DailyNightmare(Male, 30’s) Other night I woke up, the room was cold and my two dogs were at the foot of my bed- whispering to each other. I looked up, and they were looking at me, eyes shining from the streetlight outside, like they’d been caught.
I wasn’t dreaming.
(Male, 40’s) I was at home. Most of the time when I dream about houses that are supposed to be my home, it’s not really the house where I actually live. But in this dream, it was really my home and what’s more it looked like it does right now. This is remarkable because much of the furniture was moved around recently. I was in the front room. I was looking out the front window. It was night. A very large panther walked down the side walk and it saw that I noticed it.
The panther was huge, svelte, sleek muscles, serious expression on its face. It took a couple strides and then made a bounding leap at the front window. The glass in the pane didn’t break but it sort of bowed inward under the blow. The panther bounced off back into the night.
“…nearly a dozen household pets from the neighborhood, all dead and bloody…”
I looked out the smaller window by the door. At first I thought I saw a mass of curly auburn hair but when I looked again, it was just a Christmas wreath hanging on the door. What really caught my attention though was what was on the lawn. Scattered across the front yard were nearly a dozen household pets from the neighborhood, all dead and bloody. It resembled the empty beer bottles in front of a frat house after a party.
One of the cats nearest the door wasn’t dead. It was only maimed. It stared out at me, pleading with me for help but I knew if I went outside, if I even opened the door, that the panther would attack me. The panther was trying to lure me out.
(Male, 30’s) This nightmare I had kind of cracks me up when I write it down but there was nothing funny about it at the time. I’m almost embarrassed by how silly it sounds.
“…Seemed a pretty awful situation. …”
I was in the house where I grew up, a place I haven’t even seen in like 10 years. There were people on the front lawn who were doing something. I went out there to yell at them. They were painting the countertop of their kitchen cabinets. The paint was this hideous green, like a yellow green, a color from a 70’s rental property. I told them to get lost. And then there was a policeman who told me they’d be OK. See, their landlord was kicking them out because the building was being foreclosed and soon to be demolished so they were down on their luck. I asked the cop what was with the countertop and he said that the landlord was making them fix up the place or they’d lose their security deposit. Seemed a pretty awful situation.
I looked around the neighborhood and it was a decaying, urban nightmare. There were multi-story buildings that looked like they’d been bombed. Whole walls were missing, not just the windows which were all smashed out. The cop and I walked around a bit and there was just block after block of wasteland, tall buildings ready to collapse under their own weight.
“…”…It was a zombie. And it was a skunk. How much worse can you get from that!…”…”
That’s when we saw the skunk. It jumped out at the cop and started running for him like it wanted to bite him. The skunk was sealed in a plastic bag and chunks of its flesh were falling off. The cop was stupid, just standing there but I knew to start running away immediately. I knew somehow that this skunk was infected with the zombie plague, probably the same kind of epidemic that was causing the whole world to go to hell. The scientists has sealed it in a plastic bag to keep it safe because in this future skunks were an endangered specie. They were trying to protect the genetic material even though it was sick, er, I guess, dead. It was a zombie. And it was a skunk. How much worse can you get from that!
So I started running because I was afraid of what would happen when the cop turned to a zombie. Every pile of rubble I passed seemed to have another zombie creature creeping out of it. Possums, squirrels, a mangy old cat. I was just running and running, hopping over piles of rubble trying to get away and the terror was all around me.
(Male, 40’s) I have this enduring fear that I’ll end up living on the street in a damp cardboard box and this nightmare for some reason called that up.
“…the carriage itself was jet black as were all four of the horses…”
I was downtown in a big city. It had a pretty thriving city life, though things were very grimy and a big run-down. Like there were two extremely tall wooden houses built with timbers probably a foot or two thick and covered with dirty yellow clapboards. These houses must have been ten stories tall and then BETWEEN them, that is, over the street another house had been built that was supported by being wedged between them. It was a busy street and the supports to the middle house were obviously falling apart. It was just a matter of time until it fell.
I was dressed like a street person. I’m not sure that I actually wasn’t a street person. In one hand I held a large clear plastic bag with ice water and a couple dozen cans of soda. I guess I made my living selling soda to the commuters as they came out of the buildings to evacuate the city and go home to the suburbs.
There was a crowd of people. I had made enough for the day to cover expenses and get a meal so I was about ready to sell the leftovers to this other street person who had the same gig. Then a loud clackitty clanging sound came up the street. It was a horse drawn carriage. It looked like a couple had just gotten married, because the woman was dressed in a frilly white dress and the guy was in a tux complete with a tall top hat. Except the carriage itself was jet black as were all four of the horses.
And the strangest part was that three of the four horses were dead. They hung lifeless in their harnesses while the fourth and final horse dragged the whole carriage along. The people in the carriage acted as if it was nothing to have three dead horses attached to the carriage, perhaps as long as things kept moving along they didn’t really care about how it happened.
“… if the folks there didn’t like you, you just might disappear….”
(Male, 50’s) I had a nightmare last night that was really unnerving in addition to having a couple really scary moments. I was riding around with my Dad. My Dad has been dead incidentally for a good 20 years. We were trying to get an old radio or something that belonged to him from someone in this dangerously small town. It was dangerously small because there was a real sense that if the folks there didn’t like you, you just might disappear. Like the gasoline in our car seemed to disappear, like it had been siphoned away and there of course were no gas stations in this town. And the vehicle we were driving kept getting parked in. You know, there would be someone parked at either end of it so we couldn’t get out. We ended up taking the radio which was immense. It was easily three foot by three foot by four foot tall. We strapped the radio on top of a scooter / three wheel motorcycle thing and headed out of town. I was riding on TOP on the radio. I told Dad that I really hoped he wasn’t planning on driving on any expressways. Even when we turned corners on the side streets, we’ve leaned like we were going to tip over. There were some scary moments on that ride. I just had to relax and hold on.
We drove through this industrial wasteland, factories that were shut down and rusting. Windows grey and smashed out. It was an urban hell. Finally we arrived at my grandmother’s house. My grandmother also has been dead for upwards of 30 years. She did used to live in a pretty run down and decrepit part of an urban factory town. In the dream she was dead but her house still lived on, so to speak. It was much larger than I remembered it and I mean the ceilings of the rooms were easily twenty foot tall. It was still filled with furniture. I asked Dad what he had wanted with the radio for, why we had to go to all that effort to retrieve something that we was just going to deliver to a house where no body lives. He didn’t reply at all and that was strange because in life at least he was a rather talkative person. I could tell that this was something big but hard to put into words, something like honor or the “principle of the thing.”
“…It moved silently so it would sometimes just walk into the room on those silent, deadly cat feet and it would start tracking….”
The scariest parts of the dream happened inside Grandmother’s house because it was haunted not by a ghost but by a panther. The panther was large, half way between the size of a real panther and a velociraptor. It only seemed to be able to see movement and even that movement it could see best from the corner of its eyes. The beast was also almost entirely deaf. It moved very quietly so it would sometimes just walk into the room on those silent, deadly cat feet and it would start tracking. Once it was right on top of me snuffling at the soft inner parts of my throat. One bite and I would have died immediately in a spray of blood. I threw something and distracted it enough that the creature moved away. It also got very interested in an empty plastic bag that was being blown around by the wind. Another time though this blood thirsty monster came up right between my legs and started to sniff at my crotch. It growled low. I figured that I could probably survive if the monster bit off my penis if I didn’t bleed to death before help could arrive. –where was the nearest hospital in the urban wasteland?– but all things being equal, I would rather keep all my parts attached. When it wandered away, I yelled at my Dad. “Why is that thing still here? Why didn’t you call a professional exterminator or something to get rid of it?” Again, Dad was silent like I was missing some very obvious point.
(Male, 40’s) This started off a much more normal dream but became a nightmare around this point. I had just exited a cottage, like a Hansel and Gretel kind of cottage, but it was on a suburban street of suburban style houses. All those houses though were empty and dark. Abandoned. It was evening, the last part of evening before things become totally dark, before it’s night. There was a woman there with me who had long blond hair. She stood facing the street like she was on guard watching for something.
“…They are more powerful than you can imagine…”
There was another woman, powerfully attractive, with long black hair. She stepped up to me, so close to me our bodies over lapped. It’s hard to describe but it felt like she was standing in the exact spot where my feet were standing. There was no point to embracing each other with our arms because we were already as close as we could possibly be. The woman with the black hair whispered in my ear. “Don’t be afraid of the wolves.” I looked down and a dozen wolves ran by us in slow motion. Some of them were real, flesh and blood wolves but others were the merest suggestions of wolves, like a wolf-shaped cloud or a wolf-shaped mist. The woman said “They are more powerful than you can imagine. They are always all around us. In the middle ages, astrologers thought it was the movement of the stars that determined our actions when really it is the movement of the wolves.” Despite what she’d told me, I was terrified of the wolves.
Just then the blond haired woman alerted us that she had seen something. When the black haired woman moved away from me, I found it hard to breath. We all retreated into the cottage. I was the last to enter and as I closed the door, I heard a gun fire many times. The bullets came toward me in slow motion and I was able to watch them and I knew they would miss. I watched them spinning in the air. Except they weren’t bullets; they were golden screws. Five of them. I watched them impact the door jam and slowly screw themselves deep into the dark wood. They were clustered tightly together, like a shotgun blast. I closed the door and I woke up
In honor of Friday the 13th, I wanted to treat all you trixodecaphobes to something kind of sweet. My son and grand-daughter were doodling the other day and happened to come up with some very happy bats. I thought they were delightful, especially for the colors they chose to depict these children of the night. Am I the only one who’s getting a little bored of scary things having a dreary color pallette? These are happy, cheery little bats who are smiling, perhaps because they’ve just feasted on the blood of some paisley-wearing hippy.
(Male, 30’s) Strange dream. It wasn’t exactly a nightmare until the very end.
I was entirely submerged in the long tower that was completely filled with water. The tower was probably four foot in diameter and made of brick. It felt sort of like a chimney, except of course it was filled with water. It wasn’t cold and I was able to float up and down the height of the tower pretty effortlessly. I was also able to breath somehow, not like through breathing gear but more like I could just breath water, like it wasn’t any thing strange.
Then there were items that fell down the tower and landed on the surface of the water. Everything floated for some reason. I remember there being books and shirts, t-shirts and button down shirts, and at least one pair of jeans… I thought that maybe I should investigate what else was up there because for one thing I wasn’t wearing any clothes and maybe some of these clothes might fit me. So I swam to the top of the tower and reached my hands up into all the stuff that had fallen on the water surface.
Then I felt things crawling on my hands and arms. The bony, claw-like fingers of a rat, of several rats. There were rats mixed in with all the stuff. And somehow I now was trapped. I couldn’t swim down to the bottom of the tower anymore. I was trapped up at the top with the rats.
(Male, 30’s) I sent you a nightmare a ways back that felt like this dream or at least I think I did.
It was a weekend and I was trying to avoid seeing my Mother who at least in the nightmare was a nagging hypochondriac. So me and a buddy get in the car and drive up to visit my Grandmother. This is creepy thing number one because my Grandmother is dead.
We get there and Gramma welcomes us in but there is strangely very little furniture in the house. Then there’s a knock at the door and Gramma tells us we have to hide in the basement and not make much noise. At the door are a couple of my aunts and uncles as well as my mother. They’d gone out on a singing excursion, sort of showing up places and singing songs, kind of like Christmas carolers except it wasn’t winter and they weren’t singing carols.
My buddy and I go down to the basement and Gramma locks us in. It is dark but we can still see quite a bit from the light coming in by the side windows. The walls are a rotting brick, red brick that’s powdering away to dust. The basement also feels MUCH larger than the house above. We hear something skitter across the concrete. We investigate. There is this huge cut of beef, already roasted, like the kind you sometimes see at fancy buffets but this huge roast is just sitting on the floor of this filthy basement. It is all dried out and what’s weird is that it’s been nibbled and chewed at. I tell my friend that we need to get out of here. We slowly move back to the stairs when we hear more skittering. I bend down close to the ground to look under neath the random pieces of furniture. I see at least three creatures, a squirrel, a ground hog and a cat. All are extremely ragged and mangy. Their fur is grey blotched with white. For some reason, I know they’re cannibals maybe because they’ve been eating the dried beef.
(Male, 30’s) I’ve recently been transferred at work from one building to another and I have to say I’m pretty happy I don’t have to deal with a particular woman at the other location anymore. She was one of those people who can’t stop talking and furthermore, who only talk on and on about themselves. I think she may have liked me because my sense was that she gravitated to me especially.
In the dream, I had gone back to the old location for some reason. I think it was just to say hi to my co-workers. I looked down this long corridor and I saw this talkative woman. She waved at me enthusiastically. She had beside her two very large dogs. I think they were terriers. I waved back to be polite and when the dogs saw me, they took off running down this long corridor toward me. I’m not a “dog person” in life that is I don’t have a dog but I like dogs. When these large creatures bounded down to me, I wasn’t afraid, even though they were barking. Some dogs do that when they’re glad to see someone. I started petting one of them and someone said, “Oh you shouldn’t have started to pet it. That just makes ’em angry.” The next thing I knew the dog had literally swallowed my entire left hand right up to the wrist. The other dog bit onto my arm a little higher up. I started to panic. It wasn’t so much because it hurt because it didn’t really hurt. Rather, I was trapped, held in place by these large dogs. I looked down the hallway for the woman to see if she was going to, well, call off the dogs. And she was gone. For that matter, there was no one anywhere. I didn’t want to cry out but I was really getting scared. I didn’t know what the dogs were going to do to me next.
(Male, 40’s) A friend of mine was performing in a play that was being staged in someone’s living room. There must have been 30 people in the “audience” sitting on couchs or chairs or standing. I was in the kitchen and was able to watch the play through the doorway. I started making myself some tea when the front door is kicked in and probably two dozen policemen pour in all dressed in riot gear. They forcibly subdue everyone, and I mean everyone, from the people sitting on chairs to the actors on stage. I drop to the floor and roll myself under a shelf full of cookbooks to a place where it’s highly unlikely anyone would see me. I can overhear what’s going on and watch a bit of it. Once about half the people have been dragged out of the room, bleeding and unconscious and in shackles, there’s a team of policemen who begin scouring the house looking for something.
“It’s in the couch.” I hear one of the policemen tell the sergeant. “But it seems to be wrapped in animal hides.” The police start tearing the couch apart and sure enough there appears to be a large trunk, like a foot locker that is wrapped in what looks like the pelts from male lions, complete with shaggy manes. But these pelts also still have their paws and claws.
There are six of these skins draped over the box. The police suspect a trap and they are right to. What appear to be skins are actually werewolves that have been hibernating during the journey while the package was being shipped. Now they are exposed to light and the noise and commotion of the police action, the top werewolf comes to life. It growls and actually inflates itself with breath while it snarls and howls. As the police begin to fire on the werewolf that is fully re-animated, the next werewolf on the pile begins to stir. It is clear that the police weapons are going to be totally ineffective as they begin to be torn apart by the monsters that rise from the pile, one after another. The lucky audience members were the ones who were beaten and dragged off first. I cowered in my hiding spot, hoping that the werewolves would be too busy with the police and with securing their cargo and wouldn’t pay attention to me.
(Male, early 20’s) This one qualifies more as a weird dream, I think, than as an actual nightmare but it was vivid enough to keep me thinking about it all day.
There were these three small alligators playing in a dried up creek bed. The sand was a dark green and the little alligators were blue or at least they has a bluish color to them. A mother-alligator was watching over them. But all of a sudden another alligator showed up. It was huge and scary and it pushed the mother-alligator out of the way. The evil alligator was able to open its jaws so wide that they stretched from one side of the creek bed to the other which allowed the alligator children no way to escape. They were trapped and facing imminent death. The little alligators looked at each other and decided to charge. They ran straight into the mouth of the large alligator. They ran down his throat straight to its belly – I could see them bulging against the skin of the large alligator – but they didn’t stop at its belly. The small alligators kept running inside the large alligator down its tail until they reached the tip which they made look like an over-stuffed alligator-skinned bag.
That’s when the dream ended but I can imagine that a pretty one-sided battle continued with the large alligator being devoured from within by these three small but feisty creatures.
This wasn’t a nightmare like the other one on your site but it still gave me a fright.
I just laid down the other afternoon to take a little nap. I mean that’s what weekends are for, right? I started to dream about my kitchen about walking along past the cupboards when all of a sudden a black cat jumps out from nowhere with claws fully extended and it slashes me across the back of both my calves. I literally yelled out loud so forcefully that it woke me up.
After that I wasn’t in the mood so much for a nap!
I was at a summer camp area for grown ups with those typical uninsulated, wooden cabins and a large meeting building that had lots of windows. The person in charge of the camp raised bees, normal, safe, honey-producing bees. They seemed almost domesticated, peaceful. But there was some kind of threat from up the road, or further out in the county from more violent, invasive bees. The person in charge of the camp could tell this somehow by a little crust of honeycomb he found on one of the paths. The bees knew there was something up too since they all took to flight and there was a very loud and intense buzzing sound everywhere. We all gathered in the meeting hall – probably two dozen men and women – and kept looking up the road for the invasion to happen. But I looked behind us, to the garden area where I saw these huge spiders advancing on us in huge hops. The spiders were probably two meters across with hairy arms striped black and a vivid yellow green. I yelled to alert our troops but the spiders had already started to spray our building with web. But either it was a strange kind of web or it dissolved when it contacted the honey because the webs dissolved and the liquid poured down the windows, trapping the dead soldiers in a clear wall of something that felt like liquid glass. As it hardened, this glass-like substance gave off fumes that sort of drove people crazy. Everyone who had survived stripped off all their clothes and started running around naked, yelling with great excitement about the important things they were going to do with their lives, now that they’d survived this attack. One by one, they ran out of the building, which I didn’t think was a good idea mostly because I wasn’t certain that the battle was over. Then a marrionette entered from the back of the building, from the door where the survivors had exited. He was probably three feet tall and was dressed like an SS Nazi field officer. I knew that couldn’t be good so I jumped on him and easily over-powered him (killed him? Can you really kill a marionette?) Just inside his jacket I found a folded up piece of heavy paper that had the invasion plans. But before I could open it up, I woke.
I was in someone else’s house, a bright modern style house, on the second story in the bedroom the owners were letting me stay in. I became aware of the fact, somehow, that there was ghost lurking behind this small, gold painted door in the wall. The door was probably no bigger than 9″ or 10″ but it opened up into another full-sized room. I couldn’t resist opening the door and taking a peek. That’s how I learned both about the ghost and the full-sized room. I quickly closed the door and said some kind of prayer that God would keep the ghost on the other side of the door. It made perfect sense in the dream.
But then I realized that the family’s housecat had snuck into the room while I had the door open. I had to come up with a way to open the door, lure the cat out and keep the ghost locked away. At that point the dream became less a nightmare and more an anxiety dream, one verging on slapstick.
(Male, early 30’s) I don’t know if this is exactly a nightmare but it was really annoying. I was outside trying to cross this yard to someone’s house and there were all of these huge bats swarming around trying to attack me. Their wingspan was probably three feet across and they were covered in short, dark colored hair. And the weirdest thing about them is that their entire face was one big suction cup. Somehow I knew that they wanted to affix that suction cup right over my face and then drain out my vital fluids. I kept swatting them away and that seemed to be good enough to keep them out of my face. In the dream, I didn’t get to the house but then I didn’t get the life sucked out of me either.
(Male) I had my own farm which is something I’ve wanted for most of my life. I was just out wandering through the fields when I came across a gray tarp. Underneath the tarp were eggs that were white and roughly the size of watermelons. I thought to myself “This can’t be good” and I thought for a second about smashing them. They were so large they looked like dinosaur eggs. However, before I could act, one of them hatched and hundred of tiny snakes came out. They weren’t much larger than earthworms but they were black and there were hundreds of them, maybe a thousand or so. I knew they weren’t good.
I retreated to an outbuilding. It wasn’t quite big enough to call a barn but it had bales of straw all stacked up. The snakes followed me which was my plan. I took down a hunting bow and nocked a piece of straw in it and sent it sailing off into the mass of snakes. I skewered one right through the skull like I was an archery pro. In fact, in the dream, I think I was supposed to be an archery pro. I kept shooting off pieces of straw that kept killing the snakes, one by one. The area in front of the barn looked like a weird patch of grass because there were all those tiny snakes in their death throes struck through the head with pieces of straw. The straw stuck up straight and waved gently back and forth like it was blowing in the wind.
Though it was impressive and though I was able to shoot just about every second, it became evident that the whole strategy was flawed. If I kept killing them only one at a time, I wouldn’t be able to kill enough of them fast enough to keep them from over running me. The mass of snakes kept advancing, closer and closer.
(Male) Two chain link fences ran up and down this green yard. They were only probably 6 to 8 inches apart. My conscious mind figures that there must have been a property dispute. The owner on one side erected a fence where he thought the boundary was and the owner on the other side did the same. Trouble was, a nest of snakes had taken up living in this “no one’s land” between the fences.
They were relatively small snakes like garter snakes, black and there seemed to be dozens of them. For some reason I thought these were the young and that there must be larger adults still hiding in the nest. But I just didn’t know exactly where the nest was. It was my job to kill them all though. Someone considered them a deadly pest.
I climbed the fenced and eased my way down between the fences. It was extremely tight. I was wearing my steel toed boots which are a little larger than my street shoes so I had to splay my feet out to fit in the narrow area. And I started stepping on snakes. I crushed their heads with the heel or the toe of my boot. I’d kill a couple with my right foot and a couple with my left foot.
And then I lost my balance. I fell over between the fences and got myself wedged in there pretty well. I was wearing cloth gloves so they weren’t going to give me any protection. And I started to panic because I couldn’t get myself back up to a standing position and I was finding it hard to breathe as well. Just then I looked down and saw an opening in the grass. I had fallen directly on top of the snake’s nest. Inside it were two huge snakes at least as big around as my wrist with heads the size of my fist. I started to yell but I woke up.
(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.
(Male) This isn’t exactly a phobia but you also ask for “odd aversions.” And I REALLY can’t stand being in a store or really any place for roughly the hour before they close.
If I wanted to make this aversion sound logical and defensible I’d say that I used to work in a shop where I just HATED everyone who walked through the door during that last hour or so because all I really wanted to do was go home and not help people.
But there’s something else working here too, like a childhood fear of abandonment. I still have this strange fear that I’ll get locked in someplace and that instead of security guards, there’ll be Dobermans. I must have seen a movie with this as the premise sometime when I was a kid and it scarred me for life. Y’know a guy locked in a department store who has to survive until the store opens the next day.
Stores that are open 24/7 are a Godsend!