Category: Nightmares

(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.

(Male, 30’s) I don’t have a cat, or any pets for that matter but there’s a cat in the neighborhood who’s been very friendly to me for the last year or so. Maybe that’s where the dream comes from.

In the nightmare, I’m living in a small apartment and I have a pet kitten. The kitten is orange striped and very friendly. It follows me from room too room. I’m in the bathroom, either washing my hands or cleaning the basin and the kitten is walking around the seat on the toilet. Then before I know what is happening, the kitten loses its balance (?) and falls INTO the toilet. There’s not much water in there but she has been pulled almost entirely down the drain. I can just barely see her head looking up at me under the water. She looks so scared. I am terrified too because I don’t know what to do. I yell to other people in the apartment and my dad comes in. We look down at this poor drowning kitten and don’t know what to do. Finally I reach down and try to grab her. There is nothing to grab onto really so I pinch onto her ear and tug her upward. As soon as her shoulders clear the edge of the drain she is able to use her legs to crawl out by herself which she does very quickly. I don’t know why this nightmare was so scary other than it being an emergency situation where I had absolutely no idea how to act.

(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.

(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.

(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.

(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.