Author: The Grim Gnome

(Male, 20’s) This dream was EXACTLY like a horror movie which is kind of strange because I haven’t watched a horror movie in awhile. I was like a private in the military but it was like France maybe around the time of Napoleon or something. I was on night patrol with another soldier but there was also a lieutenant with us. We were on this island with these rolling hills and gravel roads and huge pine trees. All of a sudden this big fat guy comes up to the lieutenant. I got the sense that this fat guy was someone important, like the mayor of the town we were occupying, someone important but not military. He wore white pants, I remember that. The mayor was complaining to the lieutenant “Do you have any idea what your men have done?” And the lieutenant just spews out this line of pure bull that was so smooth and reassuring. He seemed to think that the worst the soldiers had done was to go hunting and accidentally hunt someone’s dog. The mayor explained that the soldiers had gotten drunk and started digging up graves. The lieutenant looked a little grossed out by that but he kept up with the bull. The mayor continued and said the trouble is that a werewolf had come out of the woods and started eating the corpses. Yuck, I know. So the soldiers shot it and thought everything was fine. The lieutenant said “The army will deal with the consequences.” The mayor got all huffy, like there’s no way you’ll be able to cope with the consequences.

And by that he meant the living dead. Somehow the werewolf had infected all the dead and not just the ones in the cemetery. There were zombies everywhere like maybe all the people who’d been killed in the day’s fighting. All of a sudden I wasn’t on this island anymore. I was in the front yard of the house where I grew up. My dad was there though he was dressed like one of the French peasants from the island. He had a shotgun and was heading out to kick some zombie ass. I said “I got your back, Dad.” And I picked up the only weapon that was nearby which was this nasty wood splitting ax. There was someone else there too on our side though I don’t know who it was. We walked down across the front yards of the neighbor hood and a few zombies came out from between the houses. This is where it got weird. I mean this is where something else weird started happening. We could only move a little bit at a time and only one person at a time, like this was a board game or something. The zombies could keep coming however they wanted but they were slow and disorganized. I tried to move away from my dad so I wouldn’t accidentally hit him with the follow-through on the ax. But I somehow got stuck, like I couldn’t move closer at all, like I had massive lag in a video game. I could watch what was happening but couldn’t do anything. Dad kept walking closer to the zombies way closer than he needed to because he had a shotgun. The other person who was with us got scared and tried to run away but could only run a couple steps at a time like he was stuck too. I knew Dad was going to get killed and there was nothing I could do.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Female, 40s) I was at a party at someone’s house who was supposed to be my friend. However, I’ve never actually been in the house before in my life. There was music, general revelry. I was standing in a hallway with my back to the party talking to a young man who was supposedly a friend of mine though actually, I’ve never seen him before in my life. He was much younger than me, probably in his twenties. Then a young woman came up to us. She was also very much younger than myself, again perhaps early twenties. The woman had long blond hair. The man introduced me to her and at that moment I realized that she had no hands. Her arms just stopped at the wrists, rounded over into knobs. The young woman, I could tell, didn’t like me at all. I didn’t know exactly why. Perhaps it was because I noticed that she didn’t have any hands. Perhaps for another reason. I didn’t feel comfortable at the party anymore.

(Male, 50’s) I had this nightmare during a nap so only bits and pieces of it are coming back to me but it’s pretty weird.

It started that my wife and I were picking up our daughter from day care — which is bizarre for several reasons one of which is that our real daughter is graduating high school, hardly the daycare age. The second bizarre thing is that our daughter looks exactly like my wife except smaller. And by smaller I mean scaled smaller like an image in photoshop: shorter, narrower. And the most bizarre thing, I think, is that she never looks us in the face. Our daughter is always facing away from us, like she’s pouting or something or maybe like she doesn’t actually *have* a face… By the time we get to the daycare, it’s getting dark and the lady at the daycare is angry, pissy. Her door is locked with multiple locks. She’s upset that we’ve left it so late again, so close to dark when the zombies come out.

Oh yeah, another bizarre part of this dream is that everything gets over run by zombies at night fall. Life goes on pretty much the same during the day but once the sun goes down and things get dark… it’s the living dead EVERYWHERE. As we’re heading away from the daycare, I say to my wife that things weren’t like this back home, that maybe we should consider going home, perhaps even that very night. She agrees immediately and we start walking “home” which was some place several hundred miles away and I *think* it was to the south of where we were. This was a popular idea. There were MANY many people also out on the streets but NONE of us were in cars. Everyone was walking. Along the side of the road people had set up impromptu rummage sales. I stopped at one that was selling nice old hardbound books. They were all reasonably priced, though I had no money, was setting out on a multi-day hike and, oh yeah, was fleeing from zombies.

That’s probably the MOST BIZARRE part of the whole dream. Everyone KNEW there were zombies around ready to strike out at any minute. By this point in the dream, there even was an occasional zombie reaching out from the shade underneath a tree to grab and devour someone. Everyone knew there were zombies but we carried on in total brain-dead denial of that horror. Here were were members of a crowd stumbling down the streets, a banquet on the hoof, absolutely NO protection yet we were just walking along, not even particularly hurrying. Part of my mind kept saying “Wake up. Wake up. There’s danger here!”

(Male, 50’s) I had lost my wife, literally. She had gone missing in this strange building.

The building was very much like the basement of a bank where they have safe deposit boxes (at least the way they’re depicted in movies.) There were two sides to the vaults, two corridors connecting them and two elevators that went up and down between the two floors of the vaults. I was riding the elevator in one of the areas with her and all of a sudden she wasn’t beside me anymore. I was still in the elevator but she must have stepped out. I rode up and down the elevator and i could see no one outside through the elevator windows, just the lines of metal vaults. I stopped at one floor and held the door open and I called out to her but my voice echoed and reverberated down the corridor in such a way that no one would be able to tell where I was or what I was saying. I got back on the elevator and rode down. I decided that my wife was the kind of person who wouldn’t waste all this time in forethought, she’d just step off the elevator and investigate matters. In fact, that’s evidently what she’d already done.

When the elevator doors opened, I stepped out. But it was not like the vault corridors I’d seen before. I was actually in a relatively small room, maybe 10′ x 10′ and there was a very large object in the room that looked like an ice chest you’d find at a motel or hotel. It was very fancy with a powder-coat paint job of a very deep maroon, almost brown. Again, I made myself be brave and I opened the hinged door. It was thick like an insulated door. But all I could see was another hinged door, smaller than the first. I opened it. Again another door. In total, three doors. Behind the third door was a rectangular lid, much like a door but without a hinge. I had to removed this entirely. Again, another lid. In total four lids each one deeper and deeper inside this strange chest, each one harder to reach and harder to see until I wasn’t able to see at all what I was reaching into beyond that seventh portal.

Again, I forced myself to be brave, because that’s what my wife would do. I stuck my hand past that last open hole. There was a very weird substance in there. My first thought is that it was brains, very very dry brains. It was slightly sticky to the touch, rubbery and felt a bit like a very large number of rubber toys or gummy-bears had been pressed tightly together. About this time, the dream faded.