…”We were living in this sprawling country farmhouse and had invited the neighbors and basically everyone we knew who were still alive for a potluck.”
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Tag: country
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Nightmare #85 – Zombie Farm
(Male) I was at a farm, along with an aunt and uncle of mine and a whole family of people from the neighborhood where I grew up. In the dream, they had just been featured on a television commercial for fast food tacos. For some reason we didn’t stay in the farmhouse but rather in the barn, and mostly in the cement silo. A spiral walkway had been rigged around the outside to allow us access to the living spaces higher up in the silo. When we left the silo, we were always looking over our shoulders, being careful of our surroundings. I walked through the farm yard with my aunt and uncle. My uncle showed me a new harrow he had bought. It looked exactly like his old harrow, which also looked like a toy I had had as a child.
…The area was over-run with zombies, but a kind I’d never exactly seen before…
The reason why we were so conscious of what went on around us, of course, were the zombies. The area was over-run with zombies, but a kind I’d never exactly seen before. They were gray and wrinkly like a prune from top to bottom. When they moved, clouds of dusty dirt flaked off them, like dustbowl golems. They didn’t seem much like animated corpses, though they were humanoid and extremely slow moving. However, the zombies were very powerful and it was impossible to get away if one caught you. The one fact we had in our favor was that the zombies weren’t able to climb, not stairs or ladders or even up the spiral ramp around the side of our silo. We were safe as long as we stayed on the second story. However, we had to keep the zombie population under control like they were an agricultural pest or something.
It was night. I was downstairs in the barn, around the stalls where we once kept cattle. I didn’t see the zombie until I had almost walked into it. He growled, low, deep, elemental. Before I knew it, there was another one behind me. I started to panic but I got out the handgun I carried in the dream and I shot both zombies. The first one collapsed into a pile of gray sand at least a yard high. The second one kept moving. Suddenly, I became aware of other zombies all around me. If I kept my head and kept moving I could likely get around them all. I started running and just as I cleared the barn, my foot slipped. I woke up.
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Nightmare #82 Train and Typing
This dream just started strange but got scary.
I was at a farm that belongs to one of my relatives. It was twilight but I was still playing catch out back of the farmhouse with someone. A train went by remarkably close to the farm. Inside the train were passengers and they were all sitting like they were on a subway car more than like they were on a train. Through the windows of the train I was able to recognize one of the passengers. He was a long-time friend of my dad’s. His car whizzed by and I looked inside another car. This friend of my dad was in that car too. This happened again and again while the train passed. There were probably a dozen instances of my dad’s friend in that train. By the time the train passed by, it was fully dark, that deep black kind of in the country dark. I was alone. I ran alongside a row of bushes in this pitch blackness. I knew where I was and that soon I’d be near the house but I tripped over something and landed in a gravel path.
I woke up. This was such a strange dream that I started to write it down so I could remember it in the morning. Except as I wrote it down, as soon as my cursor moved away from the words it had typed, the words started to change. It was sort of like that annoying feature on Microsoft Word that automatically corrects your words but this had some kind of intelligence. It changed my writing to the present tense and started to describe how I was being stalked by a creature that wanted to tear me apart. I kept typing and it kept correcting me until the final words were “Look behind you.” I kept trying to wake up for real.
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Nightmare #75 – Snakes and Straw
(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) I was inside a mall, a nice mall with lots of internal features and I headed toward an elevator, a round glass elevator. When I got out of the elevator, I was in a very dark field with very tall grass swaying in the wind. Somehow I knew that this grass was supposed to have been cut a long time ago but that the reaping machines had run amok and were terrorizing the area. It was dangerous to be out in this area alone after dark because the reaping machines could cut humans down too. I walked along a dirt road and saw an old abandoned harrow rusting away in the grass. I didn’t look very dangerous. Then all of a sudden a huge reaping machine thundered up on me. It was the size of a barn, made of wood too and it had these long, arcing blades that it worked like fingers. I have no idea how it was able to move since it was so large. The timbers were probably 12 inches by 12 inches. It came to me that there would be only one way I could defeat this thing and that would be with fire. I knew this plan had great danger too because I could set the whole field on fire as well. At that moment, I realized that I had a flaming torch that I was carrying with me for light. When the reaping machine made it’s next pass, I tried to ignite it with the torch but I fell to the ground instead. When I landed, I woke up.
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Nightmare #36 – Stuck in Time
(Female, early 50’s) I had this really weird dream where I was a newspaper reporter and also about 25 years younger. I was sent on an assignment to this large mansion out in the country, and I was to interview someone who lived there. I drove far out of the city, in a vacation area in the mountains with hotels and cottages all around– a place that had been popular long ago. I knocked on the door and waited a long while before someone came. It was a very old woman. Evidently she was the person I had come to interview. I followed her up three flights of stairs to a small room. It was barely large enough to hold a single bed and a nightstand. Everything in the room was old and faded and dusty. Even though this was a huge mansion, this was the only room of it that was hers. I didn’t quite understand.
I asked her lots of questions, trying to figure out her story. I discovered that she had been living there for more than 50 years. She’d had a summer job when she was young, and something happened and she could never leave. “I’m 75 years old now,” she said, “and when the phone rings, I have to go down 3 flights of stairs to tell him.”
Who?
The “him” turned out to be some boy she had an affair with that summer. Now he owned the hotel. Why did she stay here? What reason did he have for keeping her around or did she have for not leaving? Who was punishing whom? I couldn’t get her to answer those questions directly.
Another strange thing was that there was no phone in her room. Where did she answer these phone calls for “him?”
When the old woman was tired of answering questions she pulled up the window shade and revealed this huge beautiful green golf course he’d built. “That’s all new. It’s his too. But I’ve never been there.”
I couldn’t figure out how she got stuck there, like she was stuck in time and unable to change.
(Female, 40’s) I have this recurring nightmare scenario that plays on a couple of my real-life obsessions. One is my sense of orientation, by which I mean knowing which way is north, and therefore east, south, and west. In my head, I place myself on a map, most of the time, and I know where I am. And the other is a sense of direction, so that I know where I want to go on that map in my head.
My recurring nightmare image is more like a backdrop than a plot. Whenever I find myself in that dreaming place, I’m filled with a sense of dis-ease. I’m at the place where two country roads intersect. There are no street signs at these four corners. The roads stretch on in all directions far as the eye can see, and farmlands and fields cover all the ground. At some junctions, there’s a house or two, but no one is home at any of them. There are no signs of life, no cars in the drives. In these dreams, I’m usually traveling, either walking or driving or occasionally riding a bike. Sometimes I’m trying to get somewhere, like to visit a relative, or get away from someone who is following me. The scariest part though is not knowing where I am or which way to go. I travel on and on but the landscape keeps repeating. There’s no way out.
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Nightmare #17 – The Sharp Stick
(Female, 40’s) Do you remember how, when you were a kid, you could rub a stick back and forth on the sidewalk until you sharpened it to a little point for war games and such? I’d forgotten about that until I had this dream.
In the dream, I was looking after a little girl. She was about 7 or 8, very solemn, with straight, long black hair, no one I know from real life. She was the heir of this farm property and it was my job to protect her. I followed her all over the property, into the barns, up and down ladders, while she played. Her uncle worked on the farm and it became obvious that he was extremely jealous that she had inherited the property and not him. He did the chores resentfully, casting angry glances at the little girl. She was in the way of his fortune; he wanted her dead so badly that he would kill her himself. Since I was supposed to take care of her, I knew what I had to do. I took a broomstick handle and began sharpening it on the cement sidewalk, rubbing it back and forth until I made a very dangerous point. I waited until he was asleep and then I pounded the stick through his temple, just like Jael in the Bible.
Does it count as a nightmare when you find yourself doing something really awful, like killing someone with a stick? I think so.