Author: The Grim Gnome

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #219 – Lost in the City

(Female, 40’s) I had spent the weekend with my good friend in the Big City, and now it was time to go home. I had to catch a train in 2 hours and she was leaving on a plane in 3. I guess I went to check out of the hotel. I rode down in the elevator to the lobby, which also connected to a large shopping mall. The lobby and mall were really crowded with shoppers and I had to dodge my way across the concourse. When I turned about to head back up to our room, I had no idea which way to go. All the possible paths looked the same, with shiny walkways and store windows and doorways.

“… I kept walking around, conscious of the passing time and no closer to finding my way…”

I started to wander, but I was lost. I didn’t know which way to go. I kept walking around, conscious of the passing time and no closer to finding my way. I was feeling more worried and panicky all the time. Then I found myself at an exit, and I decided I should go outside, because I’d be able to look at the building and see where the hotel tower (it was very tall– we were staying on the 18th floor) was in relation to where I was.

Outside was even more disorienting. The facade of the mall was so tall that I couldn’t see any other buildings behind it. I was surrounded by tall skyscrapers; I was standing in their shadows and I felt cold. I decided to cross the street so I could see better. I turned about to see that there were 8 lanes of traffic on the street. The corners were far away, so I just started running across, dodging traffic as I went. I still couldn’t locate the hotel. I asked someone walking by where the hotel was, and he asked which hotel. I couldn’t for the life of me remember the name of our hotel. I said, “I think it’s the Constitution.” “There’s no hotel named that.”

Then I got a text message from my friend: “Where are you?” and I wrote back, “I am lost.” She texted me again and said to come back inside. I went into a subway station and she was sitting on a bench waiting for me. She had my suitcase with her. She had packed it up for me. I sat down to double-check that all my stuff was there, but when I opened the suitcase, nothing inside looked familiar.

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #218 – Elevator Attack

(Male, 40’s) This was just a quick little nightmare I had after pushing the snooze alarm today. Got my heart racing.

“…The blond guy with the spiky hair grinned like he was going to take pleasure in killing me…”

I was in an unfamiliar city and I had just gotten on an elevator. I was alone and I counted the money in my wallet. Four ones and a five which I figured was enough for lunch. At the next floor a young man gets on. He’s a lot younger than I am and he has spiky blond hair. Instead of facing the door of the elevator, he just stares at me, right in my face. At the next floor another young man gets on, one with black hair and a black t-shirt as I remember. The blond guy pulls out a knife. It’s a stubby triangular shaped blade, easy to conceal, one that could do a lot of damage easily. “We’ll take your money,” he said. I sized them up and figured these punks were like half my age.

“All I’ve got is nine bucks”

“That won’t be anywhere near enough.” The blond guy with the spiky hair grinned like he was going to take pleasure in killing me. And then before I really knew what I was doing, I punched the blond guy as hard as I could in his Adam’s apple. He collapsed to his knees, suffocating. Then I grabbed the guy in the black t-shirt and pushed his chest onto the triangular knife. There was blood everywhere. At the next floor, I got off the elevator. The two guys weren’t dead yet but they were definitely in their death throes. I was still lost in a strange city and I had just murdered two men.

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #217 – The Silent Instructor

(Male, 40’s) I had this nightmare earlier this week and I’ve been telling everyone about it. It’s sounds so funny but trust me I was simply terrified in the middle of it.

“…I tried to greet the students and found that I had no voice….”

In the nightmare, I was a science teacher and this was my first day at work. I had the dim sense that I’d quit my current job and that I was finally doing something I really wanted to do. (And this sort of touches with reality. I’ve been giving a series of presentations at work recently. “Teaching” sort of, and I really enjoy it. I do wish I could do that full time.) So I’m a science teacher and this is my first day teaching… and I’m teaching in the exact same classroom where my Dad taught. He was a middle school science teacher. I loved his room when I was a kid. All those weird displays like a human skeleton, animals preserved in jars, oversized models of the human heart… So I was teaching in that very same room.

And just to make sure I did well on my first day, along had come my Mother who sat behind me off to the left. And my wife, who sat behind me off to the right. They periodically said vaguely encouraging things as I prepared for class.

The bell rang and students started to shuffle in. Up until this point I had felt relatively good in the dream, despite the presence of my watchers. I tried to greet the students and found that I had no voice. I busied myself passing out handouts all the while desperately hoping that my voice would return before I had to speak.

Categories
Nightmares

NIghtmare #216 – Haunted Panther

“… if the folks there didn’t like you, you just might disappear….”

(Male, 50’s) I had a nightmare last night that was really unnerving in addition to having a couple really scary moments. I was riding around with my Dad. My Dad has been dead incidentally for a good 20 years. We were trying to get an old radio or something that belonged to him from someone in this dangerously small town. It was dangerously small because there was a real sense that if the folks there didn’t like you, you just might disappear. Like the gasoline in our car seemed to disappear, like it had been siphoned away and there of course were no gas stations in this town. And the vehicle we were driving kept getting parked in. You know, there would be someone parked at either end of it so we couldn’t get out. We ended up taking the radio which was immense. It was easily three foot by three foot by four foot tall. We strapped the radio on top of a scooter / three wheel motorcycle thing and headed out of town. I was riding on TOP on the radio. I told Dad that I really hoped he wasn’t planning on driving on any expressways. Even when we turned corners on the side streets, we’ve leaned like we were going to tip over. There were some scary moments on that ride. I just had to relax and hold on.

We drove through this industrial wasteland, factories that were shut down and rusting. Windows grey and smashed out. It was an urban hell. Finally we arrived at my grandmother’s house. My grandmother also has been dead for upwards of 30 years. She did used to live in a pretty run down and decrepit part of an urban factory town. In the dream she was dead but her house still lived on, so to speak. It was much larger than I remembered it and I mean the ceilings of the rooms were easily twenty foot tall. It was still filled with furniture. I asked Dad what he had wanted with the radio for, why we had to go to all that effort to retrieve something that we was just going to deliver to a house where no body lives. He didn’t reply at all and that was strange because in life at least he was a rather talkative person. I could tell that this was something big but hard to put into words, something like honor or the “principle of the thing.”

“…It moved silently so it would sometimes just walk into the room on those silent, deadly cat feet and it would start tracking….”

The scariest parts of the dream happened inside Grandmother’s house because it was haunted not by a ghost but by a panther. The panther was large, half way between the size of a real panther and a velociraptor. It only seemed to be able to see movement and even that movement it could see best from the corner of its eyes. The beast was also almost entirely deaf. It moved very quietly so it would sometimes just walk into the room on those silent, deadly cat feet and it would start tracking. Once it was right on top of me snuffling at the soft inner parts of my throat. One bite and I would have died immediately in a spray of blood. I threw something and distracted it enough that the creature moved away. It also got very interested in an empty plastic bag that was being blown around by the wind. Another time though this blood thirsty monster came up right between my legs and started to sniff at my crotch. It growled low. I figured that I could probably survive if the monster bit off my penis if I didn’t bleed to death before help could arrive. –where was the nearest hospital in the urban wasteland?– but all things being equal, I would rather keep all my parts attached. When it wandered away, I yelled at my Dad. “Why is that thing still here? Why didn’t you call a professional exterminator or something to get rid of it?” Again, Dad was silent like I was missing some very obvious point.

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #215 – The Death Hospital

(Male, 30’s) Only part of the dream was a nightmare but it occurred at the end of a longer dream that was just disorienting, probably not exactly a nightmare, where I was wandering lost through a college campus trying to find something to eat. I knew there was an excellent restaurant around someplace but when I found it, it was closed for some holiday. I looked in the windows. There were huge steaming trays of food. They were prepared for a celebration and I wasn’t included or invited.

“… It was extremely contagious but no one was exactly certain how it spread…”

The nightmare stared when I stumbled into a hospital. It looked like any of the other college buildings – dark red brick with ornate stone insets. The hospital was dedicated to treat people suffering from some very dangerous illness. It was extremely contagious but no one was exactly certain how it spread. I was on the nursery ward. There were only a couple real nurses, people who knew what they were doing but there were several volunteers who more or less just kept getting in the way. I was a volunteer. The first task was to carry these infants in and place them on these high folding beds where the intake nurse could assess them. The intake nurse was very beautiful but very mean and she looked sort of like someone I work with. She yelled at everyone constantly.

None of these babies looked very good: they were waxy, barely breathing if they were breathing at all. They were all tightly wrapped in white blankets. One of the babies I carried in was black and I don’t mean African-American. The child was black like it was carved out of black wax. The intake nurse started yelling at me. Wasn’t it obvious that this child was dead? And worse, wasn’t it obvious that this child was a fruiting body for the infection. She started scrubbing down the area, though it’s strange to call it that because nothing she did involved water. The intake nurse wrapped the baby in the blankets. Then she used a flat thin piece of metal to scrape the top layer of wax off the floor. She yelled for assistance from another nurse. The other nurse was extremely ugly in the sense that she was physically deformed. She was bald and her face had huge round growths on the forehead, some the size of a softball. But she was patient with the intake nurse’s abuse and understanding with the volunteers who were all doing as best as we could, as best as we knew how. As soon as this second nurse was in the room, the intake nurse scooped up the dead infected baby and started to leave the room. But I seemed to be standing exactly in the place where she wanted to move. So she kept yelling at me and swearing over and over again, “Get out of the way! Get out of the way!”

It was possible that we all had been infected and would die

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #214 – Not A Very Safe Haven

(Male, 40’s) This started off a much more normal dream but became a nightmare around this point. I had just exited a cottage, like a Hansel and Gretel kind of cottage, but it was on a suburban street of suburban style houses. All those houses though were empty and dark. Abandoned. It was evening, the last part of evening before things become totally dark, before it’s night. There was a woman there with me who had long blond hair. She stood facing the street like she was on guard watching for something.

“…They are more powerful than you can imagine…”

There was another woman, powerfully attractive, with long black hair. She stepped up to me, so close to me our bodies over lapped. It’s hard to describe but it felt like she was standing in the exact spot where my feet were standing. There was no point to embracing each other with our arms because we were already as close as we could possibly be. The woman with the black hair whispered in my ear. “Don’t be afraid of the wolves.” I looked down and a dozen wolves ran by us in slow motion. Some of them were real, flesh and blood wolves but others were the merest suggestions of wolves, like a wolf-shaped cloud or a wolf-shaped mist. The woman said “They are more powerful than you can imagine. They are always all around us. In the middle ages, astrologers thought it was the movement of the stars that determined our actions when really it is the movement of the wolves.” Despite what she’d told me, I was terrified of the wolves.

Just then the blond haired woman alerted us that she had seen something. When the black haired woman moved away from me, I found it hard to breath. We all retreated into the cottage. I was the last to enter and as I closed the door, I heard a gun fire many times. The bullets came toward me in slow motion and I was able to watch them and I knew they would miss. I watched them spinning in the air. Except they weren’t bullets; they were golden screws. Five of them. I watched them impact the door jam and slowly screw themselves deep into the dark wood. They were clustered tightly together, like a shotgun blast. I closed the door and I woke up

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #213 – Crime Gone Wrong

“…The other men were dead, shot in the head…”

(Male, 40’s) Last night I dreamed: I was in some caper with two friends and an out of towner. We stole some money, or played a harmless but elaborate trick on someone I’m not sure; the kind of “crime” that gets you on Jay Leno instead of cell block 4. Anyway, the one new guy- our hired schemer was funny, and charming and after the whole game was played and we met back at the agreed place, we shook hands to make our congenial get away, he reached into his coat and shot the other two grinning guys, and he shot me twice in the back. I felt it. It was shocking, like being hit hard with a phone book with a nail in it. I fell face down. He stepped over to me and set the gun down in my palm, so I could finish myself off. With his finger he tapped the back of my head, “Just here, can you do it?” I just nodded. I heard his footsteps move down the hallway. I was in pain, but I rolled over, and sat up. The other men were dead, shot in the head. I took the gun and wondered if I would screw it up. The gun was a tiny silver .22 with red trim, like something you’d see in an arcade. I could feel my insides, damaged, no blood yet, but a terrible soreness, and it was getting hard to breathe.

I went out to my car and drove to a friend’s house. Her name is Dawn. She was outside busy on her cell phone, so I had to wait till she got off to tell her I was probably going to die. I felt happy, and sleepy. I began coughing up what looked like red oatmeal, so think I couldn’t talk afterwards. She hung up, and ran off to a nearby hospital to see if anyone could come get me. I sat on the dark street, and lay down on my side, then rolled over on my face- this is how I sleep at night and felt the cool wet blacktop. The pain was less, but the weakness overcame me. I could people yelling and footsteps, but it all seemed very far away

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #212 – An Old School Tragedy

“…I see something small hanging on a chain in the opening, dark against the sky…”

(Male, 30’s) It is the end-of-the-day school assembly, a routine gathering of students in the gym bleachers. Here we chat and laugh and have the energy of a group of young people who’ve been told to be patient. We are gathered in self imposed groups; athletes, clowns, the ill-tempered. I’m well liked, others are turned toward me, wanting to talk, tell me a joke, listen to mine, or look at drawings I’ve made in the spiral notebook, where biology notes should be. Over the PA system, music is heard. The song is Bernadette by the Four Tops. I can’t seem to find one of my classmates.

A bell rings, and we all stand as in church and wait until the row of kids before us files out before us. The way out of the gymnasium, and out of the school altogether, is a ladder made of mud and sticks, a kind of crude hillside with steps carved into it. You climb up and out through a small hole, a burrowing animal would make. I get to the ladder and begin my climb, I see something small hanging on a chain in the opening, dark against the sky. It’s been quickly, hung there, it’s a book, taped open to a certain page, so you must see it, even read it before leaving the school. I see outside on the lawn, a splitting of the student body- with boys going off right, the girls stepping left and waiting in a long line. I move in line with the girls to see what they’re doing, but no one speaks. It is the 18th Century. The girls do not speak. All are dressed in drab, homespun dresses, with green felt scarves, a kind of puritan school uniform. We are all in a line that leads to the doors to the tower. It is a severe structure, dark, mottled with years of weather, with tin gray shutters at the top and a long spiked steeple, but otherwise featureless. There is no church connected to it. We enter and ascend a long ladder to climb to the top, up and out one of the open windows, a look out perch, where one can see miles of spring green trees and the harbor beyond. I’m suddenly next in line. The wind up here is strong. In front of me is a girl I know. She’s pretty, about 8, much younger and is greeted by a sobbing woman who is at the top. The woman is a servant of mealtimes at the school. She is horrified to see her daughter is next in line for this moment. It is known that we are forbidden to speak during such trials. The girl quietly takes the rope and a short wooden sled that’s given to her. She ties it around her waist. How is it that such young hands are to affix a thick rope in a safe manner, secure enough to allow her to climb down outside the steeple in such a wind? The knot she makes is absurd, like a pretzel. She pulls back from the reaching hands and sobbing face of her mother safe within the tower’s shadow. The girl climbs over a short railing and begins her spider like descent. The knot immediately fails and the girl and the board both fall from the great height to the church yard below. There is no scream. Just the rope dangling in the wind. I pull it back in, crying and hand it back to the woman who numbly readies it for the next girl in line.

What happened was this; a young student, angered by something said to him during the day by a girl, hung the book of verses in the doorway, open to a certain passage; a challenge, a proverbial task designed to prove one is under, and worthy of the hand of Grace. In our time, in our world any open page from this book, must be read, understood and acted upon immediately.

It is the 18th Century’s version of the Columbine massacre.

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #211 – Kidnapped Daughter

(Male, 50’s) I dreamed that my daughter had been kidnapped and the kidnappers were threatening to kill her. In real life my daughter is grown up and on her own but in the dream she was much younger, in high school. She had long hair. There were no ransom demands. The kidnapper didn’t seem to want anything apart from someone to kill. For some reason, we knew that the kidnapper was going to blow her up with a bomb he had draped around her neck like a necklace.

“…There were no ransom demands…”

The real nightmarish part of the dream was what I felt. I spoke with the police. I was certain that the kidnapper didn’t know that someone cared about the girl he had, that she was someone’s daughter. I asked the police if we couldn’t find someway to substitute her for another girl, for someone that no one cared about, someone that no one would miss. It seemed so reasonable in my dream but I’m sick to my stomach thinking about it now I’m awake.

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #210 – Other World Escape

(Female, 40’s) My dreams don’t usually fit in obvious genres, but this was a total science fiction dream. I was on some other planet, which was very earth-like with plants and streets and buildings and neighborhoods, along with a whole community of people, but some of us were ready to return home to earth. A transport ship was due to dock so I was preparing to leave the planet.

“…the ships that arrived were filled with these alien creatures who wanted to kill us…”

Only the ships that arrived were filled with these alien creatures who wanted to kill us. I was waiting in the docking station, and when the aliens opened the doors and started looking around, I had to hide quickly. They were like large, brown floating worms, with eyes like flashlights. I rolled under this baggage cart where I couldn’t be seen, and a guard who worked there and was my friend slipped a sleeping-bag-like getup to me under the cart. I could camouflage myself with this, covering my face and looking down at the ground. In order to fool the aliens though, I had to keep looking down so I never got a good look at them.

I got out of that tight situation somehow, and then a group of us plotted together to slip by the aliens. The plan then was to load two of the ships with supplies and humans to go back to earth, but we couldn’t let the aliens know this was happening. They were malicious, but not very smart, I guess. I worked with other escapes to load the ships and then we had to stay in hiding until it was time to depart. The aliens were guarding the ships and searching for us.

Somehow there was a mix-up with the departure time. Maybe we overslept– I’m not certain. I just remember the extreme disappointment of discovering that the ship had left without me. It was morning, sunny and bright, and I was walking down the hilly street with a group of friends– just going to make sure that we had indeed missed getting on the ship. We walked past a friend’s ceramic studio and admired the piece she’d made in honor of my marriage as well as this ceramic installment that looked the a dozen silver-glazed paper airplanes that were mounted individually on a wall. We could see the empty docking station as we walked to the center of town. At least we were safe from the murderous aliens for the time being. I had been happy in this place for a while but now I ached with homesickness.

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #209 – Intruder Alert

(Male, 40’s) Strange dream, really violent but most important it was really detailed and vivid. Strange flashbacks to the past.

“…Here I am talking like I’m a big tough guy..”

It took place on the street where I grew up but sort of in the present day. Literally on the street, not in the houses, though I was living in one of the houses. It wasn’t the house I grew up in and in fact there were no houses like the one in my dream on this street. I had met up with a friend I knew from 20 years ago. It was in the afternoon and he said we should go someplace and get lunch. He was going to drive but I just wanted to make sure my door was locked and that I should pick up a hoodie.

When I went back to my house, which was a ranch style house, very modern with its entire yard a cement slab, I found that the side door was not only unlocked but open. I kicked it open and said, “OK fuckers. Come on out.” (Here I am talking like I’m a big tough guy.) I could see someone sitting at my computer which in the dream was one of those cute little iMacs from years back, the ones that were candy-colored. This guy stands up and he is a physical double for Lurch, the butler from the Addams Family TV show. He’s wearing a flannel shirt with a brown plaid pattern. He advanced on me and I grab him by the front of his shirt and sort of catapult him over top of me. He lands in a pile on the cement but gets right back up and charges at me again. Again I grab him by the front of his shirt and this time I toss him down a short flight of stairs that must have led to the basement. This time though as he’ll getting up I slip off one of my shoes and hit him repeatedly in the face with my heel. He goes down and out.

Like an idiot, I rush inside the house to find the other guy that I just *know* is there. I open the door to my kitchen and there he is. And this guy looks like Bruce Lee. Well, to be honest he looked like Bruce Lee if he lived to middle age and put on a few pounds. I mean, he still looked dangerous but he just looked a bit more manageable. But for some reason I can’t understand, this Bruce Lee guy decides to shoot at me. He’s got some kind of hand gun that apparently has an inexhaustible supply of bullets but that isn’t very powerful. I’m able to hide behind a wood door and not get hit. Then I hear him kick out a window and I look just in time to see him diving out this window. I go after him and again he starts shooting at me. So with my legs dangling out of the window, I kick him. And at that point I wake up.

As I write this down what’s striking are all the pop culture references. I really want to go back and watch “Enter the Dragon” now.

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #208 – Shopkeeper for the Mob

(Male, 40’s) This is another nightmare I had while I was battling the worst cold I’ve had in years. Feverish dreams are wild!

“”…everything was a front for the Mob..”

I operated a little shop of some kind in a canvas tent pitched in a parking lot beside a highway. There were big bags of coffee beans and by big, I mean probably 50 pounds or so. There also were different kinds of spices and bags of food like it all had been directly imported from other countries.

And everything was a front for the Mob. Though it wasn’t explained in the dream, the set up sounds like there were drugs or guns being smuggled in with the coffee and other items. My position was extremely tenuous. There was really no reason to have an outsider like me so intimately involved with Mob work and I knew it. It was only a matter of time until I was killed. The Mob guys would show up every couple days, cut open a bag of coffee, spill the beans everywhere and then take off. There would be someone holding a gun on me in case I wanted to make some kind of an objection. This one time the Mob people show up and they’ve got someone with them. In fact, it’s someone I work with, a nice enough guy. He chats with me, totally oblivious to the danger he’s in. He’s amazed that I run an import shop in addition to the other job. Then the Mob guys grab him and force him to his knees and without saying anything they shoot him to death right there in front of me. I am simply terrified. Shocked and terrified. I don’t know what to do. The Mob guys back out of the tent. I don’t know if I should run or call the police or what.

Then all of a sudden I’m in an apartment building. I get the sense that it’s also entirely owned by the Mob. I’m in one of the rooms possibly a room where I live and I look out of the door just in time to see a couple Mob guys drag another guy I know up the stairs and thrown him on the landing face down. They put these weights on his arms. The weights look like big coffee cans with a handle on the top. The guy is unconscious. One of the Mob guys prepares a syringe of something, maybe heroin for all I know. Then he backs up and makes like he’s going to throw the syringe like a dart. That part makes me cringe.

All of a sudden he realizes that I’m there, that I’ve been watching everything from just a couple feet away. He turned toward me and started walking. I backed up and at that instant I woke up.

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #207 – Apocalypse Party

By brewbooks from near Seattle, USA (The Rubble pile - Garden Rubble Project) [CC-BY-SA-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
By brewbooks from near Seattle, USA (The Rubble pile – Garden Rubble Project) [CC-BY-SA-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

(Male, 40’s) The last few days, I’ve had the worst cold I’ve had in years. Sweats, chills, sore throat, the works. There’s nothing like a nice fever to spike up the nightmares. This is one I had last night. I’ll send you another one too.

“…And of course, we were fighting for our lives….”

This nightmare STARTED after an apocalypse of some kind. Most of the world had been leveled into rubble. All the buildings as far as I could see were knocked flat and crushed. I just had the sense that I was in the last building left intact anywhere in the world. And the people in this building were the last humans. We were a weird group. It was sort of like a random collection of people you might get at a train station or a bus terminal. Little clumps of us were related to each other or knew each other but there was nothing in common really about the group as a whole. There was four or five guys, who wore overalls and straw hats, who looked like a cartoon cliche of a jug band. A couple of them were really muscular, a couple were pretty overweight. There was another group of women who I think were speaking Italian to each other. On and on like that, little clusters of people. I was on my own though, all alone. There were tables with white table cloths and punchbowls, though it didn’t seem like there was any food. Maybe we’d already eaten it all or maybe it had never been put out. Weird party. Weird collection of people.

And of course, we were fighting for our lives.

The earth had evidently been invaded by creatures from another world. And by creatures, I mean exactly two. They were remarkably human-shaped, except for a couple key differences. One is that their heads were oriented 180 degrees backward which was incredibly unnerving. They were both bald, with extremely pale skin that glowed slightly. And they were really rather fat, like some of those statues of Buddha. At one point in the dream I saw them at the end of a hallway and I was seriously terrified. They saw me and invited me to take an elevator ride with them to the top of the building. There was nothing for me to hide behind, if that would have even done any good. I was in plain sight and they could have disintegrated me. But I declined. They chuckled to each other and got on the elevator.

The humans somehow thought we could fight these beings. We tried to come up with a plan, some strategy but before we could get ready the beings just appeared through the walls. We were thrown around, killed, exploded. There wasn’t any hope we could win. And then someone poured a bucket of water on one of these creatures. It sizzled, like short circuiting electricity and melted like the wicked witch of the west. The other being backed up toward a wall of windows, terrified by us for a change. Then it disappeared.

The last part of the dream was like the closing sequence of a movie. The camera pulled back and revealed the same building we’d all been in. It had been rebuilt and was full of people. The camera pulled back even further and showed that the whole city had been rebuilt. It was like the camera was in a helicopter and it was giving traffic reports. Humans had survived and rebuilt the world pretty much exactly as we did the first time.

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #206 – Lost Hospital

“…it felt like an empty warehouse: dark gray walls and very high ceiling, probably 40 feet up and filthy, not like a hospital at all…”

(Male, 40’s) I had taken my daughter to the hospital for something serious. I think it was serious and bloody like an accident. She was probably 7 or so in the dream though she’s 18 in everyday life. My wife was with me too. The doctors whisked her away to start working on her and we never saw her again. At first a nurse came and said she’d been moved to a certain ward somewhere down the hall. So my wife and I walked down this long cavernous hallway. Seriously, it felt like an empty warehouse: dark gray walls and very high ceiling, probably 40 feet up and filthy, not like a hospital at all. But at the end of it, there was the ward we were told about. By the time we got there, though evidently my daughter had been moved. A nurse very impatiently told us to follow her and she shot off though this extremely crowded ward. It wasn’t much like a hospital either. The rooms were too large, more like school class rooms. There were no actual beds, just mattresses laid so closely together that there was barely enough room to stand. The mattresses were each filled with at least one patient, sometimes two. Some of them were wrapped with bandages discolored with rust and black. Often visitors or family members stood in the small gap between the mattresses. The lights were off in the room so everything was a dim twilight. Many of the occupants were coughing like they were sick though the bandages made me think this ward was for physical trauma. Maybe they made no such distinctions in this hospital. The large grey windows were all thrown open for ventilation, I suppose and a torrential downpour of hot rain was coming down outside. The nurse we were following very deftly traversed the mattresses and crossed the room in no time while my wife and I stumbled slowly behind her. She disappeared out the door on the opposite side before we made it half way across the room.

The hallway on the other side of the room was completely different, much more like a hospital hall but not entirely. It had been painted white at least and there was the sense that there were many many rooms just like the room we’d just left, rooms crowded with patients. There was no sign of the nurse or of any hospital staff for that matter. My wife and I wandered down the hall and eventually we found an elevator. The door of the elevator was tarnished brass though the casing around it was quite fancy, filigreed. When the door opened, the elevator car was round, spherical in fact. You couldn’t stand up in it but rather had to sort of sit in it, leaning against the walls and bumping into the other passengers. At first we weren’t going to get on but the people who were already in encouraged us to come aboard. “We’ll make room” The doors closed and it became evident that no one really knew how to make it work. The “floor numbers” or the place where one would normally indicate what floor one wanted didn’t have numbers on them. And the car itself didn’t just seem to move up and down; it also rocked side to side and I think it actually moved side to side.

I don’t remember getting off the elevator but next I was in what felt like an upper floor. It was regally appointed. Brass, maybe even gold, rich red velvet, fancy rugs on polished floors. It was crawling with loud fraternity college students. They were all raucous and mostly drunk. There were different tables set up, I gathered, for different fraternities to recruit but based on their boorish behaviour, there was little difference between them. However, in the middle of this room there was a collection of fancy arm chairs. i think they’re called wing chairs because of the shape of the upholstery on the side. There was a collection of distinguished men sitting in these chairs, distinguished but not pretentious, just quietly powerful. None of the fraternity animals seemed even able to see that these gentlemen were in their presence. I walked over and spoke with one of these men. I can’t remember exactly what I said but I think I said I was looking for my daughter. The man said “Are you?”

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #338 – Ceramic Death

“…And he jumped on the intruder and slashed at his throat…”

(Male, 30’s) A buddy of mine told me this dream. He’s a ceramicist, an artist who makes pots and jugs and cups and that kind of stuff. In his dream he had just finished making a vessel with this beautiful shino glaze. (I didn’t ask him for particulars but I looked it up on-line and a shino glaze is supposed to be an exceptionally warm and rich glaze, one that’s rather difficult to pull off flawlessly.) He’s always telling me about how deadly some of the chemicals are that he works with. Radioactive. Poisonous. Even the clay itself turns into a fine powder that collects in his lungs and will eventually kill him from cillicosis.
In his dream, an intruder broke into his house. So my friend smashed this vessel with the beautiful glaze and he took one of the larger fragments, one with a particularly sharp edge. And he jumped on the intruder and slashed at his throat. The pottery shard tore into the intruder more effectively than a knife; it hacked him open. He just went limp, dead in my friend’s arms. I asked if there was any blood and no, the particularly odd thing was there was an almost entire absence of blood.

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #177 – A Town in Panic

(Male, 30’s) I want to start off saying that I don’t usually have nightmare and I don’t find zombie movies to be at all scary but after this dream, well, maybe.

“… I’m pretty sure things won’t be fine, even though I don’t know exactly what’s wrong at this point…

I was in the car with my family and we were driving home, back into town and there’s something not right. There are walls of tall chain link on either side of the road. There are folks trying to head away from us, out of town. They keep telling us it’s the wrong way, but we’re pretty sure that if we get back to our house we’ll be OK. Eventually we get to a place where the traffic is just entirely stopped so we have to abandon our car.

We start walking and walking with all our kids too and still there are people rushing off OUT of town. They’re all on the other side of this chain link fence. For some reason we get convinced that that’s the right side to be on so we get through the fence somehow. We try to make our way to our house but we can’t.

My wife just wants to sit down on a park bench. She thinks every thing will just be fine but I’m pretty sure things won’t be fine, even though I don’t know exactly what’s wrong at this point. I can’t make her come along but my son follows me and we start heading, I think, we’re still heading back to our house. The plan is that we can hole up there and be safe. She says she’ll meet us there in a little while.

We just get a little bit further away, not noticeably closer to safety, when I hear this sound. It’s like a concrete dragging along concrete but lower, much lower in pitch. Then I realize it’s a groan. We look around the next corner and there is a tidal wave of zombies. Slow moving but as far as the eye can see. I know I won’t be safe at home. And I don’t think we can even out run them. I pick up my boy and I start to run and that’s when I wake up.

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #205 – Baby napper

…I found a ransom note, however, and I recognized the handwriting

(Female, 50’s) My 2 year old granddaughter was missing, and I knew she’d been kidnapped. Her parents were doubtful– why would anyone kidnap their child since they would be unable to pay any ransom demand? They seemed to think she was around the house, and if they kept looking they’d find her.

I found a ransom note, however, and I recognized the handwriting: it was my next-door neighbor’s. The note requested 2 million dollars for the return of the child. I knew now that he had the girl next-door in the basement, and that he was playing with her and keeping her occupied, and I knew he wouldn’t hurt her because our neighbors really want to have a child.

I showed my son and his wife the note and told them, “You see? She’s been kidnapped.”

My daughter in law said, “Do you think it’s serious?”

I replied, “Kidnapping is a federal felony.” (Which was really funny when I woke up and thought about the dream!)

All day long they tried to get enough money to pay the ransom. They called all their friends and relatives.

Finally, in the evening, I called my neighbors’ house. When he answered the phone, I said, “Doug, I know you have her. We want you to bring her back and we won’t press charges.”

“What about the ransom?” he asked.

“They cannot afford to pay the ransom.”

There was a pause. Then he spoke.

“Well, then. What do you think is reasonable?” He wanted them at least to pay him for watching her all day.

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #204 – The Old Fake Death Embalming Enema

GrimGnome notes: “I always love to hear nightmares from this particular guy due to the overwhelming joy that these weird dreams give him. It’s obvious from the way he tells them. He’s always got a fantastic dream and he has absolutely no inhibition about sharing even the strangest ones. Like this one:

…the procedure was extremely painful… and cold!

(Male, 30’s) “For reasons unknown, I had to fake my own death. And things had gone pretty well up until the point where I had to prove I was dead. The proof, however, was that my wife had to give me an enema of embalming fluid in front of witnesses. The enema was delivered in his huge syringe. It must have held gallons and gallons of fluid and the embalming fluid itself was fluorescent blue like antifreeze. It was also freezing cold. The procedure was extremely painful and cold and I think I even was screaming at some points but somehow it convinced the witnesses that I was really dead.

Or at least mostly, because there was some lingering suspicion. So my wife and I figured that it would look more believable if she got married to someone else. We chose a guy I’ve known since childhood and who is also currently a co-worker of mine. So the dream ended with me dressing up in a disguise to go attend my own wife’s wedding.
How about THAT for a dream!”

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #203 – Accident at the Alien Incinerator

(Male, 30’s) It started off as a normal dream. I was being given a walk-through tour of a place like NASA or something. A large scientific facility and this was the tour for new employees. One of the things we were shown was the incinerator. I remember seeing a small pile of ashes in front of it. We were told to be very careful in cleaning the incinerator because this was where the bodies of the alien creatures were disposed of and if the incinerator wasn’t properly cleaned, we’d risk spreading some kind of alien infection. I made a special mental note to clean the incinerator really well. At the end of the tour, I told the guide that I knew it was all business as usual for them but that I was still finding it kind of hard to get my head around the idea that aliens were real!

“…It wasn’t clear actually whether it really was an accident or whether she did it on purpose….”

So I started working there and things went fine for a few weeks. Then a woman I worked with got careless with the incinerator. It wasn’t clear actually whether it really was an accident or whether she did it on purpose but some the alien virus got out and started infecting people. They turned into some kind of zombie monster. There were strict protocols for how to deal with virus in order to keep it contained.

But some how my 9 year old son got infected. We were locked in a room together. I knew that I had to contain the infection which meant I had to kill him. But he had just started to turn so most of the time I would look at him and he’d be normal. Only every every now and then he’d act very aggressive and throw me around the room. It was impossibly hard but I realized that I’d have to kill him. I got a knife. When he saw the knife he went crazy, so I hid it behind my back. He calmed down. I approached my son and I hugged him, and as I hugged him I sawed off his head with the knife. By that point it was clear that he was a monster but still somewhere inside he was my son. He died mercifully quickly. But his head didn’t fall off entirely. So I had to sort of twist it around and saw for awhile on the other side until it separated.”

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #202 – Driving Sideways

(Male, 40’s) Unbelievable dream, maybe not a nightmare but a dark dream. Really dark.

“…if I stopped I’d likely be hit by another car and end up like the bits of wreckage….”

I was driving down a gravel road, a familiar gravel road, one that’s kept in pretty good condition usually. I know this road. I was in my car, the familiar car that I drive every day. It was night and it was raining. Visibility was horrible but as I said this was all pretty familiar territory. But the road started to get extremely bad. Not icy or slippery but there was junk on the road. Bits of cars and things. Like something that looked like the entire undercarriage of a car that had just dropped off. I could swerve around them because they just kept popping up in my headlights. But every time I ran over one of these things, the alignment on my car would go just a little bit more skewed. By skewed, I mean that the car was pointing a good 20 degrees to the right different from where the car was actually heading. I couldn’t see where I was going very well because the windsheild wipers only cleared the glass in front and I was headed in a much different direction. I kept running over things, on one side then the other. By the end of the dream, the car was facing exactly perpendicular to the road, a full 90 degrees. I was still somehow able to control it by turning the steering wheel. Don’t ask how the wheels must have been moving. All I knew was that I had to keep going, that if I stopped I’d likely be hit by another car and end up like the bits of wreckage. And I knew that there were pretty steep ditches on both sides of the road so I had to be careful not to go into them. But I really couldn’t slow down either because I had to get somewhere. But I couldn’t see anything. I had to look out through my side window because that was the direction the car was heading. I finally decided to roll down the window but all that did was let in the stinging spray of icy rain. It bit into my face and I couldn’t keep my eyes open. So I closed them. And I woke up.