(Female, 50s) This might be my oldest nightmare from childhood, and one that’s stuck around in my memory for years. I don’t remember how old I was when I had it, probably around 5. It seemed to bring a bunch of things that I was afraid of together into a big ball of a nightmare.
The dream took place in our basement, which was a room that I was scared of to start. My dad may have recently installed a drop-ceiling — something he did for work — or maybe I had just come to understand how a drop-ceiling hung: that there was some space above between the tiles over my head and the actual basement ceiling. It was a big enough space for a monster to live. No one else in my family knew about the monster, only me, because he was invisible.
The invisible monster hurt me, but there was nothing that could be done about it. One of the ways he hurt me was by making me have the ear aches, that seemed to be a frequent problem in my childhood. From real life, I remember the small blue glass bottle of ear drops from the doctor that my mom would heat up and then drip into my ears.
In my dream, I was playing alone in the basement, which at that time I wouldn’t have done. I didn’t go down there alone at all. My family were all upstairs in the house. The invisible monster came to me and told me to be quiet, that he would tell me a secret.
When he leaned in closer to me to whisper, he took a sharp piece of metal and screwed it into my ear. It really hurt a lot, but I couldn’t stop him. Then he did the same to my other ear, leaning in like he was going to whisper a secret and then twisting a piece of metal into my ear.
Almost needless to say, I woke up with a really bad ear ache.