Month: June 2008

(Male, 30’s) I woke the other night just terrified from a dream that was otherwise pretty much OK. The rest of the dream wasn’t very eventful, really. I think I was doing something in a yard. The point when it turned scary though was when I went into a garage. This garage in the dream reminds me a lot of the garage that came with a house I used to rent about ten years ago. It was extremely small, like it wasn’t built to fit a car. Seriously, the building wasn’t wide enough to open the doors of a car if one could even be squeezed inside. In the dream, there WAS a car inside. It was a small car, though I can’t tell much about it’s make or model for reasons that will be obvious in a second. The nose of the car was touching the back wall of the garage. And some how, I was UNDERNEATH the car!

Night has fallen very quickly and it was extremely dark under the car. The garage had a dirt floor that was damp, perhaps with water or perhaps with motor oil. I was only able to wiggle, keeping my head at an angle. I shimmied my way up to the front of the car but the license plate hung down too low for me to get out. I tried pushing the back of my neck against the license plate in order to bend it but all that happened was that I scratched myself up pretty bad. I heard sounds behind me like there was something else in the garage, like a rat or something. I panicked more and more, feeling more and more claustrophobic. When I woke up, I was scratching at the sheets, trying to claw my way out.

(Male, 30’s) It’s clear to me where the parts of this dream came from but it’s still pretty interesting how they all were re-assembled into a nightmare. I work in a high school and we’re all packing up our rooms for summer.

In the nightmare, I’m in an old brick building and there are dozens of people around, kids, teachers, it’s supposed to be a school but it’s a weird old building. It’s not obvious where any room leads or how to get anywhere. There’s a flurry of activity everywhere, people packing things, saying goodbye, getting yearbooks signed. And every where there are these life sized rubber rats. They must have been some kind of mascot or something. There are at least a couple in every room, one teacher’s desks, on the floor. Like a joke that got out of hand. And the weirdest part is that almost ALL of these rubber rats were sealed up in locking storage bags.

I wandered from room to room trying to be of some help and I ended up in a basement. It had a very strong basement feel because the wall were stone, like cobblestone and the mortar was crumbling away. It wasn’t dark or particularly scary on its own. But once I got down there, I realized that there were two teachers there having a very serious, very private discussion about a student. I felt like I should leave them alone but I found I couldn’t. I physically could not fit up the staircase – it didn’t seem like any human could fit up the stairs but I got down there somehow. And again there were dozens of bagged rats, casually tossed in the corners of the cellar. There was another way out, something like a window, perhaps an old unused coal chute. It looked like I could get out of it, like I could fit through the window but it was just a little bit higher than I could reach easily. There was sunshine from outside in the window. What stopped me was I was irrationally afraid that there might be more of these silly rubber rats in whatever space I crawled into. I started to look up into the window to investigate it a bit and that’s when I woke up.

(Male, 40’s) This was a vivid nightmare that I had just as I was trying to wake up. My wife had already gotten up and I must have fallen back to sleep for an instant. I heard her in the other room. She had turned on the computer and was starting to play some music. Sometimes we play a little music in the morning to help us wake up. But the song that was playing was this slow depressing tune. It’s a real tune, one from the Donny Darko soundtrack but I have no idea who performs it. It was dark and slow, hardly the thing that I wanted to hear first thing in the morning, especially if it might “stick” in my ear and be the song I hear all day long. So I force myself out of bed and I find that my wife is gone, that there is no one in the room. But the computer is indeed playing this ominous song. I reach to try and turn off the computer and my hands are suddenly unable to perform the small maneuvers necessary to shut down the computer. I try to poke at the off button with my rigor mortis like fingers but all I succeed in doing is pulling the whole computer off the table, keyboard, monitor, everything. But still the music is playing. I reached down to try to unplug the monitor and I end up pulling the power cable out of the back. There are three exposed wires now that are glowing with a blue arc. For some reason I think that this is a “plasma” perhaps because I’m thinking that this is a plasma screen or something. I know that this is extremely dangerous, both in likelihood of electrocution but also in the chance of spontaneously igniting a massive fire due to its great heat. I don’t know what I’m going to do. I want to save the computer box itself because it has my files on it but I have no reason to believe that I won’t destroy the computer in the process. Just about then, I woke up from the nightmare. And the BEST part was that the stupid song stopped playing!

(Male, 40’s) This nightmare is shocking because it came out of nowhere, out of a very calm and normal dream. I was working in a machine shop. It was very tidy and very well lit. The space itself was contemporary but not overly stylish. I don’t recognize any of the tools in the shop however. There are obvious workstations set up around the room. I must be in some kind of a management position because I’m not actually working at one of the stations, rather, I’m walking around the whole site, answering questions for workers, making things go smoothly. I’m wearing the same clothes as everyone else, that is, a grey canvas-like overalls and a sturdy blue work shirt. Both of these pieces of clothing are worn soft from use and repeated washing.

All of a sudden a worker walks up to me very closely. He says “I realized something about what you asked me to make.” I look in his hand and he’s holding, well, it’s a paper airplane. At least it’s the *shape* of a paper airplane though first of all it’s made of some kind of clear material. It’s very thin and nearly invisible. While I’m looking down at this device, I feel a knife entering my stomach. This guy is stabbing me! But there’s something particularly strange about the blade. It feels like it’s electrified, that it’s shocking me while he’s stabbing me. But the strangest part is that as he’s stabbing me, the impact propels me AND my assailant about 20 feet up into the air. As I’m flying backward with a knife in my gut, I somehow know that this is only the beginning of a fight. That either he’s revealed himself as a spy from another planet, a spy that I’m supposed to neutralize, or that *I* am the spy and that means he’s the counterspy. I thought maybe I could somehow tighten my stomach muscles and trap his hand… However, as soon as we hit the apex of our flight, I woke up.

My stomach still aches where the blade stabbed me in my dream. I was so shaken up, I didn’t want to go back to sleep.