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Nightmares

Nightmare #153 – Classroom Anxiety

(Male, 30’s) I haven’t been in a college class room in over a decade but that’s where this nightmare took place. Maybe it’s not a nightmare like the other ones on your site. Maybe it’s just an anxiety dream but I felt pretty weird when I woke up.

I accidentally opened a doorway in the office building where I work and I discovered that inside is a classroom, just like the classrooms in the college I attended. There was a table and a professor standing by the windows and there was another student sitting at the table. I say another student because as soon as I saw this situation I knew immediately that I signed up for a class with this professor and that I was now only accidentally attending it. I went inside and sat down. This professor wasn’t anybody I know but I had the sense that he was someone I particularly admired and respected, that I was feeling really lucky to be able to take this class. But as class started, I realized that not only hadn’t I read the book we were discussing, I hadn’t even bought it. I didn’t know what to do, whether to pretend i knew what was going on while this other student kept saying everything, hoping the professor just wouldn’t realize that I didn’t know what was going on. About twenty minutes into the class, twenty deeply painful minutes, this other student comes in. He is very noisy getting his materials out almost to the point of being disrespectful as I see it. He interrupts the professor and says “I may be out of line here because, heck I didn’t read the material. I haven’t even bought the book yet. But it seems like what you’re saying here is…” and then he goes on to spew out some stupid theory that has nothing to do with what’s been going on in class. I am furious at this arrogant student but then at the same time, I’m not a lot different from him. I woke up with this twisted sense of anxiety and rage. Like I said, not exactly a nightmare but surely and uncomfortable dream.

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Nightmares

Nightmare #152 – Cave Painter

(Male, 40’s) This nightmare was epic length, a whole story. It took place in the distant past, thousands of years ago. I was a trainee to be a shaman or something and this was my final trial. It was sunset and the whole landscape was a reddish-brown color, burnt sienna, I think they call it. We may have traveled all day to get there. There were a few trees, small scrub-like ones but mostly this rocky, dusty red soil. As I write this down, there’s a sense that this place felt like the pictures I’ve seen of Mars.

I had no idea how much farther we were traveling but we stopped and all of a sudden I looked down and there are these carefully carved stone steps, leading down to a large closed door. I take a few things from my pack, paints and a straw. I get a good look at the other members of the party. There are probably six of us and our skin is almost identically colored to the earth around us. Everyone is bald and has several geometrically patterned tattoos.

The task is that I’m supposed to descend these steps and go through the doors into a cave where I’ll be locked in all night. Somewhere inside – I’m just supposed to “know” where – I am to draw a picture of the spirit being that will watch over me all my life… or something. Initially, I was going to take some tinder to make a fire but the elders suggest that there is only a very little oxygen in the cave so I’d better not do that. And for some reason that makes sense to me, that I’m going to draw a picture of something while I’m sealed up in a cave where I might suffocate.

The next thing I’m doing is snaking my way through this twisty, rocky cave. I think the floor is sandy though so it’s not too unpleasant to walk through which is good because the walls seem pretty rough. I can feel things – images – scraped into the walls which I figure is where other initiates have depicted their spirit creatures. I keep going in a bit further until I no longer feel the scratches but before I get my gear out, I get the sense that there is someone else in the cave with me. Maybe it’s someTHING else. The cave is completely dark but there’s something between me and the cave entrance. I can’t see it but I know that it is entirely covered in hair, thick hair, fur like a bear or a water buffalo. I can hear it breathing but I can’t see it. That’s when I woke up.

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Nightmares

Nightmare #151 – Ghosts amid the Honey Bears

(Male, 40’s) In this nightmare, I was looking for my dog but I haven’t actually had a dog since I was a kid. It wasn’t in the house anywhere so I went outside. Our house now was on the edge of a very large park, one with mountains and pine trees instead of the suburbs that it actually is in. I yelled for my dog and then I saw it being carried in the mouth of a bear. This bear was on the edge of our backyard, just where it turned rough and started into the park. The dog, scraggy black fur, was obviously dead but I was concerned that if this bear was hungry or ornery enough to attack a dog, it wouldn’t think twice about attacking any of the people who seemed to be just standing around oblivious to the creature. I started yelling to folks to slowly move away and to get inside. There was one couple in the middle of the back yard who didn’t hear me or didn’t want to move or just didn’t understand. The man was wearing a black suit with a black bowler hat and the woman wore a full length white dress. She held a baby in her arms. I was foolishly brave and approached them. By the time I reached the couple, there was another bear within the same area, about 10 feet. These bears were large at least five feet from the ground to their backs when they walked on all fours. Their fur was long probably six to eight inches long and it was a rich golden color. It looked like honey, that same translucent color. I figured the couple were just panicking so I tried to make it easy for them. I said, “Just stand where you are and I will back away from you. I’ll get the bears to follow me.” No response from them. I started to back away, the bears followed me… and these stupid people started following me too! As I was backing up, I run into something incredibly solid which for some reason I know is yet another bear, this one much larger and more sturdy than the others. I am now literally penned in by these immense bears while two of them are sniffing toward the baby in the woman’s arms. Still this couple doesn’t seem able or willing to move. I say “Give me the child” so the woman handed me the bundle and about that time I realize that I can see through these two people, that they are actually transparent. They were ghosts. The full horror of my predicament flooded into me: I was surrounded by bears that were primed for an attack while I was carrying something like a ghostly supernatural baby. The last thing I remember is running purposefully and deliberately through a wooded area with pine branches lashing at my face. I knew I couldn’t outrun the bears but if I just moved deliberately toward the house I thought I could make it.

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #150 – “Men of a Wolfish Nature”

(Male, 30’s) My wife and I were walking into from town and we passed a tent that was set up as a vegetable stand. The canvas of the tent was printed with broad stripes, I forget what color and there were wooden crates filled to the top with odd fruits and vegetables both inside and outside of the tent. The inside of the tent seemed much larger than it could possibly have been by looking at it from the outside. There were also strange items on shelves, things that looked magical if not just new age-y like a porcelain wall-hanging that depicted something about a woman’s anatomy, perhaps the stages of development during pregnancy, perhaps some strange phrenology diagram. There was a man and a woman who tended the stand both of whom were very friendly but the man did all the talking. There was another person there who was just finishing up her shopping. The man took a 5 x 7 framed photo off the tent wall. It was a picture of a woods, a totally non-descript area of undergrowth and saplings. He explained, “There’s a place where the old Dexter Road splits. Down the wrong path is where men of a wolfish nature congregate.” I nodded like I thought I knew what he was talking about. My wife accidentally dropped something that was like a tiny porcelain bell. It rang but it didn’t break. The shop keepers didn’t seem to mind. The man was cutting into an onion, a strange onion because instead of a papery brown exterior, this had a thick mottled purple husk like the skin of a citrus fruit. He held out a sample to me balanced on the edge of his knife. The onion was sweet, onion-y but sweeter than any onion I’d ever tasted. We thanked them and went on our way to town.

When we returned from town, I wanted to buy some of those remarkable onions but we found the tent completely abandoned. The flaps of the tent were blowing in the wind and the wind chimes were sounding insanely. It had started to get dark and quite cold so we decided to drive the last part of the way home (? I know that part doesn’t make sense. Like we just had our car in our back pocket or something?) But we got a little bit lost. We were driving down a dirt road that had been torn up quite badly so we couldn’t go very fast. What was strange was that houses had been built right up to the very edge of this dirt road on both sides. There wasn’t room for a drainage ditch, let alone a front yard. The road was only wide enough to go in one direction. Then we came to the end of the road. The road dead-ended at a small woods, similar to the one in the photo. No one could tell whether it actually WAS the woods in the picture because everything was so dark by this point. I say everyone because by now there were several people in the car with us. The car had also shrunk to the point that I sat in the passenger’s seat and had to have the door open, with one leg dangling outside just to have enough room for everyone.

We started back and soon we knew that THIS was the fork of the road that the man had told us about. The houses were strange shacks and the road — maybe we have to call it a path at this point — snaked up and around the houses, back and forth, very VERY close to them. We had to get out and close the doors on some houses so we could drive past. The final section of the path actually drove THROUGH someone’s living room. We talked about what we should do but we decided we had to go through. Once we cleared the house, we got back up to speed and tried to drive as quickly as we could. Then someone said “If that was the wrong path, where were the men with wolfish nature?” Just then we felt something heavy land on the roof of the car, something that started scraping with nails hard enough to shred metal. I was scared but not for myself. For some reason, I knew that the onion the vegetable man had fed me would protect me, that it was wolfsbane or something. But I was the only person who’d eaten it. Everyone else in the car was doomed.

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #149 – Monstrous Actor

(Male, 30’s) In this nightmare, a friend of mine was directing a one person play and I was producing it. There was going to be one last rehearsal before the performance. There was a meeting of all the people who had done the lights and the set and that kind of thing. We all were meeting in a church, in the alcove off to the side of this incredibly large sanctuary. The sanctuary was probably a thousand feet tall and a half mile long. The ceiling was supported by these columns that were long strands of poured concrete. It almost felt organic, very beautiful, delicate and airy.

The alcove off to the side was rather dark. There were no lights. The actor was thick and brutish, with a massive jaw and heavy set eyes. His skin tone was unnatural as well, a green-ish tone. As I describe him now, he’s almost like a gargoyle. For some reason I knew that if this actor ever got the director alone, say at the rehearsal the next night, that the actor would kill the director and eat him, literally that the actor would devour the director, bones and all. The director was someone I know who’s a really carefree guy, totally oblivious to any danger and probably totally unable to deal with it if he did notice it.

I kept telling myself, reminding myself to mention it to the director my suspicion but other duties kept coming up. I had to meet with one of the ministers at the church. His office was in a curved room, shaped almost like a claw in that it started very narrow and got wider as it curved around. There was a bank of stained glass windows on the left — very modernist, colors and patterns but no figures — and a wall of bookshelves on the right — floor to ceiling, hard bound books. There was a large paper maché mask leaning against the wall at the far end of the room. The mask had bulbous cheeks and a broad contorted smile. I told him he should hang that up. He smiled like he thought that was somehow an indecent or at least impish notion.

When I went back to the alcove where the pre-rehearsal meeting was taking place, everyone was gone. I don’t know if the show went on.

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #148 – The Girl from the Dangerous Basement

…The woman was wildly insane…

Continue reading “Nightmare #148 – The Girl from the Dangerous Basement”
Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #147 – Reckless Driving

(Female, 40’s) The other night I had this dream that I was riding in the back seat of a mini van with probably six other people. The person who was driving the vehicle was a colleague from work. I hadn’t been paying attention but he said to everyone “You’re sure you’re OK with this?” Everyone agreed. He had evidently asked if he could take us on a “little ride.” The next thing I knew the minivan was careening down the stands of a stadium. It was a very deep and steep brick stadium, far deeper than the big one at the University. We were picking up speed as we bounced over the seats. The person next to me yelled “We’re all going to die!” Everyone else was screaming. Except for the guy that was driving. He had a very amused smile on his face but I didn’t know if that meant he wasn’t worried or if he was just crazy. I decided that whatever was going to happen, the best thing for me to do was to close my eyes and just not worry about it. We finally reached the field at the bottom of the stadium and we crashed into these very large wooden blocks. The driver shouted “Yes! We gotta good score!” Come to find out this was all some adrenaline-junky game. We drove back up the side of the stadium where there was a small camp of other adrenaline junkies who were just waiting for their next run. Though this all sort of ties up nicely, at the bottom of the stadium on the field near the big wooden blocks was a daycare for severely impaired children. There was the sense that it was all OK because they weren’t mobile enough to climb on top of the wooden barricades. That was the part of the dream that stayed unsettling, that kept me disturbed all day.

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #146 – The Obstinantly Haunted House

(Male, 30’s) I was trying to spend the night in what everyone thought was a haunted house. I knew deep down in my soul that there was just someone trying to scare myself and the other person who was there with me. I don’t think there was any reward involved, just the sense that if the place wasn’t really haunted that some kind of curse would be lifted, not like a supernatural curse but more like a psychological curse.

The house was dark but not entirely pitch black. We decided to try not to sleep at all that night so we just sat up awake in the dining room. The dining room opened into the living room through a large doorway but it was so dark in there that we couldn’t see what was going on in there. We could make out various whispy gray shapes moving but nothing more distinct. They shapes looked like window drapes and I for one wasn’t certain that wasn’t all they were. The guy I was with was pretty sure they were ghosts, though. There were also strange sounds coming from the other room. I thought they sounded like people knocking into the furniture as they walked around in the dark but my friend, as could be expected, thought they were ghosts. The hauntings seemed to come in waves, like there would be twenty or thirty minutes of nothing but boredom punctuated all at once by something happening. It drove my friend crazy but it just started to make me angry. I wanted to rush into the other room and catch the people in the act but my friend became hysterical at the idea of us separating. But one time, when one of these haunting assaults started, I picked up an end table and threw it into the living room. It didn’t seem to hit anything or make any difference. If anything, it just un-nerved by buddy more.

I was getting desperate to get rid of any sense of ghostly intervention, and angry and perhaps a bit scared. And this is where I literally don’t know what I was thinking in the context of the dream. I knew that there was a crack house next door, actually in the same building. The haunted house was like an attached brownstone, a brick building built into a long line of buildings. This one happened to be “haunted;” the next one happened to be a crack house. I knew that crack dealers and crack addicts could be dangerous in ways that fake ghosts and the people behind them can’t be. So the plan, I guess, to the extent that I had a plan was to alert the attention of the crack addicts next door and get them to terrify the people behind the haunting. I crawled down the staircase that connected the two parts of the building and somehow got the attention of the dope fiends. They ran out of their house and into the haunted house. The crack addicts flipped on the lights (why hadn’t WE thought to do that?) and there was gun fire going every where. I was hiding under a table with a table cloth on it. There was a guy with a semiautomatic weapon standing less than a foot away from me. For some reason, thankfully, he didn’t see me. There was yelling and shooting and eventually they just left.

That’s about where the dream ended, with no resolution. I don’t know what happened to my friend. I don’t know if we lifted the curse on the building. I don’t even know if the gun-toting crack heads killed the “ghosts.”

Categories
"What We Fear"

Dreams So Good They’re Bad

I can cope with fear. I’ve got rational categories and ironic perspectives all set up to deal with even the most disturbing nightmare or distopic vision. To be honest, I *enjoy* a good bit of white-knuckled terror because it wakes me out of the complacent greyness of my everyday life. But recently I’ve encountered something worse than nightmares.

Continue reading “Dreams So Good They’re Bad”
Categories
Games

Internet Game – “Dark” Movies Hidden in a Painting

I just spent a few enjoyable minutes playing a game at this site:

http://us.mms.com/us/dark/dark_game.jsp

The premise is that there are the names of 50 “dark” movies hidden as allegories and symbols in a painting. Click on the picture, type in the name. Some are pretty obvious; some had me scratching my head… that is, until I slapped my forehead “D’uh!” It’s well worth a look even if the site is a blatant promotion for dark chocolate.

I love how visual puzzles make the brain link words and images in ways that aren’t mere illustration.

By the way, if you need help, post which part and I’ll give you clues.

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #145 – The Airless, Shadow-filled School

(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.

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #144 – Backyard Hooligans

(Female, 40’s) I was standing washing dishes in my kitchen sink– not an unusual situation at all, unfortunately. I heard the loud zoom and roar of a car engine. I moved to the window, looking down toward the street, assuming the noise was coming from there, and suddenly this golden Porsche raced down my relatively-short driveway, going extremely fast and somewhat out of control, tires spinning in the gravel. The driver’s side of the car scraped along the side of our beautiful new garage as the driver slammed on the breaks, and the car came to an abrupt halt. I went out the backdoor of my house and approached the car, bending over to see if the driver was all right. His head lolled back and forth, like he was fighting to gain consciousness or like he was on drugs, but he didn’t appear to be hurt at all. No blood. He was glaring at me through his heavy eyelids.

I went back inside to call the police. But first I called to my son. I asked him to sneak outside and get the license plate number of the car in the yard. Then I started looking in the phone book for the phone number for the police. I thought about calling 911, but I remembered reading a public service announcement that asked us not to call 911 except for true emergencies, not for car accidents. Whatever. So I got the yellow pages and started looking for the phone number there.

Meanwhile, the driver of the golden Porsche was attempting to flee the scene of the accident. He’d turned off his car lights and was slowly backing down the driveway, careful to avoid scraping any more buildings. I went to the front door and looked around, but I couldn’t see the car any where. I asked my son if he’d gotten the license plate, but he said “No” very loudly. I felt annoyed with him — “What the heck?” Then I noticed he was winking at me– he was covering, pretending he hadn’t gotten the license number because the golden Porsche was now parked in front of our house, among all the cars parked on our street. We went inside and my son jotted down the license plate number. His handwriting was terrible and I had to ask him what the numbers were!

Then I called the police station. I was routed through a series of push-button requests and put on hold, listening to musak. Then I heard the noise of a dozen car engines, racing and zooming in my driveway. The Porsche driver had returned with a bunch of his friends and they were driving 3 cars wide into our yard, making a terrible racket with their cars and their shouts. I went to the second floor, still holding the phone to my ear with the long cord trailing behind me, and I looked out on the rutkas. I leaned out of the window to see better, and I lost my balance and fell out, a whole story down, but I didn’t get hurt. The hooligans laughed at me. One produced a pair of shears and made a show of cutting the telephone cord.

I scrambled up and ran back inside the house, locking the door behind me. Then I got my cellphone and dialed the police again. I waited patiently on hold again, musak playing in the background, wondering who was going to pay for repairing the big scrapes in my new garage.

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #143 – The Dark Carnival

(Male, 40’s) Now that I write down this nightmare I realize that nothing really horrific happens in it but there was a terrible sense of foreboding, like something extremely bad was just about to happen. I was at an indoor amusement park with someone else’s family – a mom, a dad, a couple really small kids. It was night time and the sense I got was that this place was open all around the clock. We were in the middle of this huge indoor plaza and we were going to take in one of the shows. The older kid, the one about 4, wandered away from us as we stood getting out bearings. He got on this escalator headed down. I scooped up the other kid, who must have been about 2 and ran down the steps to catch up with the first kid before he totally disappeared.

The escalator ride was almost entirely dark. There were sheets of black canvas hung so that they’d nearly hit your face as you descended. At the bottom was the lobby for the show. It appeared to be some kind of rather terrifying vaudeville show, a sideshow nearly a “freakshow,” not something that would be obviously appropriate for children. I decided to stall for time until the children’s parent’s arrived. They couldn’t be far behind us on the escalator.

Some kind of rather terrifying vaudeville show…

In this lobby area were booths devoted to each of the stars or attractions in the show. There was a busty blond woman in a flimsy white chemise who turned into a werewolf, supposedly at some point during the show. There was a thin man in a black suit that was a bit too big for him, as if he’s been wasting away from life on the road, who wore an immensely tall stovepipe hat. He seemed lost and badly preoccupied. The strange thing about these booths at least from a marketing perspective was that the actual stars of the show stood behind the booths. We were free to talk and interact with them. The children seemed to be rather scared of some of these performers so I started talking to the performers, joking with them, trying to make them appear OK. I don’t know if it worked. Some of the acts sounded pretty intriguing like this person who worked turning snakes into swords. We waited longer and longer. The children’s parents never appeared. Furthermore, there was no escalator that would take us up out of there. The exit must be on the other side of the show. We had to go through it all.

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #142 – Too Many Guests and a Missing —

(Female, 40’s) This dream started out as “merely” an anxiety dream but it became a true nightmare before the end.

In the dream, we were getting ready to have a big party at our house. It wasn’t our real house, but some weird mash-up of a bunch of different houses: the basement was from my childhood home, the kitchen was from an aunt’s house, and the huge living room was like something from a magazine, really big and modern with a wall of glass sliding doors. My whole family was helping to clean up the house and get organized for the party. My husband and my mother-in-law were setting up a dozen round tables in the living room and covering them with table cloths. It looked like a reception hall. The problem was that I just wasn’t sure why we were having a huge party at all.

Then I remembered: our daughter is graduating from high school so we must be having her graduation party. I was confused however– had we sent out invitations? I didn’t remember doing that! What were we having for food and drink? I didn’t remember doing anything about that either.

Some guests started showing up suddenly. I suggested they sit on the stairs until we were ready to get started. So they sat down and talked to each other and I ignored them.

…I kept saying, don’t worry– it’s under control…

I remembered that in the basement there was a box of party supply odd and ends: some pink plates, some red cups, napkins of various colors. If I could find that box, we’d be all set! So I went in the basement and started looking. I looked for a long time, interrupted by various people asking questions about food and drinks and guests and what time the party was going to start. I kept saying, don’t worry– it’s under control. And I kept looking, but I couldn’t find the party box.

Then I started looking for my daughter. It was her party after all so she should come and talk to her guests. No one had seen her. No one knew where she was. I was worried about her missing the poorly planned party, but I was more upset because I knew she was gone now. Just gone.

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #141 – Clumsy Bank Robber

(Male) I dreamed last night that I was waiting in line at the bank. As I neared the tellers I realized that I was carrying a handgun with me. I was flooded with a sense of embarrassment and fear but I figured the best way out of the situation was to rob the bank. So I stepped out of line and yelled at everyone to get down on the ground. I waved the gun around a little bit to show everyone just how serious I was. And I dropped the gun. I didn’t just drop it but rather I let go of it and watched it go sliding along the floor ending up probably twenty feet away from me.

…As I neared the tellers I realized that I was carrying a handgun with me…

There was a painfully awkward moment when the crowd at the bank wasn’t sure what I was going to do and when I myself didn’t know what I was going to do. At just about that point I saw someone I knew in line. He was extremely angry at me. I guess we had gone to the bank together that day with the idea of robbing the bank but that now I was messing things up, he didn’t know if he could save the situation. I felt so clumsy and alone. There were guards and security cameras. I was going to jail forever.

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #140 – Extorted by my Fingertips

(Male, 30’s) This dream was very convoluted and crazy and parts were just so very sick and tawdry. I kept trying to do the smart thing but the situation just kept getting worse and worse. I was a college student and I was trying to fit in. There was a group that seemed very popular, not quite as organized as a fraternity, but perhaps more like a secret society. It was made up of at least 40 athletic guys and one very attractive brunette girl. They let me hang out with them for awhile but then, for no apparent reason, a half dozen of the guys beat me up, knocked me to the ground and kicked me until I couldn’t move. I think one of the guys peed on me when I was lying there nearly unconscious. They laughed and said it was part of the “hazing.” I wish the nightmare ended there but it just continued on and on.

…this secret society of thugs would do something simply horrible if they had that key…

I knew that this secret society of thugs would do something simply horrible if they had that key so I asked them for time to think about it. I used that time to gather together my family, my mother and father and our pet dogs (?) and get us all into a station wagon so we could flee. I didn’t know exactly how powerful this society was but I had reason to believe they could hurt my parents and it would be best if we just re-located to someplace far far away. This station wagon was a mess by the way, it barely ran at all. It was gray and dingy on the outside. I drove it down these heavily rutted gravel roads because I was trying to avoid the major roads that might have been watched.

As I turned a corner, the car flipped over into a ditch. There was another vehicle there, conveniently, a small red car. We piled out of the station wagon and started carrying our luggage over to the red car. It was clear we were going to have to leave many things behind, probably most of our things. Just then a big truck appeared with a dozen or so of the society thugs. I stopped loading up the car we were using to escape. I turned to face the truck as it pulled up and right then, I woke up.

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #133 – The Slashed Horizon

(Male, 40’s) I was chasing someone through these very dark, black streets that were also slick with rain. I had lost the trail and was a bit lost when I realized I wasn’t in a city at all. What I thought all along was the city scape of buildings was actually a long backdrop painting. The canvas was stretched all along the side of a large semi trailer. Then I looked around me and realized that everything I had been running through, everything that had felt like a city was actually just cutout flats on a very very small stage. How could I have ever taken that to be the street I was running down?

I looked back at the back drop and noticed that it had been slashed with huge long cuts running lengthwise. The truck was in the middle of a field. It was the middle of the afternoon. There was nothing else, absolutely nothing else as far as the eye could see. Then there was a young woman. She had very straight, plain blond hair about shoulder length… and a HUGE knife, easily a foot long that she waved around like she was very comfortable with it. It was clear that she was the one who had sliced up the backdrop. She wanted me to stay and talk but I said No I had to head back to town because I had to pee. She laughed and said “You’re in a field. Just go ahead and pee here.” I replied, still eager to get the heck away from her “You just want to see my penis.” She replies by grabbing the back of her t-shirt and pulling it off in one smooth movement so she’s standing there, topless and bare-breasted still brandishing this immense knife. I am absolutely terrified — I don’t want to piss her off but I don’t have a clue what to do.

Categories
Book Comics Movies

The “30 Days of Night” Franchise

(The Grim Gnome) I don’t like vampires, generally speaking. The whole rule-bound / old-world / invitation-only aspects make them about as scary as a supernatural Certified Public Accountant. Except for the ones in “30 Days of Night.” If you haven’t heard of this series you either have been moldering away in a casket or you’re metaphysically immune to the effects of horror-culture. A few years back, writer Steve Niles and artist Ben Templesmith wove together a freshly twisted premise with spattery exuberant artwork and pumped life back into the genre of the horror comic. The fresh twist on the vampire rules that gets “30 Days of Night” rolling is obvious from the title; if vampires hate sunlight, then what if they attacked a place that didn’t have much of it, say, a city located near the Arctic circle? What if a whole ragtag clan of vampires threw a party of sorts during the month of darkness and attacked the whole town. Add human hero. Stir well. Garnish with a nasty skewer at the end and, heck that’s what started the juggernaut. I really have to recommend it. Quite highly.




A sequel picked up the storyline and propelled it forward, again ending with a sickening little twist. And a third, completing a classical trilogy, right? If I understand the chronology correctly, the movie started development around this time and the comics kept coming. A collection of tales appeared, including a rather dumb one about vampires in space. Some of these feature artists other than Templesmith and honestly, I feel cheated with those issues, especially cheated when the artist is attempting to make work that sort of / kind of / almost resembles Templesmith’s art. So though I can’t highly recommend them all — one reason I can’t is because they’re STILL making new ones — I still have to confess I’ve bought and savored every one of them.

Niles’s other comics are nothing to ignore… but for the moment I WILL ignore them, or to be more exact I’ll postpone looking at them until another post. Who knew that comics would work so well for horror? I sure didn’t. I thought the EC’s Crypt Keeper was just weird and, OK, so I was afraid of “The Tomb of Dracula” but I was kid back then. I even thought “Dark Shadows” was scary.

And then there’s the “30 Days of Night” movie. I admit that I felt an actual quiver of excitement when I first heard Sam (“Army of Darkness”) Raimi’s name connected with the project. Alas, it was only as a producer. There are parts of the movie that are very good. For instance, some of the shots are very haunting, like an aerial tracking shot that shows the carnage of the initial attack. And throughout the movies human faces seem to have unusually de-saturated color which makes everyone look cold .. and then also makes the blood really pop out. And I really appreciated that at least a couple times when humans were standing outside in sub-zero temperatures that there were clouds of condensation when they breathed or spoke. As curmudgeonly northerner, I can’t STAND fake winters on screen. My comments don’t sound like a love-fest, though do they? Perhaps I’m grumpy for paying good money to see the movie in the theatre. I’m a stingy curmudgeon. But furthermore, I can’t help but thinking that the comic book was scarier. There was a LOT of back story in the comic book that was simply removed for the movie, so much that there doesn’t seem to be much possibility for a sequel. I was honestly pretty shocked that so much editing was required because I don’t usually consider comics to be that dense when it comes to story line.

“30 Days of Night” – the movie – comes out on video this week. Though I don’t feel unusually COMPELLED to see the movie again when it comes out on video, if I’m honest with myself, I’m pretty sure I will. If for no other reason than it will remind me of how much I loved the original comic.

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #132 – A Chase to a Strange, Terrible World

(Male, 20’s) I had a partner, a woman with medium length blond hair, and we were running after a man. We were in a long corridor and every so often, there was a set of doors. We’d run through them and we’d see him just going through the next set. We kept running and chasing him. Finally, we saw him going through a set of doors that opened into bright daylight so we knew he was going outside. When we went through those doors we were on the roof top of a building and we could see the man over by a smokestack. He was climbing up a ladder on the side of the smoke stack and when he reached the top, he pushed aside a lid that was on the smokestack and he climbed inside. We followed.

Inside the smokestack was a vine. We started climbing down the vine, still in pursuit of the man. We climbed for what felt was like hours, even though I know it must have just been a couple minutes. It was a dry brown vine and eventually we reached the end of it. There was a little gap and then another vine started. We though we could easily jump from one vine to the other one but we didn’t know that gravity changed between the two vines. What was “up” became “down” so halfway through our jump, we were jumping “up.” But we were able to grab the other vine and continue the chase UP a vine. Again we climbed for hours and at the end of the smokestack, we pushed aside the lid and found ourselves in a very dense jungle.

Then something else must have happened but the next part I remember, I was in the dense jungle and the man I was chasing was yelling at me, saying “Come on. Come on! We’ve got what we came for.” A dark and scary looking cloud was bearing down on us. And I was holding the decapitated head of my female partner, tucked under my arm like a football. I had no idea what had happened but the man was very insistent. We started climbing down the smokestack again back to the normal world. Once we had gone a little way, once I was sure that the cloud wasn’t following us, I said “We’ve got to go back.” The man took the head I was holding and pushed back the hair to reveal the scalp. There were eight things there, though I can only remember one. There were some Mardi Gras beads woven in between the tufts of hair. “See, we’ve got what we came for.” We continued climbing, climbing back to our world.

Categories
Movies

Movies – “Dark Place” (Episode 2)

(The Grim Gnome) A couple weeks ago I linked to the first episode of Garth Marenghi’s Dark Place, a delicious satire on horror TV. Here’s episode two.

Garth Marenghi’s “Dark Place” Episode 2