(Male, 30’s)
I don’t remember the whole nightmare story, but I remember one awful scene involving a child vampire.
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#358: Child Vampire
Category: Nightmares
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Nightmare #357: Awful knowledge
(Female, 50’s) I had a dream so awful last night that I haven’t been able to think or talk about it without crying, but you asked me to write it down so here goes. The dream was about carrying around some awful knowledge.
I dreamed that my daughter died. She’s grown now and living quite far away. She had some health issues as a child, and in my dream she was very sick again, but none of us knew it. I don’t think she knew it either. And she died. I got a phone call that she was dead.
But we were in the middle of some big, stressful event. I don’t know what exactly, but it was some happening, some convention or presentation that we were preparing for and needed to accomplish.
So I didn’t tell anyone that she had died yet– because knowing didn’t matter. There was nothing that could be done, so I had to wait with my knowledge. I felt very sad and very lonely.
And I knew that I had a lot to do too, but I wasn’t ready to deal with that. I had to make arrangements to get her body home and make plans for what– a memorial? a funeral? I didn’t know. We’d never talked or made plans with her because it hadn’t occurred to me that she could die.
So I was leaving the house and I ran into a neighbor. The dream neighbor was not a real person, sort of a conglomeration of people I know. She was a stocky woman with two little girls running around while we were talking in the front yards. She asked me how I was doing and I had to lie and say fine. Then she asked about my daughter and how she was. Her girls were always talking about my daughter, they enjoyed her company so much and they missed her. Again, I had to lie and say she was fine. I had no idea how to keep going.
(Male, 50’s) This happened at the end of a much longer dream. My partner and I were walking through a dark area, shadowy streets. There was some element of danger, too. We weren’t alone on these streets and it was late enough that the people around were up to no good but largely they ignored us. It was thrilling more than scary, rather fun. We strayed to an industrial area, cement buildings, some abandoned, that stood close enough to each other to make a maze of little roads, each barely wide enough for a truck to fit down. M partner wanted to turn back but I insisted we press on to the end of this alley. It opened up to a dark woods. We skirted the side of building. We passed a silent man who carried fishing gear, bound for a stream hidden somewhere in those woods.
Then we turned a corner and the wall of the factory building disappeared. It was a very dark market, busy with the commerce of death. Maybe a half dozen men, with ragged work clothes milled around the items, some buying some selling. There were at least three coffins, tiny ones. child coffins. Beautiful, hand assembled wood boxes. Antiques. But then how could they be antiques? Old coffins would be in graveyards, wouldn’t they? There was something unwholesome here, like maybe these coffins had been dug up. But I looked at them as if I was interested. The salesman said “You don’t want to put a child in these. They’d get used to being dead.” As if I would use a coffin for a cradle. I told him, “No, I have a special doll that I need to keep safe.” He nodded grimly, as if that was what these were good for, for some kind of black magic. But I was most interested in the metal grave liners. I’d never seen them before, just slightly larger than the coffins, thick rusted metal, industrial but grim, very grim. There’s only one way they could have gotten so rusty, so corroded.
I had the sense that no one walked away from this market without buying something. That if you were ever desperate enough to find this midnight sale, you paid whatever was asked for the item you needed. It was a compulsion, a craving, a need. No one simply browsed here.
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Nightmare #355: Locked out
(Male, 40s) This bad dream came at the end of a night of bad dreams, one right after the other. They weren’t all scary, but they were all disturbing and unsettling, which made for a really crappy night of sleep. Nothing like being locked out to put a person in a fine mood!
In this final episode, I had a dream about living in a big city. I was just about to stand up at a wedding in the park, but at the last minute, I decided that I’d look better in my best suit instead of the jacket and pants separates I was wearing. I excused myself and ran down the rain soaked streets.
I ran past a person who was my girl friend, who was shouting up to me– a different me or an earlier me?– who looked out of a window. She was under the impression that she was invited to the wedding too and had made a cheese tray. The “me” standing in the window didn’t think this was a good idea or didn’t know what she was talking about.
I tried to hurry to my house, a large brick building, but the street had tilted so badly that I had to grab into the cracks between the pavers to pull myself along. It was almost like trying to climb uphill. I was worried that my wife had locked me out, or more likely that she hadn’t given me a key yet to my own house. We had lots of houseguests, I gather, and they each needed a key. I guess she had given someone my key. I was locked out.
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Nightmare #354: Strange Supper
(female 30s) I don’t remember the rest of the dream, only one strange scene of it– which I would consider a nightmare for sure.
I was in some new place with people I didn’t know, and across the room, there was a huge banquet table spread out, covered with all kinds of food. But something odd caught my eye: a human body, laid out on a huge platter, roasted or something.
I said, “Oh my god, is that a person?”
Someone said, “Yes, she offered herself up.”
“She what?” I asked
“She wanted to be eaten. In our culture, it’s a great sacrifice and a great honor.”
“But that’s awful. How could you do that to her?” I was getting really upset.
“But she wanted it. She volunteered.”
“That still doesn’t make it right!” I insisted, and I got out of that place as quickly as I could.
The creepy, ooky feeling of the dream stuck with me all day. Even now, when I think about it — ugh!
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Nightmare #353: Lost in the Landscape
(Female 20s) I’m not sure if this counts as a nightmare, but here goes. I have a couple of landscapes that reoccur in my dreams. They are like the background to a different story each time, but when I see them, I know things aren’t going to go well. I know I’m lost.
One is a city where I’ve never been in real life. I’ve been there enough in my dreams that it looks familiar to me, but I don’t know my way around and that’s the problem. I’m always lost. Maybe the streets move around or are added or taken away. Whatever the reason, I spend time wandering around, usually trying to find someone or get away from something. Even though I’ve been there before, I am lost anyway, whether I’m walking or driving.
The other place is out in the country. I’m usually driving here. The roads are a big grid. I keep passing junctions where two roads come together at right angles. There are stop signs and cornfield, but there are never any street signs. The landscape just goes on and on, repeating the same cornfields and stop signs. I never get anywhere in this place either. I’m always lost here too.
(Female 40’s) This was a crazy dream I had when I was a kid that mixed up those monster movie plots with Nancy Drew-style problem solving. It was about how I used my smarts to save the town from Godzilla
The dream took place in a small town in Northern Michigan, near a cottage that was owned by a family friend. We went up there for the weekend many times when I was growing up. It was a small cottage-country town on a lake, very pretty and woodsy.
Godzilla was smashing through the town however. We could hear his roar and the screams of people as he chased them.
I had what seemed like an obviously brilliant idea: I would make a trail out of toilet paper to “lead” Godzilla out of town and back to the lake. He would follow the trail because that was part of his dinosaur nature.
I walked along backwards, unrolling roll after roll of toilet paper, humming to myself as my genius plan went into effect.
The only problem was that I didn’t account for how effective the toilet paper trail would be or how much more quickly a Godzilla moved than a human. I wasn’t quite to the lake when I looked up and saw Godzilla trampling down the road, following the trail, coming at a very fast pace. There was no way I could get to the lake before Godzilla would get to me. I was leading him straight to me. I was doomed.
(Female 50’s) This dream is so obviously rooted in television sit-com culture of the 1960’s, like Bewitched
In my dream, no one believed at first that there were two versions of my dad running around. My older brother tried to warn us. He pointed to the “fake” Dad and said, “That’s not our father! He’s an impostor!” We all thought that was ridiculous and laughed at him. Even Dad– although it was kind of an evil laugh.
The another Dad walked in our house. The Dads stood looking at each other. They both said, “Who are you?” and “He’s the fake!”, pointing at each other. My mom, sister, younger brother and I just looked back and forth. They were identical; we couldn’t tell them apart. Which was the real Dad?
Then my older brother said, “It’s him! He’s the fake one!” and he pointed at the person he claimed all along was the fake dad. Then the fake dad got really angry and attacked my brother. He tried to strangle him by putting his hands around my brother’s neck. My brother fought back and then Dad jumped in too. They beat the fake “dad” and I think they killed him.
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Nightmare #350: Bloody, bloody nose
(Female 40’s) I don’t know if this counts as a nightmare, but it was a bad dream. It’s got the same things happening as other bad dreams I’d had, which is kind of funny when you think about it: pain, embarrassment, lots of blood, and not being about to find the bathroom.
I was on a trip at a hotel with some friends. I’d gotten separated from them, and I was wandering around among the common areas of the hotel, like the bars, meeting rooms and reception rooms. I realized that I was breathing strangely, like my breath whistled in my nose and it hurt. I slid my fingers up the skin on the side of my nose, and I could feel it was all lumpy, like something was huge stuffed way up deep inside my nose. At my nostril, my fingers touched the end of something sticking out that felt like a green bean! What the hell? I wondered. How did I get a bean stuck up my nose?
So without thinking too much, I yanked it out. The bean came out in one piece, but it hurt like hell, and my nose began to bleed. I didn’t have a tissue, so I plugged closed with my finger, but it was bleeding hard. I walked around then, trying to find the bathroom.
I came to a bar and looked around the edges of the room, but I didn’t see any signs or arrows. There were some men drinking; I didn’t think they’d know where the women’s room was. I saw waitress and I asked her, forgetting to hold on to my nose so the blood started to pour out again. She said this bar didn’t have a women’s room and I should try another one.
I walked around again and I came to an arcade, a big one, like those arcade rooms a lot of hotels used to have, only bigger. It was full of pinball machines, skeeball, driving car games, everything. Then I saw a pay toilet! That made perfect sense. I almost laughed out loud, but then I realized I didn’t have any change. Plus someone else was just going into the room. So I left again.
I came to a conference hall. I started to walk across this huge room full of people and booths and tables, and I saw a table with a big spread of sandwiches. I was suddenly very hungry. I picked up a sandwich, and my nose began to bleed again, so I held the sandwich in one hand and my nose with the other and hurried away. I had to get some tissue soon or sit down somewhere. I still had a bloody nose and I was starting to feel faint, and then I woke up.
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Nightmare #349: Deadly Jailbreak
(Male, 50’s) Just a dark and sad dream. I woke up really shaken so who’s to say this wasn’t a nightmare. I was on a 5-person team, and one of the guys was someone I used to work with at an old job. He was a good guy, creative, diligent, exactly the kind of guy I’d choose to bring along on whatever task we were supposed to perform. It was night, really late at night, maybe 3:00 AM, and we were in the courtyard of a stone building, just inside a tall stone fence that surrounded a large activity yard. It felt kind of like a prison. We weren’t supposed to be there. My job was to circumvent a computer-based lock, but the trick I used was a long metal rod, a mechanical exploit that bypassed all the fancy electrics. I felt pretty proud of the idea. We five were supposed to wait outside until something happened. We’d know it when we saw it. I leaned against the fence and started scribbling notes for a poem I was writing. Yes, I know that’s crazy, but I was writing a poem in my dream. If I had started writing down the dream earlier, I bet I could have remembered what it was about too. I remember that I was worried I wouldn’t be able to read my hand-writing because it was so dark. I looked up from my little black notebook and found the other guys on my team were gone. I was worried that I’d missed the cue.
Just then dozens of men in work shirts and khakis started filing up out of this building in a big hurry. The building was one story tall so the sense I had was that these guys were coming up from rooms underground. Maybe they were prisoners. Maybe factory workers though they “felt” like tough and clever guys, equal parts Marines and engineers. They ran down this corridor then out to the street where there were a lot of cars parked. Each guy knew which car he was heading to. They were rather strange vehicles by the way, half panel truck and half station wagon, weird looking with no windows. Each car could fit maybe 10 guys. I panicked because I thought we were going to take a helicopter out of here. I hadn’t expected cars and didn’t know what to do. I grabbed one of the guys running past me and he said to come along, that they’d find room for me. But there wasn’t any room for me in any of the wagons. I knew it was just a minute or two until the sirens would ring, and I’d be caught. The wagon-cars started racing down the road and I tried to run along behind them. I kept up pretty well.
It was a residential city neighborhood and I watched the car I was going to get in drive away down a street, only to hear it shot full of holes by machine guns. I thought that was pretty crazy, shooting machine guns in a residential neighborhood but there was no chance anyone survived. I ran the other way. I started to like my odds, figuring I could escape through the residential brownstones to escape the trigger-happy officials who were hunting us down. Worse case, I could go back to the woods that were across from the stone building we’d broken into. I’d be safe so long as they didn’t send out dogs. And just then I ran into two motion-sensor machine guns that had been positioned at an intersection. Who the hell puts motion-sensor controlled machine guns at a residential intersection? They pinned me down with crossfire and I couldn’t move, though I didn’t have the sense that I was hit. I hid behind a leafless bush, just some bare branches, trying hard not to move but totally exposed if the murderous officials came looking. It started to dawn on me that no one lived in this neighborhood, that maybe no one lived anywhere anymore. Those may have been the last humans living anywhere, those guys living underground. I hoped at least some of them escaped. Whatever set up those mechanized machine guns to strafe an intersection wasn’t interested in keeping a neighborhood safe. They would only be satisfied by killing every single one of us.
(Female, 30’s) I had this dream when I was about 5 years old; it’s a vivid dream that I still remember clearly.
I was in the kitchen (in what was, in the dream, “my” house). Tiny red worms started crawling in, covering the walls and floors and ceiling. The room was yellow so they stood out starkly.
I knew they were poisonous, and so I climbed up on the table. They started crawling up the table legs.
I yelled out for my mother and woke myself up.
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Nightmare #347: Assassination Attempt
(Female, 50s) This nightmare had a very realistic feeling, which made it even more confusing. I mean, assassination? Really?
My husband recently passed away, but in the dream he was still alive. The weird thing was we were in bed sleeping in the dream, and then we heard noises on the stairs coming up to the bedroom. We both woke up and I whispered, “Do you hear that?” He said it was probably our adult son, who lives at home, although it would be strange for him to come up to our room in the middle of the night.
Then someone jumped into the room. It was a guy who I knew back when he was a little kid, but he was grown up now. He was dressed in camouflage and carrying a gun. He laughed a crazy laugh and said, “I’m a hit man, and I’m here to kill you both! The best part of my job is telling people who hired me to kill them! Guess who hired me?” My husband and I were stunned. The assassin said, “It was your son!” and he laughed again.
“I don’t like to watch people I know dying,” he said, “so I’m going to put my hat on before I do it.” The guy pulled out a ski mask, which was more like a hood and pulled it down over his face. Now he really couldn’t see us as all, but he took aim with his gun.
My husband leaped out of bed and knocked the guy down, knocking him down the stairs, and they landed at the bottom with a big crunching noise, with my husband on top of the guy. My husband stood up and said, “Give me the pottery!” — which is strange because we don’t have any pottery in our bedroom. However, I turned to a shelf full of ceramic urns and vases, and I started to hand them one by one to my husband, who smashed them over the unconscious assassin lying at the bottom of the stairs.
I woke up feeling very odd. It was strange to dream about loved ones who were both protecting me and putting me in danger. I wanted to tell my son about the dream, but I thought about leaving out the part about who hired the assassin. Dreams are weird, aren’t they?
(Female, 60) In this nightmare, I was at the home of an acquaintance. Susan is a bit bossy and demanding in real life and can even be a little bit scary because she’s so self-assured, but nothing as extreme as dream-Susan! I’ve really been to her house, which is a large modern house on the outskirts of town, and again, it was nothing like where I was in the dream.
The dream started in the garden. I actually met Susan through a community gardening project, but in this dream, that garden was in her huge backyard, surrounded by a high brick wall. A group of people from the gardening project were meeting there to work in the garden, but unbeknownst to us, Susan had hired a group of professionals to come in and tend the garden first.
The people she’d hired were supposed to remove the weeds, but instead they’d completely destroyed the garden. They had dug up all the plants and moved them into design of four plants in a row: four roses, four carrots, four horseradish, four corn stalks, etc. The landscapers had done this to the whole garden! They’d thrown out all of the other plants. Talk about a nightmare, from a gardener’s point of view!
Then things got weirder. My husband showed up, and he and I went into her house, which was a huge rambling Victorian building in really excellent condition. We walked through the house and discovered that Susan had a crew of orphans working for her. There were dozens of children in Victorian factory-like conditions doing laundry, working looms, and manufacturing parts in a spotless tool and dye shop. It was ridiculous.
My husband discovered a storage space that had a window which opened on a room with a conveyer belt. Items were stored on the belt, and when the controls were operated, the items moved passed the window where you could grab them. I think he was just playing with the controls, figuring out how they worked, when we spied something odd– was that a severed head that just went by?
What kind of person was Susan anyway? The kind who destroyed a garden and kept enslaved orphans working in her basement, who had a severed head in her storage closet? We were obviously in danger.
Now he had to work the controls faster to get the long long conveyer belt to circle around and come back. He had to do it quickly before we were discovered. And then we heard Susan’s footsteps upon the stair.
(Female, 50s) This might be my oldest nightmare from childhood, and one that’s stuck around in my memory for years. I don’t remember how old I was when I had it, probably around 5. It seemed to bring a bunch of things that I was afraid of together into a big ball of a nightmare.
The dream took place in our basement, which was a room that I was scared of to start. My dad may have recently installed a drop-ceiling — something he did for work — or maybe I had just come to understand how a drop-ceiling hung: that there was some space above between the tiles over my head and the actual basement ceiling. It was a big enough space for a monster to live. No one else in my family knew about the monster, only me, because he was invisible.
The invisible monster hurt me, but there was nothing that could be done about it. One of the ways he hurt me was by making me have the ear aches, that seemed to be a frequent problem in my childhood. From real life, I remember the small blue glass bottle of ear drops from the doctor that my mom would heat up and then drip into my ears.
In my dream, I was playing alone in the basement, which at that time I wouldn’t have done. I didn’t go down there alone at all. My family were all upstairs in the house. The invisible monster came to me and told me to be quiet, that he would tell me a secret.
When he leaned in closer to me to whisper, he took a sharp piece of metal and screwed it into my ear. It really hurt a lot, but I couldn’t stop him. Then he did the same to my other ear, leaning in like he was going to whisper a secret and then twisting a piece of metal into my ear.
Almost needless to say, I woke up with a really bad ear ache.
(Female, 30’s)
This wasn’t my dream, but my 5 year old son’s nightmare, some years back. I remember it quite clearly.
He woke in the night, as he often did at that age, whimpering fitfully and not quite awake. I made my way through the dark apartment, not turning on any lights because– good god, who wants to encourage a kid to wake up all the way in the middle of the night? So I stumbled through the darkness to comfort him and to coax him back to sleep.
I sat on the edge of his bed, rubbing his back and talking in a soft voice, asking him what was wrong.
“Mom,” he told me, “I had a bad dream.”
“I know. That’s awful, but don’t worry. I’m here. Want to tell me about it?”
“Mom, there was a cat, but he was turned inside out, with his skin on the inside…” He dozed off to sleep.
I remember feeling not so safe and curling up in bed next to him, sleeping there until the morning.
Over at i09, Robert T. Gonzalez poses the question, “What is the most common nightmare?” To find an answer, he turns to a body of nightmare research generated worldwide since the 1930’s by psychologists Antonio Zadra, Michael Schred and many others.
Interestingly, the criterion of the nightmare studies vary quite a lot. The definition of what “counts” as a nightmare in some, but not all, studies is “a disturbing, emotionally intense dream that ends with the dreamer waking from sleep.” Data collection methods vary as well. Some studies have used dream logs while others have interviews or retrospective questionnaires. Subject pool size (from 200 to 10000) and make-up (students, the “feeble-minded”, nightmare-sufferers, or the general population) are other variables.
For the most part, the Dailynightmare.com list of common nightmares echoes these studies. Although our “data” has been collected through voluntary reporting and “sorted” and “analyzed” by tagging and clouds, our top themes in unranked order are:
Family
Violence
Death
Animals
Monsters
Creepy houses
Work-related
–themes which confirm those found in research.
As they say in the academic business, more research is needed. Please continue to send your nightmares to the Dailynightmare.com for further analysis.
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Nightmare #343: Faster and Faster
(Male, 40’s) This is a recurrent dream-image that I’ve had all my life– like as far back as I can remember. It may have started in adolescence, but I’m not sure exactly when.
The set-up of the dream varies– the how or why part — but the dream always leads me to a dark forest at night. There are noises around me, and I’m running. I’m not big on running in real-life, but in my dream, I’m running for what feels like a long, long time. Why I’m running isn’t completely clear either. Am I running after someone or am I running away? All I know is that I’m fearful and I’m running.
And just when I am so tired that I want to give up, a thought occurs to me, like I realize or remember something that I already knew.
So I get down on all fours, and I begin to run again. I can run faster than I ran standing upright and with more energy. And I keep running on my hands and feet through the forest.
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Nightmare #342: Keep swimming
(Female, 30’s) In this dream I remember swimming along the shoreline near the beach. I tried to leave the water but I had fins and kept getting dragged back into it. I wanted to be back on the land but no matter what I did, the black waters kept pulling me. I remember being frustrated watching my family on the beach cooking out and talking and laughing without me. My grandparents were there too and no one seemed to take notice. But sometimes I would see myself in the water from the beach, but then there came a terrible cry and I was back in the water. This time I saw a fin gliding alongside of me and felt terrified knowing that a shark was gliding beneath the surface. But it didn’t attack. Then I woke up.
(Male, 30’s) I have had a recent bout of bad luck with employers letting me go for dubious reasons or reasons that didn’t stand up in a court of law.
Naturally, my nightmare involved once more being summoned into an office. The woman who has called me in explains, once again, that I’m being terminated. I’ve been through this before, but this time, I watch in awe as the woman letting me go literally catches fire.
I gather up my belongings in a box, but then I leave without them.
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Nightmare #340: Getting under my skin
(Female, early 20’s) I had this dream after I had just learned that my grandfather had developed skin cancer. At the time I had become very paranoid about every little bump or mole or any change in my skin.
In the dream I had I developed a rash much like Rosacea of which one of my friends suffered from in real life. My skin however would seem to move and sometimes it would be raised and wriggling with life. I ended up seeing several doctors, the last one being able to determine that there were millions of humanoid creatures living on and within me. Eventually the scientist built a machine with which the voices and thoughts of the creatures could be heard but they never revealed where they had come from.
Finally my body began to deteriorate so bad that I became nothing more than a pulpy mess on the floor. I felt no pain only anger and sadness that they would live out their lives within their cities while mine ceased to exist. The doctor had the ability to cure me by destroying them, and had even become my lover but only out of curiosity. At the end of the dream they invade the doctor as well who seems rather comfortable with the whole thing. The last thing the doctor says to me before I wake up is a line he steals from Spock, “The Needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.” I do remember wanting to smack him, but I no longer had any hands with which to do so.