Tag: city

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Nightmares

Nightmare #306 – Robbed in the Amusement Park

(Male, 30’s) I don’t normally have nightmares but I woke from this dream so deeply disturbed that I couldn’t go back to sleep. On the surface, it’s a simple story. I was at an amusement park of some kind. Maybe not one aimed exclusively at children. Maybe something more like a World’s Fair or an Expo or something. It was downtown in a big city but a city I didn’t know. The park was set aside from the city somehow, that is, it was it’s own world.

I had started out enjoying my time there with others, friends, acquaintances, I think even my wife might have been there too. But as the day wore on, I found myself alone. It was dark. The park was emptying.

I made my way between two areas, through what felt a little like a baseball field. As I crossed, I drew the attention of several beings. They appeared human, a gang. But the gang members were only superficially human. They were made of darkness, like compressed smoke. But they moved exactly like humans, almost like dancers in the sense of exaggerated, expressive gestures.

They moved quickly to surround me. I knew they were going to rob me so I offered to give them all the money in my wallet. I thought this was clever because then I wouldn’t have to replace my driver’s license, my credit cards, etc. (I suppose I was only giving my assets, not surrendering my identity.) I opened my wallet and pulled out many bills. Then I reached in again and there were more bills, including at least one $50 bill. I never carry such large denominations. The cash distracted them and I was able to slip away.

When I got away safely, I discovered that I had left my jacket somewhere, a lemon colored jacket that I quite liked – even though I don’t actually own such a jacket. I had also left my camera somewhere. When I realized that I had lost my camera and with it all of the photos I had made, I collapsed and had to support myself on a trash can. How was I going to get home? Where was I?

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Nightmares

Nightmare #295 – Armed Panic

(Male, 50’s) This happened at the end of a pretty normal, pretty boring dream. It was everyday life. I lived in a very old house, wood clapboards, gray paint, white trim, on a tree lined street with lots of bushes in the yard, the way people used to have yards full of plants and flowers and not much lawn. The houses were pretty close together like an old city. I was just sitting and something caught my eye outside the window. There were dozens of people running through the yard. They were scared of something and they were all fleeing the direction of down town. Some of them stopped running long enough to look behind but then they kept running. Clearly something was up.

I went outside and found things generally quiet. The first wave of panicked crowds had passed. Neighbors were on their porch but no one seemed to know what was going on. I looked next door and saw my son and daughter in law and I knew they didn’t know there was trouble. I entered their house and asked if they still had a shotgun. My son said he thought so but it would be in the attic. I offered to get it. I had to climb up a ladder that was built into a window. There was no actual entryway to the attic – I had to push my head through the ceiling. But the room upstairs was fully furnished, fully finished with hardwood floor (How did I force my way through that?) It was a baby’s room though my grand-daughter wasn’t there at all – and actually she’s a lot older than the age of the child this room was meant for. Leaning up against the wall – next to the crib! – was a shotgun.

I brought the firearm down to the first floor and went out on the porch again. There were more people in the streets. Everyone was tense and concerned but no one really knew what was going on. Agitation was rising. There was a team from the local hardware coming around and handing out weapons. The weapons looked like modified weed-whackers, like they wouldn’t do anything more than irritate a monster. He said he’d put it on my tab if I ended up having to use it. I asked him if he knew what we were up against, if he knew what was terrorizing the town.

“Not a clue,” he said.

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Nightmares

Nightmare #282 – Arms Full of Mom

“…the weirdest part was that she didn’t have any legs. I had to carry her…”

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Nightmares

Nightmare#267 – A Shining City Full of Decay

“…Nothing was happening here at all. It was a cultural low pressure zone…”

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Nightmares

Nightmare #264 – Awful Gray Buildings

“…The effect was absolutely sinister. With every step my good mood dissipated…”

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Nightmares

Nightmare #254 – Hunted Down

heard them coming up behind, on either side;

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Nightmares

Nightmare #133 – The Slashed Horizon

(Male, 40’s) I was chasing someone through these very dark, black streets that were also slick with rain. I had lost the trail and was a bit lost when I realized I wasn’t in a city at all. What I thought all along was the city scape of buildings was actually a long backdrop painting. The canvas was stretched all along the side of a large semi trailer. Then I looked around me and realized that everything I had been running through, everything that had felt like a city was actually just cutout flats on a very very small stage. How could I have ever taken that to be the street I was running down?

I looked back at the back drop and noticed that it had been slashed with huge long cuts running lengthwise. The truck was in the middle of a field. It was the middle of the afternoon. There was nothing else, absolutely nothing else as far as the eye could see. Then there was a young woman. She had very straight, plain blond hair about shoulder length… and a HUGE knife, easily a foot long that she waved around like she was very comfortable with it. It was clear that she was the one who had sliced up the backdrop. She wanted me to stay and talk but I said No I had to head back to town because I had to pee. She laughed and said “You’re in a field. Just go ahead and pee here.” I replied, still eager to get the heck away from her “You just want to see my penis.” She replies by grabbing the back of her t-shirt and pulling it off in one smooth movement so she’s standing there, topless and bare-breasted still brandishing this immense knife. I am absolutely terrified — I don’t want to piss her off but I don’t have a clue what to do.

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Nightmares

Nightmare #106 – Icy Skyscraper, Snowy Death

(Male) I was in a very large city that was located right beside a large body of water. Could have been Chicago, could have been New York, could have been Toronto… The city had been hit with an unprecedented winter storm, one that had gone on for weeks… months? There certainly weren’t many people left and the sense that that they’d abandoned the city or died. Survivors were able to get from building to building through underground passages. I had gone from the main building where we had set up camp to a neighboring building. I looked out through a window at a skyscraper, one of those glass windowed skyscrapers. It stood really close to the water and the spray from the water would hit the side of the building and freeze immediately. The ice built up and built up over these weeks upon weeks until there was a strange ice sculpture attached to the side of the building, almost as large as the building itself. The ice swooped out like the arms of a ghost, like the shape of the wind itself. It seemed like the weight of the ice would have the power to topple the building over soon.

I went to a different window. This one was just underneath the “snow line.” Snow had fallen so deeply that the first few floors of all buildings were submerged in snow. I looked out one of the window that was covered in snow but not too deeply. Light still got in and I was able to see shapes outside. There was someone out there! It was someone I knew, someone from work. He was laughing and it seemed like he was trying to walk along on top of the snow, unaware how dangerous this was, how unevenly packed the snow was, how he could fall through the crust on the top and suffocate. For some reason I thought I could save him. I opened the window and snow poured in the window. I estimated I was just 20 feet away from him. The snow here seemed very soft and uncompacted. I thought somehow that I could “swim” up to the surface of the snow. I jumped out of the window. I stamped my feet and compressed the snow underneath me then scraped more off above my head, gradually moving upward. But I eventually loosened too much and made my little cave unstable. Snow started to tumble down on me. It was light at first but then it trapped my legs. It got more deeply buried. It hammered into my chest, trapped my arms. I tried to thrash but I was trapped. I was suffocating.

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Nightmares

Nightmare #100 – Blood in the Streets

(Male) I had just gotten off a bus with my wife and daughter who in this dream was maybe ten. We were in a big city with skyscrapers and busy streets and we had to get back to our apartment on the other side of town. The two them wanted to walk slowly but for some reason I had to make it back much quicker so I took off on my own, walking at a much faster pace.

I had only gotten about a block away from them when I noticed all traffic had stopped on the road. There was literally a wash of partially clotted human blood pouring across the street. An SUV had run broadside into a bus and then two more cars ran into the wreckage from either side. It looked like there were no survivors, just human body parts scattered and this horrifying puddle of blood. I was quite fascinated because it didn’t look like blood in the movies and not even like the blood I’ve seen at Red Cross locations but I thought it best to keep moving so I kept walking, leaving bloody footprints behind me, all the way home.

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Nightmares

Nightmare #63 – Flame-thrower and the Zombie Parade

(Male, 40’s) There were zombies everywhere but they seemed to be relatively fragile and explosive. One good hit with my flame thrower and they popped like a balloon filled with hydrogen. Imagine human sized Zeppelins. They didn’t seem to have a very good sense of direction either, that is, they didn’t know where I was, so I waited for one floor of the warehouse to fill up with zombies, then I pulled myself up through a hatch to the second floor and ignited the zombies I could see. The flames spread through the whole first floor. But the flames also attracted more zombies. I lured them up floor by floor and then I ran down the fire escape and burned the whole building. This was very strange, especially because my flame-thrower looked like a vacuum cleaner. The handle was a hollow tube and the bag was filled with some kind of combustible gas or liquid. I would compress the bag, like a bag-pipe, I guess and flames would shoot out of the tube.

So now I was down on the ground floor of this grimy, bombed out city, one infested with zombies. And this parade of other survivors starts making its way down the street. We all have weapons that are about as insane as my vacuum-cleaner-flame-thrower. We carefully walk down a few blocks and we gain a few folks with every building we pass. But then it occurs to me that some of the folks who are joining our parade don’t look much like survivors. They look more like zombies. In fact, once I start tallying up the number of zombies to survivors, even in our parade, they’ve got us outnumbered. And they’ve got us surrounded. The other survivors were starting to realize this as well and just as the zombies got ready to attack us, I woke up.