Author: The Grim Gnome

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #24 – The Sadistic Make-over

(Female, 40’s) My oldest, most disturbing nightmare

There are three characters in this dream. There is a little girl of 3 or 4, who is sitting in her highchair at a dining room table. There is the mother, who is in the bathroom out of sight, getting ready to go somewhere; the mother never appears in the dream but she talks to her little girl while she is putting on her makeup and doing her hair. There is also the invisible Monster. He is sitting at the table. The mother doesn’t know he’s there. My perspective shifted back and forth in the dream. Sometimes I was the little girl; sometimes I was the audience watching the scene.

The Monster sits at the table, next to the little girl, and he has a toolbox. She knows he’s there, of course. She can see him. He whispers to the girl and only she can hear his voice. He asks, “Do you want me to make you pretty so you can surprise Mommy?” The little girl nods enthusiastically.

The Monster opens the toolbox, which is full of sharp things: scissors, knives, razor blades, pieces of metal, broken glass. He takes the scissors and chops her hair off all raggedy, all over her head. Then the Monster picks up a big piece of broken glass and jabs it slowly and purposefully deep into the girl’s arm. He leaves it sticking out, and blood begins to drizzle down her skin. He admires his work. Next he takes 10 small squares of metal and slowly pushes one under each of her fingernails. He uses each of his tools to poke and cut her face and arms, and she bleeds from her fingers and arms and cheeks. The box is full of things to hurt and torture her with, but he keeps telling her how pretty she looks.

In the last scene of the dream, the Monster tells the little girl that they are finished and asks if she is ready to surprise Mommy. He lifts the bloodied little girl out of her highchair and sets her on the ground. She toddles off to show her mother, saying “Mommy, mommy, look at me!”

And then the mother screams a long, loud, horrified scream.

I had this nightmare a long time ago, when I was a kid, maybe 9 or 10. It scared me terribly when I had it, and it scares me to think of it still. The thought that nightmares are stories that come from somewhere inside one’s head really doesn’t comfort me. I can’t figure how I came up with this.

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #23 – A Freaky Cat and a Creepy Psychic

(Male, 44) This may not sound too scary but the mood woke me up from a dead sleep.

I was sprawled out on the floor of my living room watching TV, which is strange in itself because I haven’t had a TV in years and I was playing with my pet cat which is also strange because I haven’t had a cat in, well, decades. If it matters, though the living room looks exactly like it does now.

On TV was an episode of the X-Files. Scully was walking across a pitch black courtyard with another woman. The other woman had blond hair if it matters. They were looking for Mulder but had no leads. The two women were having that typical X-files conversation about science vs. intuition, except the blond woman was a psychic, far more extreme and out there than Mulder ever was. She kept mentioning how she was picking up strange vibrations as they were walking, supernatural disturbances. These vibrations meant something was going to happen, something significant, possibly very dangerous. Eventually the psychic stopped walking and said “I can’t believe you can’t feel these vibrations too.” At that moment in the background between the two women a light flared on in a second story room to reveal Mulder bound in thick brown leather straps. I don’t know if he was actually hanging from his throat but it was clear he was in some kind of immediate danger. The women didn’t notice him but rather continued talking.

What was strange was that through most of the scene, the cat I was petting was calm and relaxed. But as soon as the psychic started talking about the strange vibrations she was picking up, the cat kept getting more and more agitated. She walked up and down over my lap, kneading her claws into my legs and into the rug. When the psychic stopped and said “I can’t believe you can’t feel these vibrations too,” the cat stared up at me and her hair all stood up on end, not soft like it was a puff ball but sharp and bristly like it was preparing to defend itself against some danger.

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #22 – Animals Amok, Monstrously Immense

(Male, early 30’s) I’m with a small crowd of people on some tropical island; unnamed, but dream-sense tells me I’m somewhere around Guam. Ponderous steps shake the earth and this bizarre hulk comes into view over the treeline: a gigantic rhinocerous, truly a behemoth thing. The only way to appreciate it’s size is to note that strapped to it’s back is an elephant. By comparison, the elephant appears small, but then strapped to _its_ back is a full-sized dump truck. So it’s larger than your average elephant.

The rhino rears and looses it’s balance; the elephant slides off its back. When it hits the ground the dumptruck’s restraining ropes give way it crashes free of the elephant. The elephant hesitates for a moment, then goes to the rhino and starts pushing at it, as though to help it back on its feet. This initial mis-perception is corrected as the elephant, enraged, gores its over-sized target with its tusks, over and over and over.

About this time the crowd and I get over our initial shock and decide it’s time to run like hell. Because that’s one big, pissed off pachyderm and we know coming after us next…

A chase that follows; then the dream just got weird and not so much scary, so I’ll leave off here.

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #21 – Saviour, Monster

(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.

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #20 – Scraping, scratching

(Male, 40’s) I was alone in the house. It was dark and I was watching TV in the living room. The layout of our house is that there’s a living room at the front of the house then an archway leading to a dining room and a doorway leading to the kitchen. All three rooms are in a row so you could see into the kitchen from the living room. The dining room and kitchen were dark, probably the only light on was coming from the TV. I started hearing scratching coming from the kitchen. Just every now and then. I knew that there was no one else there, no people, no pets. I ignored the sound. Then the sound got more regular, a scraping, scratching sound. Still I watched TV. Eventually the sound turned into a constant scraping and I looked and squinted and tried to see what was going on.

There were branches slowly being pushed into the kitchen from just beyond my line of sight. There were branches, and paper and trash. Something was pushing all of this stuff slowly into the kitchen. I didn’t want to go back there and confront it directly but I wanted to know what was going on so I went out the front door. I switched on the light and looked down the side of the house. I couldn’t see what was pushing the stuff inside but there was a huge white wolf. Gleaming white. Larger than a Labrador. It bared its teeth at me and snarled silently, menacingly. I tried to move, whether to get away or investigate I don’t know but every move I made, the wolf countered and continued to threaten.

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #19 – The Dogs, the Un-dead

(Male, mid-40’s) I dreamt that my partner was, well, he was dead. I didn’t realize it at first so I tried to talk with him but he kept moving toward me, slowly, very slowly. Then I got a good look at him. His skin was grey and his eyes were red. In the dream, I figured he had caught some kind of vampire thing that was going around. He kept coming and I knew I couldn’t let him catch me. I got to the staircase of our place and was going to escape downstairs. But our two dogs were down there. They were MUCH larger than in real life. They kept circling, circling at the foot of the stairs, waiting for me. I figured I’d take my chances with the dogs so I stood at the top of the stairs and took a huge leap to jump to the bottom just as my partner got to the top.
And I just hung there in space. I moved slowly, slowly like I was moving through water. I tried to grab onto the banister to pull myself along but I couldn’t reach it. I glided slowly down through the air and my undead-zombie-vampire partner was able to keep up, step by step, even moving as slowly as he was.

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #18 – Box Cutter Monsters

(Male, early 40’s) This nightmare sounds almost funny when I write it down but it wasn’t at the time. I had this dream around the time I was moving my mother out of her house and into a retirement-sized apartment. Box after box of things we didn’t know what to do with but that we couldn’t discard ended up at my place.

…They were sort of like large, cardboard marionettes. DANGEROUS cardboard marionettes….

In the dream, there were boxes everywhere. Plain brown corrugated cardboard boxes with no markings would appear in tall stacks, for instance up against walls, blocking doors, etc. This was one of those dreams where it feels like you’ve really woken up from another dream and now, you’re REALLY awake. So in the dream I was sitting in my bed, surrounded by stacks of boxes and I wondered if there were even boxes UNDERNEATH the bed. I was a little scared to look but then I told myself that it’s not like I was a kid and there were monsters or anything under the bed. Except that when I looked, there in fact WERE boxes under the bed and further they in fact WERE monsters. The lids of the boxes pushed back and inside were these monsters made of brown corrugated cardboard. They were sort of like large, cardboard marrionettes. DANGEROUS cardboard marrionettes. They had huge sharp teeth like triangles but the teeth actually WERE sharp, not like cardboard but more like box cutters. They started attacking me, biting at my feet and their bites drew blood. I tried to run but the doors were all blocked with stacks of boxes. Finally, I hid in the closet, all curled up. I could hear them just outside the door snapping their jaws. Weird, isn’t it?

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #17 – The Sharp Stick

(Female, 40’s) Do you remember how, when you were a kid, you could rub a stick back and forth on the sidewalk until you sharpened it to a little point for war games and such? I’d forgotten about that until I had this dream.

In the dream, I was looking after a little girl. She was about 7 or 8, very solemn, with straight, long black hair, no one I know from real life. She was the heir of this farm property and it was my job to protect her. I followed her all over the property, into the barns, up and down ladders, while she played. Her uncle worked on the farm and it became obvious that he was extremely jealous that she had inherited the property and not him. He did the chores resentfully, casting angry glances at the little girl. She was in the way of his fortune; he wanted her dead so badly that he would kill her himself. Since I was supposed to take care of her, I knew what I had to do. I took a broomstick handle and began sharpening it on the cement sidewalk, rubbing it back and forth until I made a very dangerous point. I waited until he was asleep and then I pounded the stick through his temple, just like Jael in the Bible.

Does it count as a nightmare when you find yourself doing something really awful, like killing someone with a stick? I think so.

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #16 – To Grandmother’s House We Go…

(Female, 40’s) I was driving around my hometown, showing a visiting friend where I grew up. I realized that we were just a block away from the house my grandmother lived in when I was a child so I turned to go down her street. The houses were all in terrible shape, however, and I became disoriented. My grandmother’s house was just like the two on either side of it and 2 down from the only two-story house on the street. That was how I figured out which one was her former house because it looked nothing like it was supposed to.

…The house was even worse inside….

Even though the lots were not large, all of the houses has been “remodeled” but had since fallen into a state of disrepair. The walls were grey and crooked, like a western ghost town might look, but people were living there. I stood outside the house and looked, with my mouth agape. I walked up to the door and tried to look inside.

The family who lived in the house saw me and, when I explained my connection to the house, the mother invited me to come in. The house was even worse inside. There were boards leaning up against half finished walls. The house had been made larger; you could see from the rubble on the floor where the original walls had stood. My grandma’s simple 4 room house was gigantic. The new bathroom alone was half as big as the old house. But it was all so ugly and rotten looking.

When I left, my hand got caught on the door. The broken window glass tore a hole in my palm. Pressing my hand over the dripping cut, I ran outside to my car where my friend was waiting for me.

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #15 – Strange Ice Cream

(Female, erly 80’s) I am trembling as I write this. I just woke up from a MOST TERRIBLE nightmare.
I was with my son and his family in an ice cream store. It seemed very familiar and was the kind of place where the owners lived in the back. However, the ice cream cones all had very strange names. My son’s family all got their cones and as I was waiting for mine, I started to faint and I tried to call for help and hung on to the counter. But EVERYONE had gone.

…I tried to pound on the counter but my arms were LIMP just hanging out of my sleeve and would make no noise when I hit on the counter….

My voice would not come out, only with a squeak. I tried to pound on the counter but my arms were LIMP just hanging out of my sleeve and would make no noise when I hit on the counter. I seemed to know that the owners were in the back so tried to crawl back there. The woman saw me and ran to call the doctor. The man came and I mumbled that my family was out in the car. He let me lean on his arm and we went outside on this very busy street with cars crowded together. I started to fall on the street in weakness and he said, “Don’t do that , here is your family.”

This FUNNY looking little square shaped black car pulled up. My family was all there, but all dressed up in fancy formal black looking clothes and were all squeezed together in this little car. I recognized my grandson, my son and I think it was either my niece or grand-daughter and some other people. I kept saying “Why did you leave me and where is my ice cream cone?” They all had just a very strange smile and did not know what I was talking about just as though it was now in a different time. I asked “Am I dead?” I kept trying to say that I was weak and needed to eat. I remember, at this point I almost realized that it was a dream and I was trying to jerk myself awake. Finally I jerked and broke myself loose and woke up.

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #14 – Conspiracy of Fluff

(Female, early 40’s) A powerful secret group was taking over the world in a very Big Brother sort of way. I was rounded up with a group of people who were “recruited” to join, although we didn’t have any choice. We were taken to this huge warehouse structure and held there. There were guards with us all the time and we were marched between the living quarters, and the mess hall, and the exercise yard. We were captives, but they gave each of us a small fluffy pet, this weird little creature like a cross between a tribble (you know those little guinea pig creatures from Star Trek!) and a yarn pompom. We suspected that they were going to try to drug us, so we refused to eat anything. Yet, one by one, people started giving in and joining them. I couldn’t figure out why. Then I realized that the cute cuddly “pets” we were being given were part of the brainwashing process. I pushed mine to the ground and all the pets suddenly swarmed me! I knocked at them with my hands, but they were shedding fibers on my clothes and hands and face and lips. I couldn’t get away from them.

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #13 – Drowning my Shame

(Male, 30’s) I don’t know if this is exactly a nightmare, but it sure is kind of strange.

I dreamt that my wife told me that the baby she’s pregnant with isn’t mine. My wife actually IS pregnant, by the way. For some reason, this revelation made me want to kill myself.

…For some reason, this revelation made me want to kill myself….

I can’t figure out exactly WHY I had to kill myself but it seemed obvious in the context of the dream, like there was just nothing else for me to do in those circumstances. So I went out to this lake that’s by our condo and I walked out into it. And of course I floated. Even in my dream, I realized that I would float in water. And I started getting angry, angry that I couldn’t drown. I dove under the water, hoping I could make myself sink but I kept bobbing back up to the surface. Over and over. I woke up just beside myself with anger that I couldn’t drown.

I thought the dream was so weird – and kind of funny – that I woke my wife up and told it to her.

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #12 – A Ghost Chase, a Silent Scream

(Male, early thirties) This recurrent dream has changed somewhat over the years. The first time I must have been just starting high school. A ghostly old woman appeared floating outside my second story bedroom window pushing a ghostly baby carriage. She looked in the window at me and said, “I’ve come for you.”

I ran away from her and she followed, screaming at me. In this dream, it’s this chase that is repeated. She chases me through houses that I’ve never lived in, decrepit old gothic mansions, filled will scattered debris and coated in dust.

Then at some point, I turned the dream around and I fired a silver gun at the ghostly woman. Now, I’m the one who’s chasing her. All the while I’m trying to scream at her but even though I open my mouth wide and push with all my might, no sound comes out.

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #11 – Smothered

(Female, 80’s) I was in a small room, maybe in a dormitory or an apartment and this immense dog was there sitting on top of me. It was brown and had a droopy jowly face. It was overwhelming me, smothering me. It held me down and made it impossible for me to breathe. I was suffocating and found that I couldn’t even call for help.

When I woke, I discovered that a pillow had fallen over my face. Maybe that’s what it all was.

Categories
Fears & Phobias

Phobia #1 – The End of Food

(Male, early 20’s) You ask about strange fears, well, I can’t eat the ends of things. Like hot dogs, I have to chop the ends off. They just look weird. Or eggrolls. I can eat most of one, but as soon as I get through half of it, it starts to look like it’s something else, like it’s a creature that’s excreting something and I just can’t finish. And I can’t eat egg whites, only the yolks maybe because they stay warm longer.

Sometimes, if I’m eating some and I don’t totally dig it, I’ll make it into an end. By imagining it. Like with a breast of a chicken or something. I feel strange when I eat at people’s houses and they make a wonderful meal and i can’t eat the ends of things.

But I love the crusts on bread. Pizza crusts too.

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #10 – A Chip from my Brittle Eyeball

(Female, 44) I had ordered contact lens in the mail and I was very excited to receive them because I haven’t worn them in years. Opening the box, I was surprised at their design: there was a clear lens with this sort of appendage that went into the corner of your eye. It looked sort of “steampunk,” sort of Jules Verne. I knew I should probably read the directions first and buy some supplies, but I was anxious to try them out. I stood in front of a mirror and just lifted one lens up near my eye, just so I could look through it and sort of imagine what it would be like to wear them.

All of a sudden, something slipped off the lens and sealed over my iris. My vision immediately went blurry in that eye and I could feel my eye drying out like the moisture was getting sucked out of it. I looked at myself in the mirror and I could see something on my eye. There was something stuck to my eye. I figured maybe that the lens had some kind coating on it to protect it during shipping.

I touched the edge of the film but it wouldn’t come off. Then I tried scraping my eyeball gently with my fingernail, but all I did was chip a little bit out of the corner of my eye, out of the white part of my eye. It felt a little bit like a bit of candy-coating coming off a chocolate. I knew that this couldn’t be good.

I stopped tugging at the film on my lens and began to look for some saline solution. I thought maybe I could float it off. All the while I could feel my eye tightening and my vision blurring more. There were lots of old friends at this meeting but I didn’t remember who wore contacts.I tried not to interrupt the meeting too much as I went around asking everyone if they had any saline solution. No one did.

Finally I found a bottle of something on the concession table and I was so desperate I squirted the liquid into my eye. Slowly, the film peeled off and I could see normally again.

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #9 – My Brother’s Wicked Imposter

(Female, a dream from childhood) I dreamt I was in the basement of my family’s house in the laundry room. There was a big pantry cupboard and a spare kitchen set up there, and I was down there with my mom, my sister who was older, and my younger brother.

…We were trapped and we were scared…

My older brother was there too, but he was being unusually mean and cruel. He knocked my younger brother down and yelled at all of us. We were trapped and we were scared. Suddenly, my older brother walked into the room. We were startled because we thought he was already there with us. Then we realized that the other older brother was a fake.

But now my real brother had to fight this fake brother to save us. He violently attacked the fake brother and wrestled him down to the tile floor right at our feet and they thrashed around in that small space until one of them beat the other one bloody and senseless while the whole family watched.

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #8 – A Horrible Cat

(Female, 40’s) This isn’t a dream I had but one my daughter had when she was 3 or 4. She woke me up crying in the dead of the night so I went into her dark room. It’s always a little dangerous walking through a kid’s room in the dark because you don’t know for certain that everything got picked up before bedtime. There could be things to trip over. Usually I could get her to go back to sleep by rubbing her back and humming but she was really disturbed this time. I told her that maybe she’d feel better if she told me what the dream was about. She said she had dreamt she had a cat. I said that that sounded nice. But then she described the cat. Somehow it had been turned inside out so all of its bloody muscles and organs were on the outside. The idea creeped me out so much I couldn’t walk across that dark room again. I got in bed with her and slept there ’til morning.

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #7 – It Wasn’t Lint on his Sweater

(Male, 30’s) I don’t know if this qualifies as a nightmare because I dreamt it when I nodded off at work one day. I was in an elevator of a skyscraper with this other man. We both were wearing business suits and staring straight ahead. When you work in an office building you don’t really make too much eye contact with people in the elevator. The elevator seemed to be taking an extremely long time between floors. The man was picking lint off his suit.

At least I thought I thought he was picking off lint. when I paid attention to him out of the corner of my eye, I realized that he wasn’t wearing a shirt under his jacket. Then what was he picking lint from? I looked at him and saw that he was bare-chested under his jacket. The skin of his chest was bright red like it was brutally chapped, possibly even bloody. And instead of lint, he was pinching these small pustules on his skin and pulling on them. Out from the tiny sores came long white worms the diameter of string. He dropped them to the floor like it was nothing strange. He didn’t seem to care that I was staring at him pulling these white worms. I kept waiting but the door to the elevator to open but it didn’t.

After that dream, I was glad to wake up and get back to work.

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #6 – The Open Door and the Darkness Beyond

Underground Railroad Tunnel Door.jpg
“Underground Railroad Tunnel Door” by Docspond – Investigating tunnels in Salem, Ma.
Previously published: Salem Secret Underground:The History of the Tunnels in the City. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.



(Male, recurrent dream since childhood) It starts with a Staircase, usually leading downward but at least once the Staircase lead up. Usually but not always the Staircase is hidden behind a secret passage.

The Staircase goes on and on ’til it ends at the Door.

One time, the Staircase was at my Grandmother’s house and I discovered it with my identical cousin (someone who incidentally doesn’t exist in waking reality) We chased each other down the stairs, flight after flight, laughing until we found the Door.

Another time the Staircase lead to a small room, a bombshelter done up like a swanky 50’s-style cocktail lounge – one with cinderblock walls and an extra low ceiling. The Door in this instance was round.

When I open the Door, as I always do, I am confronted with opaque black, a dead silence. There is the sense of space but it is a blank space, an empty void.

Once the Staircase lead upward and the doorway looked like it would lead to an attic. When I opened it with the pull cord, there was that sickening emptiness again. But as I stared at it, a tiny black spider emerged, suspended on a thin black web. That was almost worse because something from the dimensionless void “over there” was coming “over here.”

When I’m confronted with that dimensionless void I can’t go backward or close the door, but I can’t go forward either.