Category: Nightmares

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Nightmares

Nightmare #59 – Horrible Words Through the Slit of an Eye

(Female, middle aged) This wasn’t a dream as much as a really powerful image. I mean, of course it was a dream; I just don’t remember a lot of other details from it. But it lasted a while, in dream time.

The frightening image was a slit of light along the horizon. The light was very far away, but it was coming closer all the time. It reminded me a little of that– what is it?– that flaming eye in Lord of the Rings that represents the rising evil presence, that all-knowing, all-seeing eye. This light was like that, coming closer slowly.

As it approached, I could see that there was something in it, something blurry, a dark line of some sort. As the light came nearer, I could see that the dark blur was actually text, like when you are having your eyes examined and the doctor shows you blocks of light with letters in them and wants you to read them aloud. In the light was writing. Except that this was longer, not just single letters, but probably words. There was something written there, a long sentence maybe from the amount of letters.

I squinted my eyes, trying to decipher the text, trying to make sense of it as the scary light came closer. Figuring it out was my only hope, but the text was too blurry. I couldn’t read it and the light was going to get me soon.

I’m not sure if the scariest part was the approaching light itself– I mean, after all, what was the light going to do to me? More frightening, I think, was the not-being-able-to-read part of the dream. I don’t know if my eyes were failing or what. Just that something important wasn’t working right.

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Nightmares

Nightmare #58 – Dangerous Surgery

(Male) This was a dream that had a whole world attached to it, all these things I just knew about this world which makes it rather hard to tell as a straight story.

The whole dream was set in the future, a time when it rained all the time and people seemed to live inside all the time under this really flat, gray light. The world was like a honeycomb of hallways, very institutional-feeling. Everybody wore these very drab gray jumpsuits that seemed to be very fragile, easily torn but then again very easily replaced. What’s coming to mind is that they must have been made out of recycled paper fibres but no one in the dream actually said that.

We were at war with this other society but what was strange was that both societies lived in the same hallways. The only way the different armies could be discerned was by their weapons. Get this: the weapons looked like water balloons but they had a tough enough skin that they could be stacked. There was one hallway that was stacked floor to ceiling with these water balloons. But the other army had their own water balloons, the only difference is that one army had balloons that were red while the other army had balloons that were blue. The weapons had the only bright colors in the whole place.

Since both societies basically looked like each other, we were suspicious of basically everyone all the time. The only way to really tell what side someone was on is if they were carrying a weapon. Through a passing conversation with a friend I knew and trusted, I learned that I had had some surgery as part of a very old military program, something that implanted a weapon inside me. I didn’t like the sound of that, though I thought it would be good to know once and for all which side I was on, which society I really belonged to. He mentioned an “address” which of course was a room number because no one went outside anymore.

I tried to get to the address. I didn’t know what to expect. Would the doctors remove the weapon? Would they program me to explode like a water balloon? Would I find the room empty and abandoned? While I was getting there, I must have made certain army officials suspicious of me. I had to run away from them, down the unfamiliar, indistinct corridors, turning here and there. Finally I got to the room and explained my situation to the doctors. They beat me up and kicked me when I collapsed on the floor. I tried to ask if they weren’t afraid that the weapon would detonate but all they said was “Ungrateful.”

Finally they dragged me over to an operating table. “We’ll take out the weapon. Then we’ll ship you off-world to a mining colony. How do you like that?”

The next thing I knew I was outside, running through the rain. It sizzled, stung a little, as it hit my skin. It was very dark. I ducked into an alley. There was another man there with a long black beard and a woman with snarled blond hair. They had had money once but had wasted it all and so now, they were escaping.

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Nightmares

Nightmare #57 – Deformed Mermaid

(Male) This isn’t so much a dream because I can’t remember the whole dream but just one image:

Everything was deep blue and grey, like a foggy day on the ocean. There were long swirls of kelp that were a dark blue-green. And swimming among the waves and the kelp was a mermaid, a half fish – half woman with long flowing black hair that glistened from the water. She pulled herself out of the water to rest for a moment. The Mermaid didn’t seem to know I was there or perhaps she didn’t care. I was so close I could reach out and touch her shoulder but I didn’t want to startle her so I called out to her gently. She turned her head and I could see that she had no face. Literally, everything between her chin and her forehead was gone, even the bone was missing. It looked like a shark or something had taken a bite out of the front of her head. The front of her teeth were missing, revealing a gaping throat; there were empty socket that might have been where her eyes were or perhaps they were the sinus cavities behind her eyes. The Mermaid wasn’t bleeding or in any obvious pain but I couldn’t imagine how she could still be alive after such trauma.

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Nightmares

Nightmare #56 – Zombies Last Stand

(Male) The dream took place in a cottage that friends of mine used to have when we were kids. But instead of being on a lake, the cottage was just in a normal, old neighborhood. One night, zombies attacked. Nothing too unique or special about the zombies, just old-fashioned, slow-moving, brain-eating zombies. They were more or less easy to keep out despite the long rows of windows at the front. We had retreated upstairs.

But we survived til dawn. For some reason these zombies couldn’t be out in daylight, which made things rather convenient for us. I went downstairs and found a friend of mine on the couch. I thought he was a zombie but he was just hung over. I went outside and talked with my neighbors who were all very angry. I learned that many people had tried to escape the city so there was a huge traffic jam and then when nightfall came, the zombies just ate people in their cars, one by one, like a buffet table.

Though our neighborhood had been attacked it didn’t look like anyone had been hurt. We knew we wouldn’t be so lucky tonight.

When night fell, the folks in our house retreated to the second story of the cottage, plugged in our gas generator — which we knew wouldn’t last forever — and then used the electricity to power our guitar amps. We played this really weird psychedelic music all night long. We had destroyed the staircase so we were sort of luring all the zombies to our first floor for some reason, like a big roach motel. We could hear them moving downstairs, moaning like they were singing along with the music.

When I woke up from this dream it was still dark and I was even scared to move.

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Nightmares

Nightmare #55 – Escape from Cloud Mountain

(Male) This was an epic scale dream, one that felt like it went on for hours and hours and covered a huge amount of narrative. The dream took place on this cloud that was more or less solid. People had landed on this cloud and dug out huge passages and tunnels inside it. All the walls were translucent so sunlight made them all glowing white.

The cloud was some kind of secret military installation and I wasn’t supposed to be there. But I was there with my best friend and with an old friend I haven’t seen in probably 10 years.

It was scary because we had to avoid the military who were shooting at us. And also because the whole cloud was dissolving. The builders had carved too much into the cloud and so it had started to turn back into merely water vapor. Aircraft and vehicles were starting to sink through the floor and presumably then fall to earth. We were running around, trying not to be killed while trying to find some way off the cloud.

By the end of the dream we still hadn’t escaped. As we ran, our feet sank into the floor like it was melting underneath us. It became harder and harder to run.

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Nightmares

Nightmare #53 – Stalked… by Bigfoot

(Male, 30’s) I remember one nightmare I had as a kid. It was a fever dream and fever dreams are especially vivid and realistic so it almost feels like a memory. I had noticed a large paw print in the dust on top of my dresser — though this was of course impossible because I would have been so short at the time that I couldn’t even SEE the top of my dresser. Then I had the feeling I was being watched. I looked over at the window of my bedroom and there was this huge hairy creature looking in at me. I wouldn’t have known the word for it then but clearly it was Bigfoot! I didn’t want him to get me. So I ran out of my bedroom and into the hallway. There was window at the end of the hall that usually had a curtain in front of it but in the dream there was no curtain. This allowed Bigfoot to look right in at me again. Then I ran into my sister’s room. She was disturbed by my running around but she was disturbed even more by Bigfoot staring in her window too. Finally both of us ran and hid in the closet which was the only place it seemed like we’d be save. To this day, I think we did hide in the closet!

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Nightmares

Nightmare #52 – A Little Violence among Friends

(Male, mid 20’s) The wife of one of my wife’s friends shows up at our door. She says she has just left her husband and that she needs a place to hide. She’s afraid her husband might be violent. We let her in.

..She’s afraid her husband might be violent…

Before long her husband appears and he is angry. He tries to attack his wife but she runs away from him. Then he is angry at my wife and I for letting his wife hide in our house. He takes a poker from the fireplace and chases us around in a homicidal frenzy. Then he threatens my infant daughter — and without a thought I rip the weapon away from him and beat him over and over with it. Before I know it, this longtime friend of ours, someone who would eat dinner at our table, lies dead at my feet, bloody, broken, crushed by my hand. It was terrifying how easy it was.

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Nightmares

Nightmare #51 – In Death, Face to Face

(Male) This part really happened: A teacher I had maybe ten years ago had a daughter a couple years younger than me. I don’t remember ever having a conversation with her. The difference between our ages always seemed so big at the time. Last month, his daughter died after a lengthy illness.

But after she’d died, I had a dream where she and I were both in this dark room. Just outside the door in a lighted space there were people who we both knew. We stood very close to each other for quite awhile, wordlessly standing, not exactly waiting, just sort of “being.” Finally I spoke, “I never really knew you.” Then she said entirely without inflection “Now I’m dead.” I nodded but since we were in the dark, she wouldn’t have been able to see. I didn’t know if her words supposed to mean that I was dead too, or that since she was dead that therefore we’d be able to get to know each other or whether, perhaps, her words really weren’t replying to me at all. I could hear a commotion coming from the people in the lighted space but none of their words were distinct enough to make out. We stood there, in the dark, face to face, until I woke up.

His daughter who

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"What We Fear" Nightmares

Nightmare #54 – Night Suffocation (Apnea)

You’re asleep. Dreaming. And you become aware that there is no air getting into your lungs. You try harder to decompress your chest but nothing works. You’re suffocating. You force yourself up, up, up through the layers of sleep, like a diver rising quickly too quickly toward the surface, aching for breath. Once awake enough to control your body again, you sit up quickly in bed, your chest heaving, forcing air into your lungs. Your heart hammers inside your chest. Perhaps a bit of vomit has begun to rise at the back of your throat. You sit on the edge of your bed, panting, confused as to when and where you are, peering into the dark room. Eventually you are able to breath regularly. The alarm clock tells you it’s still the middle of the night, that there are hours until morning. Adrenaline disapates and you feel the weariness of your body again. Do you go back to sleep and risk another terrifying incident of apnea, of premature burial, of nocturnal suffocation? Or do you choose to haunt your house yet another night, to surrender to insomnia and drift from room to room ’til dawn? Apnea seems more likely to strike following days when you’ve worked hard physically, on nights when you most need a deep rejuvenating sleep.

You’ve always snored but in recent years, you’ve been told it’s gotten worse. You find it hard to find a position to fall asleep in. You haven’t slept on your back in years; your throat closes off immediately. There’s one position, on your side, propped up with a pillow that allows sleep. All others are uncomfortable. Your body has become picky, peculiar about sleep, as finicky as an elderly cat that sniffs its bowl of food disdainfully before forcing down a couple mouthfuls.

Perhaps the treatments for apnea seem intrusive. Losing weight is recommended. Excess fat around the neck – that double chin – contribute to night time strangulation. But you’ve tried losing weight before and it keeps returning. There are also other treatments, masks that retain enough air pressure so that your passageways don’t collapse. But regardless of how much you read about them, the idea of wearing something on your face is sickening, terrifying. Yet another thing to get in the way of breath. An inanimate hand clamped around your face.

When you were younger, you joked with your friends about decadent rock stars who choked to death on their own vomit. Now, you think differently about those stories.

And this is the nightmare. It’s not one you wake from. It’s one you carry all day, every exhausted day, each horrified night. Sometimes it recedes, hides but the threat of night suffocation is always there.

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Nightmares

Nightmare #50 – Weiner Dog Attacks

(Male) Massively strange dream. I was walking down a row of shops and all of them seemed to sell relatively strange things. Like one of the shops sold exclusively cartoon art. Not comic books but large canvases and boards with single panel cartoons on them. There was someone in the crowd who resembled one of the figures in the cartoons and he found that funny.

Down the street a little way was a window box / display case. The frame to this case looked like an extremely thin, young fawn. It was extremely odd. I walked up close to it to see if it had been in fact made from a fawn – actually it was made from very small twigs nailed on their side. A dog started barking at me. The dog apparently belonged to a Japanese couple who didn’t speak very much English at all. I tried to indicate that I wasn’t afraid of dogs. The dog, a dachshund, kept barking at me angrily. The couple laughed like they were embarrassed by the poor behavior of their dog. I stretched my palms out to show the dog I had no ill will toward it. It ran toward me, jumped up about two feet and bit the pinky of my left hand. It didn’t bit hard enough to break the skin but it bit hard enough to hold on. I shook the dog off. I shook my finger at the dog and said “No!” in this deep growling voice. The dog’s owner told me “good voice” but did nothing to discipline or restrain the dog that continued to bark furiously at me. I thought maybe this is how they treat dogs in Japan, maybe they do what they want.

Then amazingly from a dead stop this tiny little dog jumped up five feet all the way to my face and bit me on my eyebrow above my left eye. Again, it did not break the skin but it held on tightly enough to hand there. I was terrified. I had this dog – albeit a tiny one – biting my face and growling. I had no idea what to do, nor did anyone around me.

That’s when I woke up.

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Nightmares

Nightmare #49 – Lost on Narrow Streets

(Female, mid 40’s) It was dark evening in this dream and I was riding my bike back to my car, which is not something I do in real life. My car was parked in a huge parking lot, like at a football stadium or the airport, and I couldn’t quite remember where I’d left it. I was biking up and down the aisles of the parking lot, watching as car upon car drove off. Soon the parking lot was nearly empty and that made it easier to find my little blue Honda, the car I really drive.

I put my bike into the trunk of the car, where it really wouldn’t fit in real life. Then I got in the car and started driving. I thought I knew which way I was going, but the streets didn’t look familiar at all. Still I kept driving, turning down different streets and trying to find my way. I turned down one street, but it turned out to be an alley running behind the backs of a row of buildings, rather than a street. I thought I would go around and come back out on the street, but the alley turned at odd angles. I turned down another alley, a narrower alley, that I thought would bring me back to the main road, but it didn’t. My only way to go was a narrower alley still, either right or left. There wasn’t room to turn around. Now the fences and doors and garages were even narrower. But I kept driving, slowly inching along. The sides of the alley were nearly touching my car on both sides, so I decided I’d better go back. I put the car in reverse and started backing up. It was so narrow that I had a hard time moving without scraping the sides of the car. Then I saw a door that looked really familiar– like it actually was the place I was going. I backed up the car far enough that I could open the door and I got out.

…”Finally!” she yelled, “finally you come but it’s too late! You are too late!”…

I opened the door to find this sort of hippie-gypsy looking room. There was draped cloth decorating the room, and incense, and lava lamps (!) I knew this place: it belonged to my step-mother! (I don’t have a step-mother in real life!) She was there, very angry, dressed like a hippie gypsy herself. “Finally!” she said, “finally you come but it’s too late! You are too late!” She was holding a baby, who was supposed to be my step-sister too. “You are too late to save her!” Then the step-mother knocked over a lava lamp, smashing it and making a little spark of fire catch on one of the shimmery draped cloths. In real-life, I know that the fire would have spread much faster than it did in this dream. She put down the baby to start more fires; she began to light matches from the incense and started dropping them around the room, laughing hysterically, like she was out-of-control crazy. I picked up the baby and carried her to the car and strapped her into her carseat in the back. Then I went back in for baby supplies. The crazy step-mother was still laughing and lighting fires. I knew I couldn’t do anything to stop her, so I left, closing the door behind me. Then I got back in the car and began to back out of the alley very slowly.

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Nightmares

Nightmare #48 – Video Corpse

(Male, early 20’s) I dreamed I was inside of a video game, which I guess isn’t really that strange because I play a lot of video games. It was a first-person-shooter / capture-the-flag style game which means you run around a lot shooting at people and trying to get the other team’s flag. So in the dream, I get shot and I “die” which means I have to restart at a certain place and run back into where the action is.

The first weird thing that happens is that when I passed the place where I “died” I can see that there is a body there and that it’s me. My corpse is lying on the ground right where it must have fallen when I was shot. I thought that was weird because usually you just disappear when you’re shot. But I still was able to move around and play the game so I continued running around, shooting at people, trying to capture the other team’s flag.

Then I run past the place where I died a second time and my corpse is STILL there. But what’s really strange is that there are these other figures – figures who aren’t players in the game – who are picking up my body and are carrying it away. I look around and all over the battle field there are more of these figures who are carrying away the other player’s corpses. This made me feel really strange and right then, I woke up.

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Nightmares

Nightmare #47 – Illegal Entry

(Male, middle aged) This isn’t exactly a nightmare but it was sure thrilling, maybe less like a horror movie and more like an action adventure.

…When we were nearly through the store, we noticed that we had triggered the burglar alarm…

My wife and I were taking our grand daughter for a ride in a stroller. It was one of those huge, old-fashioned strollers with ruffles and big tires. It was a Sunday. We had walked around town all after noon and by the time we started back it was getting dark and we were getting tired. For some reason, we thought it would be easier if we took a short cut THROUGH an antique shop. The first trouble was that the antique shop was closed since it was late on a Sunday. We tried the door anyway and found that it had been left unlocked so we opened it and pushed the carriage inside. We discovered immediately another trouble with this plan which was the aisles of the shop were crammed too tightly with merchandise. My wife and I had to move things from the front of the stroller to the back in order to have enough room to inch it along. The process seemed to take hours – what a short cut! It was dark outside. We were so tired. When we were nearly through the store, we noticed that we had triggered the burglar alarm. We tried to work fast to get through the store. Just as the stroller was nearly out, however, we started hearing police sirens. We pushed the stroller the last bit of the way and an antique ceramic plate got caught in the ruffles. I caught it just before it would have shattered on the cement. My heart was pounding in my chest. My feet and back ached. I just wanted to get home. Just wanted to put my feet up. As we got the stroller out of the door and onto the sidewalk, this huge armored (!) police car screamed around the corner. It pulled up beside us and a couple very young policemen rushed out and started running around the building. My wife and I smiled and started pushing the carriage toward home.

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Nightmares

Nightmare #46 – Vampire Dolls

(Male) I was supposed to water a plant a church that was closed for vacation but I didn’t have anything to carry the water in and also the door to the area where the water was seemed to be locked. I poured out my pop and filled it with water from a fish pond and started carrying it toward the church door. I’d made sure to leave the church door open so I could get back in. Just then this extremely small woman came out of the church – I mean she was probably 18″ tall. (Now I think about it, she resembled my grandmother a little bit. Then again she also resembled that psychic woman from the movie Poltergeist the one who says “this house is clean.” Only smaller. Maybe a third that actress’ height.) She deliberately lets the church door slam closed even though it’s obvious that I’m rushing to get in. Though I know that she’s a church lady, we still have some pretty harsh words. At the end of our argument, though she says “Well, come along now” then she starts to walk away. Then she turns and says “You’re supposed to follow me.” So I followed her. The woman is a little bit lame so she holds onto me a bit to walk. As we’re walking, she indicates when we should walk a little faster or when we should slow down or stop. We are able to cross at all the green lights and we avoid getting hit when someone bursts through a door. It’s like she can very precisely see into the future which was really rather creepy. We get to this hotel, climb up to the second floor and pause in front of a particular room. There are lights shining from underneath the door. She indicates that we should wait. When the lights turn off, the woman says “Now.” I didn’t know what she meant. She said “You’ll know what to do.”

I entered the hotel room which was extremely plain, more like a movie set from the 40’s than a contemporary hotel. There were a couple twin sized beds with metal frames and on the beds there were what appeared to be lifeless human forms. When I looked closer, I realized they were made of wood. They were like those featureless wooden models that artists use – only 5′ tall! And they were vampires. Wooden vampires. There was blood smeared on their faces. The old lady said I’d know what to do. I figured I was supposed to kill them while they weren’t moving. Beside the vampires, there were wooden knitting needles like they had been knitting just before bed. I tried stabbing one of the needles into their wooden chests but the tip of the needle just shattered away.

I awoke surrounded by sleeping monsters wondering how exactly I was supposed to kill wooden vampires.

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Nightmares

Nightmare #45 – The Deformed DVD

(Male, 40’s) I was watching a DVD of a television show. Actually I was trying to watch a DVD of a television show, some kind of situation comedy or something, but the disc kept skipping. In real life my DVD player often skips or stops playing all together but this DVD kept skipping from this brightly lit sit-com stage to this really dark footage that was clearly out of place with the TV show. The TV isn’t hooked up to cable so it’s not coming from there. It must be somewhere hidden on the disc. The footage is a medium shot of a human form wrapped head to toe in dark grey burlap and then bound with thick ropes. The person is still alive because they’re flailing, slapping the concrete floor like a dolphin on dry land. And another thing is that the burlap is soaking wet. It’s shiny and it makes a slapping sound as the figure moves. For some reason, I know enough of the story line to know that this person has just been pulled out of a torpedo tube, “rescued” into the submarine… but then again no one seems in much of a hurry to undo the ropes and unwind the burlap. Some rescue. There’s no one in the footage though, just this figure struggling alone. The image will fuzz in and out to the sit com with a lot of static. This footage interrupts the sit-com so much it’s really starting to disturb me so I get up and I take the disc out so I can clean it, maybe make it go away. The disc itself is deformed, like it had been melted and then smeared down a plate or something. I don’t even know how it could have fit in the DVD tray.

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Nightmares

Nightmare #44 – Wedding Horror

(Female, 60’s) In my dream, we were getting ready for my second daughter’s wedding. It was going to be a huge wedding — at least as big an affair as my first daughter’s wedding the year before. I wanted everything to be just perfect. Finally it was the day before the wedding and I went for the final fitting on my dress, a really lovely mother’s of the bride dress. The rest of the bridal party was also trying on their dresses for the last time before the wedding. I was in the dressing room putting on my dress. As I slipped it over my head, the dress stuck because it was suddenly way too small. I’ve always had a tendency to be overweight, but I could not believe that the dress would not fit me! I must have gained 20 pounds from when the dress had been fitted. I couldn’t get it on by myself and I couldn’t get it off. I was completely stuck! I had to call for help, and I started to cry because there was absolutely no way that I could wear that dress to the wedding! I didn’t know what I was going to do! And when the door opened everyone saw me stuck in the dress.

(When I woke up, I was in such a panic. I had to try on my dress immediately and, fortunately, the real-life dress was the right size!)

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Nightmares

Nightmare #43 – A Murderous Creature

(Female, teen) So maybe a lot of this comes from an episode of Alias I watched just before going to sleep but I still woke up too scared to roll over in bed. I was a spy on a mission. I was to go to somebody’s house and talk to a man who was involved with computers. When I rang the doorbell, the man’s wife and son came to the door and I met them first. The little boy went off to play and the wife showed me in to where the husband was. We talked for awhile about computers then I left.

…The creature sort of looked human…

But I could still see inside the house. I could see the room where the kid was playing. All of a sudden, a creature came into the room. The creature sort of looked human except it was bald and extremely muscular. But the muscles didn’t look like real muscles rather more like tumors just underneath the skin. It had tumors on its face as well. One eye was swollen completely shut and it had bright red bloody lips. The creature stepped right up to the boy and effortlessly ripped his arm off. Then it ripped off the boy’s other arm and then both his legs. Finally the creature opened the child’s rib cage. The boy was dead. It had only taken a couple seconds.

The dad rushed into the room and the creature attacked him too. It ripped off the man’s arms. Just as the creature started attacking the man’s face, I woke up.

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Nightmares

Nightmare #42 – Vacation Warnings

(Male, middle aged) An epic length nightmare here and it sort of developed out of another dream. My family was on vacation, my wife and I and my daughter and my mother. We had spent a couple nights in this hotel in a big city but we hadn’t really been having too much fun. I think we just realized it was our last day.

…I heard a faint whispery voice from inside the hole. It warned “Get out…”

The hotel had a lot of strange services, in addition to what you’d expect like a pool and a gym. For instance, the hotel had a lab, like a chemistry lab that you could use to do experiments. I was in the lab with a couple other men who wore white lab coats. They were showing off things but I really wasn’t that interested. Although it was a pretty well kept hotel, there was a pretty serious crack in the wall of the lab down by the floor, a crack probably 6 inches wide. The two guys saw I was interested in this and handed me a telescoping meter stick for me to see how deep the crack was. I got down on my hands and knees and inserted the ruler and it registered over 25 feet which I thought was impossible. But as I was down there, I heard a faint whispery voice from inside the hole. It warned “Get out of the buildings. Even the cars.” Almost immediately a low insistent rumble started and I thought it was an earthquake. I ran to the hotel room where my family was and told them we had to get outside. It seemed to take forever since everyone felt they had to take a couple choice belongings with them and the hotel room was a mess, belongings strewn a foot thick over the whole floor.

When we got outside the streets were crowded with many other people who had heard the rumbling too. But this was part of the country that never had an earthquake so after a couple minutes people got skeptical and restless. Just then, a building in the distance collapsed literally like a house of cards, the walls and the floors perfectly flattening on top of each other. Another building much closer began to swell like it was a square balloon filled with water. Then, like an over-filled water balloon, the building burst showering the street with papers and furniture. The parking lot across the street was filled with cars and all of a sudden they flattened out, like they were cutouts of sheet metal painted to look like cars. Then they started rumbling forward, stacking on top of each other. I think some people were crushed underneath these advancing stacks of shelled out cars. The rumbling stopped but people were leaving the city without looking back. My family for some reason wanted to look back. They went back into the dark and abandoned hotel where we were staying and started packing. I could hear a series of loud thunks out in the hallway and tried to get them to hurry. I looked out in the hallway. There were a small gang of skin heads, systematically kicking down the hotel room doors and looting what was inside. I finally got my family to leave just before the skinheads got to our room.

Then eventually things went back to normal. For some reason we stayed in town and didn’t head home. The hotel had comped us several nights stay. When we went back to our room, all of our belongings had been picked up, the clothing put on hangers in the closet, the items on shelves and in drawers. No maid could have been so meticulous. We decided to take a subway ride and on the subway, I hear the voice again. “At the next subway stop, don’t look.” I told my family to close their eyes no matter what happened. We were just pulling into a station. I cupped my elbow around my eyes but still peeked out every now and then, especially when the screaming started. Evidently some thing had descended to the subway platform just as the doors closed. She was dressed in flowing brown clothes from what I could tell – sort of “Stevie Nicks” if Stevie Nicks was a monster who could float and kill people just by looking at them. Yup. Everyone who looked at it directly had their heads explode. Probably eight to twelve people in the subway car I was in succumbed. The train pulled away from the station and people were still screaming and crying.

The next warning came in musical cues and in the dream I was tone deaf. I had convinced someone else about these warnings and for some reason he was able to hear them too. He was a musician and was able to translate the cues for me. There was a small mark on the floor shaped like an apple that I was supposed to touch. Then there was a patch of light shining on the wall that I was supposed to touch. I guess we did everything we had to because nothing bad happened.

We were leaving the city by train when I heard the voice again. I asked my wife if she had a mirror. She had a small slightly convex one for some reason. My plan was that if the monster showed herself again that I would reflect her image back at her and thereby destroy her. No such luck. The warning mentioned something about cola. There was a six pack of cola that we’d brought with us. I touched the cans and two of them were extremely hot and starting to swell. I could imagine them exploding like bombs sending shards of aluminum throughout the train car. I opened the train window and popped open the cans to relieve the pressure and then emptied the contents and threw away the empties. The next warning came immediately afterward, something about deep fried food. I just then realized that the train car behind us was an old fashioned caboose that had been set up as a kitchen. I stepped inside. It was like something from another time. Wooden paneling and flooring. All the appliances were cast iron – the stove, the skillets… and at the end of the caboose, a huge frying vat filled with oil. Bubbles were starting to surge up from the bottom like it was boiling hot. I turned to my daughter who has some experience in food service and asked what she’d do with used deep fryer oil. “I’d wrap it in tin foil.” I looked back at the fryer, filled with over ten gallons of scalding hot grease and realized that wouldn’t be a solution. I just had picked up the handle of the frying baskets when I woke up.

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #41 – Night Boat to Nowhere

(Male, 40’s) I was on a personal pilgrimage to see the Southern Cross (a constellation that only can be seen in the southern hemisphere) and I was in some strange port of call. There were tiny, winding streets. I couldn’t speak the language and furthermore, I couldn’t even identify what KIND of language it was. There were small open-air shops selling all sorts of things, all packed one against the other. I was hungry but I couldn’t even discern what was food. I was also dragging along an immense suitcase made of soft brown leather. The suitcase had straps like an old-fashioned suitcases. It wasn’t very heavy but it was quite awkward to get through the crowded streets.

…Very soon I started to think it was the wrong ship. In fact, it felt dangerously wrong…

Finally after a long wait, I boarded a ship. Very soon I started to think it was the wrong ship. In fact, it felt dangerously wrong. First of all, no one other than the crew were allowed below deck so the deck was crowded with people all carrying luggage. But then it became evident that there there was a particular family on deck that everyone else seemed to be consolidated against. The family — a mother, father, two children and a grandmother — didn’t seem to notice the glares, the staring, the random shoving and malicious elbows. No one else other than this family were being jostled so consistently, so violently. I also noticed that others in this crowd were taking notice of me, concerned that I might be a witness to what was about to happen. The ship moved very very slowly. We had barely left port. It had turned night but I didn’t dare take my eyes off the crowd to look up at the stars. The ocean was an inky black. The crowd pushed the grandmother to the ground. Still the family didn’t realize they were in danger. I couldn’t warn them because I didn’t know the language and even if I could, I’d just be putting myself in danger too. But I was already in danger and it wouldn’t get any better once we reached the open sea. So before we had entirely left the bay, I grabbed my suitcase, which I somehow knew would float, and I jumped overboard into the black, black water.

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #40 – Demonic Garage

(Male) This is going to sound funny I’m sure as I tell it but as a dream it was pretty intense. I was going out to the garage of my parent’s house. Which is strange in itself because they haven’t lived in this particular house for probably 15 years but it was the place where I grew up. I opened the big garage door and I was rather amazed that the place was, relatively speaking, pretty clean and tidy. There were still all sorts of strange things hanging from hooks on the walls and there were boxes stacked on top of each other off to the side. But there was clearly enough room to get a car in there and that was definitely not the normal condition of the place.

I mean, you could have gotten a car in there except that set up right in the middle of the garage was a ping pong table. I stepped inside to investigate but it was extremely dark inside. Luckily there were probably a half dozen bare light bulbs hanging down over the table. I yanked on their pull cords one by one and they each turn on but each bulb is really dim and doesn’t illuminate much. It almost seems darker with the lights turned on than when they were off. I stepped outside the garage to find someone to play ping pong with and when I step back in, all the lights are off. I tried pulling the cords again and they were all dead, all burned out. And at that point I’m standing right inside this entirely pitch black space looking out at the dark grey twilight of the big garage door and I hear, behind me, all around me, this low rumbling growl. It feels sort of like I’ve stepped into the mouth of some enormous monster thinking it was a cave. I realize in a flash – and this didn’t seem that strange within the dream, oddly enough – “Oh, the old garage must be possessed.” Not haunted but possessed for some reason. So I get down on my knees and start performing, get this, an exorcism ritual – like I’d know how to do one of those, right? – And in the dream, I’ve got this really commanding and authoritative voice. And I somehow know exactly what to say. The garage starts to shake around me, dust and leaves falling on me from the rafters but I keep concentrating, keep talking and then suddenly a great surging wind gathers up around me and blows out the garage door. That’s when I woke up so I never did get to play ping pong.