Category: Nightmares

(Female, early 40’s) I was trapped with a group of human survivors inside a school building. We were battling giant robots like nothing I’ve seen before. They were fifteen to twenty feet tall, they had round faces like an analog clock and their heads were part of their round bodies. They had legs with wheels on the bottoms so they could move very fast and their arms were very long and had guns and pinching claws on the end. Their arms reached all the way from their shoulders down to the ground. Some robots look like metal people but these didn’t. They were just heartless killing machines. Did I mention they were trying to kill us in any way possible at any opportunity?

There was a herd of them circling the school.. There was something we could build that could eliminate the robots but they knew about it too. One of the essential pieces was this special rock. It was as big as my hand and it was dark black, like obsidian or something. We had the rock but the robots had killed the people who were carrying the rock. We had to get it back to have any chance of survival. So someone drove a bus around the school building and when it passed by the doors we had to take turns running and jumping into it to get inside. It had to go around several times because we couldn’t all get on at once. The bus couldn’t stop because that would attract too much attention. There were also delivery trucks at the school that were unintentionally helping us because they robots had to avoid them.

We were also trying to separate the robots from each other because one of them had the rock and we knew we couldn’t destroy them all. We got this one robot alone and then we crashed our bus into it. The robot fell over. Some of us got off the bus and grabbed the rock from the claw. But we had to get back in the school then because that’s where the rest of the device we were building was. We started running toward the school but that attracted the attention of the other robots. They started speeding toward us and shooting at us. Before we made it there, I woke up.

This was a dream straight out of Kafka. I was visiting another country where I could speak the language but it isn’t my native tongue. My room was right next to the train station, I knew when my train would be leaving and I knew the place was never very busy so I didn’t bother to saunter over there until nearly departure time.  The train must have been something like a commuter train because I didn’t have an assigned seat, I didn’t actually even have a ticket. I thought naturally that I would be able to purchase one and step aboard. But the train station was absurdly crowded. There were people everywhere and long, long line snaking around queues everywhere.  Standing in one of the lines was a colleague from work, actually a bit of a rival. He seemed in charge of a huge brood of schoolchildren who were also waiting for a train and incidentally clogging up the queues for tickets.  I stood in a different lines, several in fact, fruitlessly; once I got to the front I discovered this was, say, a window to buy caramel popcorn not train tickets. I was starting to panic.  I went inside the station which was pitch black.  A young man I know was there, someone who is confined to a wheelchair in both real life and in the dream.  He couldn’t get his chair through the turnstile so I helped him through and got him safely to his train.  But there was no place where I could buy a ticket for myself.  As I remember there was also a display set up inside the station where the history of rail travel was told in dioramas. There were no lights illuminating these displays and I was even more pressed for time. I raced outside again.  The crowds had thinned and I finally was able to purchase a ticket though this itself was a hassle because the agent wanted exact change and wouldn’t settle even when I wanted to pay too much.  Finally with ticket in hand I started running toward the train.  It was a small train, maybe three cars pulled by a steam locomotive.  There were train conductors stepping off the stairs.  It was clearly ready to depart.  I still had a small hill to run down to catch it.  I thought if I could get the conductors’ attention, they might hold the train.  I yelled but my voice was thin and tinny.  I started to take off my hat to wave it and catch their attention when I realized that I had tucked dozens of slips of paper under the brim of my hat and as I removed my hat, they all cascaded to the ground.

(Male) I was in a car, a normal four-door sedan, nothing special. I think the interior was burgundy. It didn’t feel like it was my car like for one thing it was messier than any car I’ve ever had. Not like spills, but things like bits of trash on the floor. I’m not a clean-freak but I don’t usually leave that kind of stuff around. But I also didn’t exactly feel like I had the right to throw away any of the stuff. I drove the car alone. I had all these errands to do. I drove it from one stop to the next, parked it, ran in someplace and hopped back in the car. I can’t remember what the errands were but I don’t think they were very important.

What was strange though was that every time I got back in the car there was a little more crap on the floor. It wasn’t happening fast enough for me to notice really but for instance, one time I got back in and there was stuff coating the whole floor. Pretty soon there was stuff on the seat too: books, crumpled up paper, candy wrappers, dirt… Eventually it became difficult for me to get into the car. But I had to keep making these errands.

Finally though I was entirely trapped inside this car. The weight of the junk on top and beside and around me was too heavy for me to move my limbs. I was somehow able to keep driving though. I started hearing this strange little sound a bit between a tinkling bell and a sizzle. I didn’t think much about it until I saw something move out of the crner of my eye. It was small and furry like a mouse or a shrew. It was angry at me, threatened by me being in its lair. It also wasn’t alone; there were several of these little creatures mixed in the garbage all around me. I felt something bite me and it was a weird bite, like a sting and an electrical shock mixed together. The one up by my face kept squealing at me like it was yelling at me while I was getting bitten in random places all over my body. I really, really didn’t want to be bitten in the face but I couldn’t move to avoid the creature. And that’s when I woke up.

We had survived a shipwreck, me and two other people. We were just floating in the middle of the ocean, all alone, with no wreckage or raft or anything to hold on to. We faced each other to keep from getting freaked out by the fact that we were in the middle of the ocean, miles from anything. But we each knew that if we looked out onto the horizon we’d go crazy thinking how far away it was, about how slim our chances of survival were. We suspected there were sharks underneath us but no one mentioned that possibility.

Our skin was very pale, nearly white, like a cave salamander or maybe like flight suits. It almost glowed under the water. And each of us held onto something that we had rescued from the ship before it went down. Like I had this small parcel that some how was supposed to be used for navigation but none of us knew how to use it. It also wouldn’t have been very much use to know WHERE we were if we didn’t have the ability to move anywhere else.

So there we were, treading water, all of us on the verge of insanity, waiting to drown. We knew how it would happen. One of us would not be able to take it any longer, either from exhaustion or from fear or craziness from the waves constantly hitting against our chests and heads. The one who goes crazy will start to freak out, and grab on to the others. We’ll struggle, wrestle in the waves, gulp water. It’ll be easy for us all to be pulled under, for us all to drown. We’re just waiting. Watching each other. Putting it off.