, I say to my wife that things weren’t like this back home, that maybe we should consider going home, perhaps even that very night. She agrees immediately and we start walking “home” which was some place several hundred miles away and I *think* it was to the south of where we were. This was a popular idea. There were MANY many people also out on the streets but NONE of us were in cars. Everyone was walking. Along the side of the road people had set up impromptu rummage sales. I stopped at one that was selling nice old hardbound books. They were all reasonably priced, though I had no money, was setting out on a multi-day hike and, oh yeah, was fleeing from zombies.
That’s probably the MOST BIZARRE part of the whole dream. Everyone KNEW there were zombies around ready to strike out at any minute. By this point in the dream, there even was an occasional zombie reaching out from the shade underneath a tree to grab and devour someone. Everyone knew there were zombies but we carried on in total brain-dead denial of that horror. Here were were members of a crowd stumbling down the streets, a banquet on the hoof, absolutely NO protection yet we were just walking along, not even particularly hurrying. Part of my mind kept saying “Wake up. Wake up. There’s danger here!”
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Nighmare #158 – Mom in Trouble
(Male, 30’s) This nightmare has to be related to Mother’s Day somehow.
I was with my mother shopping, I think. I came across flyer focused on investing that noting how so many different kinds of alcohol are actually the registered trademarks of specific companies. I gather this was supposed to make it more attractive to invest in those companies, or perhaps the parent corporation that owned them all. All of a sudden we were at a house party, in someone’s kitchen that had been set up as a bar. Happy bouncy people were everywhere and the bartender handed me a drink. We looked on the menu for something that my Mother might drink. She’s pretty much a teetotaler and so pretty innocent about alcohol. I think she ended up with a sweet rum drink, maybe with cream, maybe Kaluha…
Before I knew it, it was hours later. The clock said 4:30 AM! The party was still going quite strongly with music and dancing. Mom was smashed, absolutely drunk, barely able to stand even propped against a wall. I felt horrible, like I’d neglected her. Everyone was giggling because someone noticed that the place was surrounded by cops in riot gear. I looked out the back window and was able to hide just as a battering ram shattered the outside kitchen door and a legion of police dogs poured inside. Now that I think about it, there were hardly any policemen at all, mostly ravenous dogs. The dogs started biting at everything that moved. I tucked my hands inside the sleeves of my coat so I had no exposed skin. One of the dogs bit my right hand, swallowed it up to the wrist. Its teeth couldn’t penetrate my jacket so it just sort of hung there, growling, chewing every now and again. I tried to get over to my Mom but another dog bit onto my left hand. The dogs weren’t impossibly heavy but they made walking difficult. Mom had the sense to hide in a back room and turn off the lights. The police either got who they came for or had set up a very loose cordon because Mom and I (and the two police dogs!) were able to escape. The dream gets fuzzy at this point but we we able to get in a taxi and ride away at least a certain distance. Then I realized I was in my old neighborhood, the one where I grew up. The rest of the dream was spent avoiding the police or any official notice while trying to take care of my Mom who was still stupid drunk.
Weird.
Rush over to the Classic Tales Podcast and pick up the first part of H.P.Lovecraft’s “The Lurking Fear.” The reader and proprietor of the site, B.J.Harrison has a suitably dramatic style of presentation that works especially well with Lovecraft’s luridly over-written prose. You might also want to subscribe to the Classic Tales as well, since in past months several nightmarish titles have appeared. They include delicious chestnuts as “Berenice” by Poe, “The Vampyr” by Polidori and “The Horla” by deMaupassant, etc. If you miss them in the (free) feed, all of the audio books are available for purchase.
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Nightmare #158 – Lost in the Vaults
(Male, 50’s) I had lost my wife, literally. She had gone missing in this strange building.
The building was very much like the basement of a bank where they have safe deposit boxes (at least the way they’re depicted in movies.) There were two sides to the vaults, two corridors connecting them and two elevators that went up and down between the two floors of the vaults. I was riding the elevator in one of the areas with her and all of a sudden she wasn’t beside me anymore. I was still in the elevator but she must have stepped out. I rode up and down the elevator and i could see no one outside through the elevator windows, just the lines of metal vaults. I stopped at one floor and held the door open and I called out to her but my voice echoed and reverberated down the corridor in such a way that no one would be able to tell where I was or what I was saying. I got back on the elevator and rode down. I decided that my wife was the kind of person who wouldn’t waste all this time in forethought, she’d just step off the elevator and investigate matters. In fact, that’s evidently what she’d already done.
When the elevator doors opened, I stepped out. But it was not like the vault corridors I’d seen before. I was actually in a relatively small room, maybe 10′ x 10′ and there was a very large object in the room that looked like an ice chest you’d find at a motel or hotel. It was very fancy with a powder-coat paint job of a very deep maroon, almost brown. Again, I made myself be brave and I opened the hinged door. It was thick like an insulated door. But all I could see was another hinged door, smaller than the first. I opened it. Again another door. In total, three doors. Behind the third door was a rectangular lid, much like a door but without a hinge. I had to removed this entirely. Again, another lid. In total four lids each one deeper and deeper inside this strange chest, each one harder to reach and harder to see until I wasn’t able to see at all what I was reaching into beyond that seventh portal.
Again, I forced myself to be brave, because that’s what my wife would do. I stuck my hand past that last open hole. There was a very weird substance in there. My first thought is that it was brains, very very dry brains. It was slightly sticky to the touch, rubbery and felt a bit like a very large number of rubber toys or gummy-bears had been pressed tightly together. About this time, the dream faded.