Tag: crime

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Nightmares

Nightmare #346: Scary Garden, Scary Basement

graverobbed
(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.

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Nightmares

Nightmare #320 – Bullies who Unlock the Brain

(Male, 40’s) The whole dream was creepy with people I know who are dead and who I knew were dead even in the dream. But it didn’t turn into a nightmare until the last final moments. I was in a warehouse, a showroom with crates and merchandise stacked up several stories tall. I had been with friends — even though they were dead — but suddenly I’d turned a corner and was completely alone.

Then, there were two men there, leaning against the boxes. They didn’t seem openly hostile or theatening just vaguely up to no good, like con men. One of the men was friendly. He started chatting with me. He said something about the Wicked Witch of the West, about how she had 9 shelves full of… something, but that he had 18.

I asked if that meant his shelves were half as big as hers. He laughed.

Then the other man, the silent one moved in. He held up one of his hands and made a big show of pulling on his forefinger. He removed the flesh like it was a cap. The bone protruded an inch or two… but it wasn’t a bone: it was a key, an old-fashioned key, a skeleton key, I guess. The silent man then pointed his finger-key at me and stepped forward. He pointed at my forehead like he was going to unlock my brain. Before he touched me, though I woke up.

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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 #300 – Trapped like a Thief

(Male, 30’s) The nightmare was like an old movie. It was brown and white and a little bit blurry. I was in a room about the size of my living room, except there were no windows and no doors. It’s not obvious how I got in there, though it felt a little bit like I was on-stage, that one of the walls was the “4th wall” where the audience watches from. Except all the walls appeared real.

I was with this other guy and we were busy trying to crack into this safe. The safe was huge, probably 5 feet tall, 4 feet deep and wide. It obviously didn’t belong in this room but again, I have no idea how we got it in there. I knew that we had stolen it somehow. It didn’t belong to us.

And if all this wasn’t bad enough, I wasn’t really sure if opening it was the best idea. For some reason, I thought that it could contain either an immense fortune… or an extremely powerful bomb that would blow up the entire building. My partner, however, didn’t have any worries and he kept fiddling with the lock like he knew how to open it. I didn’t know whether to help or try to find a way out of the room.

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"What We Fear" Other Haunts This Just In

This Just In – Murder

“…we humans have been shooting each other in the back for a long time…”

Continue reading “This Just In – Murder”
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Nightmares

Nightmare #213 – Crime Gone Wrong

“…The other men were dead, shot in the head…”

(Male, 40’s) Last night I dreamed: I was in some caper with two friends and an out of towner. We stole some money, or played a harmless but elaborate trick on someone I’m not sure; the kind of “crime” that gets you on Jay Leno instead of cell block 4. Anyway, the one new guy- our hired schemer was funny, and charming and after the whole game was played and we met back at the agreed place, we shook hands to make our congenial get away, he reached into his coat and shot the other two grinning guys, and he shot me twice in the back. I felt it. It was shocking, like being hit hard with a phone book with a nail in it. I fell face down. He stepped over to me and set the gun down in my palm, so I could finish myself off. With his finger he tapped the back of my head, “Just here, can you do it?” I just nodded. I heard his footsteps move down the hallway. I was in pain, but I rolled over, and sat up. The other men were dead, shot in the head. I took the gun and wondered if I would screw it up. The gun was a tiny silver .22 with red trim, like something you’d see in an arcade. I could feel my insides, damaged, no blood yet, but a terrible soreness, and it was getting hard to breathe.

I went out to my car and drove to a friend’s house. Her name is Dawn. She was outside busy on her cell phone, so I had to wait till she got off to tell her I was probably going to die. I felt happy, and sleepy. I began coughing up what looked like red oatmeal, so think I couldn’t talk afterwards. She hung up, and ran off to a nearby hospital to see if anyone could come get me. I sat on the dark street, and lay down on my side, then rolled over on my face- this is how I sleep at night and felt the cool wet blacktop. The pain was less, but the weakness overcame me. I could people yelling and footsteps, but it all seemed very far away

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Nightmares

Nightmare #141 – Clumsy Bank Robber

(Male) I dreamed last night that I was waiting in line at the bank. As I neared the tellers I realized that I was carrying a handgun with me. I was flooded with a sense of embarrassment and fear but I figured the best way out of the situation was to rob the bank. So I stepped out of line and yelled at everyone to get down on the ground. I waved the gun around a little bit to show everyone just how serious I was. And I dropped the gun. I didn’t just drop it but rather I let go of it and watched it go sliding along the floor ending up probably twenty feet away from me.

…As I neared the tellers I realized that I was carrying a handgun with me…

There was a painfully awkward moment when the crowd at the bank wasn’t sure what I was going to do and when I myself didn’t know what I was going to do. At just about that point I saw someone I knew in line. He was extremely angry at me. I guess we had gone to the bank together that day with the idea of robbing the bank but that now I was messing things up, he didn’t know if he could save the situation. I felt so clumsy and alone. There were guards and security cameras. I was going to jail forever.

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Nightmares

Nightmare #140 – Extorted by my Fingertips

(Male, 30’s) This dream was very convoluted and crazy and parts were just so very sick and tawdry. I kept trying to do the smart thing but the situation just kept getting worse and worse. I was a college student and I was trying to fit in. There was a group that seemed very popular, not quite as organized as a fraternity, but perhaps more like a secret society. It was made up of at least 40 athletic guys and one very attractive brunette girl. They let me hang out with them for awhile but then, for no apparent reason, a half dozen of the guys beat me up, knocked me to the ground and kicked me until I couldn’t move. I think one of the guys peed on me when I was lying there nearly unconscious. They laughed and said it was part of the “hazing.” I wish the nightmare ended there but it just continued on and on.

…this secret society of thugs would do something simply horrible if they had that key…

I knew that this secret society of thugs would do something simply horrible if they had that key so I asked them for time to think about it. I used that time to gather together my family, my mother and father and our pet dogs (?) and get us all into a station wagon so we could flee. I didn’t know exactly how powerful this society was but I had reason to believe they could hurt my parents and it would be best if we just re-located to someplace far far away. This station wagon was a mess by the way, it barely ran at all. It was gray and dingy on the outside. I drove it down these heavily rutted gravel roads because I was trying to avoid the major roads that might have been watched.

As I turned a corner, the car flipped over into a ditch. There was another vehicle there, conveniently, a small red car. We piled out of the station wagon and started carrying our luggage over to the red car. It was clear we were going to have to leave many things behind, probably most of our things. Just then a big truck appeared with a dozen or so of the society thugs. I stopped loading up the car we were using to escape. I turned to face the truck as it pulled up and right then, I woke up.

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Nightmares

Nightmare #138 – Convenience Store Robbery!

(Female, 20’s) – Maybe this isn’t exactly a nightmare but it was pretty exciting and I remember it vividly to this day even though I had this dream about ten years ago.

…There were many men, a whole carload full of them, all with guns…

I was riding in the car with my mother and we pulled into a convenience store to get some gas. We were getting ready to pump some gas when we looked over at the store and saw it was being robbed. There were many men, a whole carload full of them, all with guns. At that moment they saw us and started to pour out of the store. They ran right toward us. My mom said “Get back in the car.” But even when I got in the car, I wasn’t safe. The robbers started firing their guns at us. The bullets shot right through the windows and the doors of the car. My mother said “Get down” while she started the car and pulled out of the gas station. It was just like she was an action adventure heroine!

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Nightmares

Nightmare #120 – Celebrity Cop

(Male) I was a movie star and I was researching a new role. Since I was going to portray a policeman, I was riding along with some policemen in their car, just out on patrol. A call came in suddenly that there was an armed robbery taking place just a couple blocks from where we were. We had to respond. We pulled up in front of the bank along with several other police cars. There were apparently three robbers and they had taken some hostages. It was going to turn ugly. But then without thinking or asking anyone I started walking toward the bank. I was already in costume, that is, I was wearing a policeman’s uniform and I had a gun in my holster, a real gun with real bullets for some reason. Without asking anyone, I walked into the bank and said something like “Hey cut that out.” Then I smiled broadly with my movie star smile. The robbers recognized me immediately and let down their guard. They said “Hey it’s {whatever my name was} What are you doing here?” And I say “I’m doing research for my new movie and I saw some guys in here who might be fans of mine.”

And then I took my gun out of my holster and shot each of the men square in the chest – one, two, three – and then I shot them each again – one, two, three. The expression on their faces didn’t change. They didn’t understand what had happened. They just sort of melted down to the floor, dead. Situation resolved. When I woke up I was horrified at how cold and callous I had been, that’s the part that was a nightmare.

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Nightmares

Nightmare #119 – The Inept Robbery

(Female) This dream is probably as much embarrassing as it is scary. It involves a man I work with who is deceitful and underhanded but in a bumbling, doltish way. For instance, he recently stole a set of computer speakers from a co-worker’s office and tried to pretend he hadn’t, even though they were sitting right on his desk, connected to his computer. When questioned about it, the speakers appeared back in the co-worker’s office, unceremoniously dumped in a pile and this guy acted like nothing had happened.

Regardless, in the dream this jerk is trying to be a serious bad guy. He’s got a handgun and he’s robbing a whole room of people. It felt a bit like a “Great Train Robbery” set up. But he was sort of bungling this robbery too. I thought to myself I’d be damned if I’d let this idiot have my wedding ring so I slipped it off and buried it deeply in my bra. When he came around to me, I told him I had nothing. He leered in “Give me your JEWELS” like he was a bit more trying to be a pirate now rather than a train robber. And I showed him my fingers and there there were no rings on them. So he pats me down, quite roughly and thoroughly in fact but he is still too stupid to find my ring.

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Nightmares

Nightmare #114 – Contraband in a Deadly Wrapper

(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.

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Nightmares

Nightmare #90 – Outlaw Biker

(Male) It was twilight, nearly dark and my wife and I were digging up the last few roots of a tree in the yard of the house where I grew up. The roots were thick and pale, more like horseradish roots than that of a tree. A helicopter flew over head slowly as if it was inspecting was we were doing. I ran up to hide under the porch. I think it didn’t see me. My heart was pounding.

…These folks definitely had the death’s head insignia of the Angels. The sound of their bikes shook my heart and belly like a good Harley does…

Later, camping with my family, one of the entertainments offered is medieval re-enactments. I’m to be shown how to shoot a bow and arrow. The bows come in two pieces, both long, spindly sticks that will be held together somehow by one hand while the other hand draws the string. I get what I think are two parts of the same bow, some arrows and join the others standing in the yard. Just then a motorcycle rumbled by and somehow it is PULLING a van. The van is like a commercial delivery van and it’s obvious the guy had stolen it for the tools that are kept inside. Someone mentions that it was a Hell’s Angel but I didn’t see the guy’s jacket. A moment later, several police cars and a low flying helicopter scream down the same dirt road obviously in pursuit. Then several people desert the re-enactment, hop on their bikes and zoom off down the road. These folks definitely had the death’s head insignia of the Angels. The sound of their bikes shook my heart and belly like a good Harley does.

We left the park ground to visit my dad who was an elderly widower. (Oddly enough in waking life, it’s my Mom who’s been a widow now for nearly 20 years) He was older and slower than I remember him, thinner too and paler. He lived alone in this very small brick house. Dad seemed more interested in listening to a baseball game on the radio than in talking with us, even about the possible danger. He lived near the park and I was afraid for him given that there was an outlaw biker on the loose, one made desperate by police pursuit. My plan was to sit around at his house until the guy was caught. But the police helicopters were swarming overhead which suggested the suspect was somewhere really close by. I didn’t want to worry Dad but I wanted him safe too. I tried to check around a little in the backyard but I just kept finding more and more places where someone could hide and escape detection. I gave up and started checking the front yard. Then I realized that I’d left the car unlocked and for that matter that one of the kids had left the back door wide open. The guy could be in my very car. Or under my car waiting to slash my ankles with a knife at that very moment. My heart was hammering inside my chest. I think that’s what woke me up because it still was beating heavily as I lay there in the dark.

When I went back to sleep, I continued the dream, sort of. Somehow we got home to a neighborhood of extremely small houses, like trailer homes made of brick, tidy, compact. There was no grass on the yards, only dirt. There were very few cars but in front of each was at least one shiny Harley Davidson motorcycle. They ran the gamut from Sportsters to Electra Glides, very old ones to new ones, all very well kept, nothing overly fancy or customized, just honest working bikes. These were what folks road to work. And I was stuck riding down the street on the same bicycle I had as a kid with the banana seat and ape hanger handle bars. I wonder whatever happened to the guy with the delivery van?

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Nightmares

Nightmare #89 Murder Art

I was walking through a suburb very much like the one where I grew up except at the edge of a cluster of houses instead of a woods, there was a wide expanse of water, possibly an ocean, possibly just a Great Lake. Leading up to the water was a long flat sandy beach and on this beach were houses just like those of the suburb though much farther apart. From one of the houses, I heard cries, then screams. Someone was being beaten, then murdered. I recognized the assailants but since there were three of them and only one of me I didn’t intervene.

Later, I was at a small bookstore, so small it was the living room of a house. They were having an art exhibit and when I looked at the names of the artists, I recognized them as the three young men who had killed that person. Evidently everyone seemed to know that they were guilty, but that no one seemed to care too much beyond the fame it brought them. The artworks weren’t extremely compelling, though they used some materials in slightly novel ways. One of the artists for instance seemed to paint with melted wax crayon and to paint inside old cooking pans. Interesting perhaps but his brushwork and composition were barely competent. The bookstore owner noticed my attention and said the artists themselves would be stopping by later. It was as if he didn’t know how dangerous these young men were. I was afraid and I left.

I was walking home from the exhibit, angry and scared, through the suburb I grew up in, in fact just a block or two from the house where I lived. I passed a liquor store and two men started following me. They were twins, slender, brown-grey, in ragged suits with crumpled hats. They talked as if they were drunk, or more precisely as if they were pretending to be drunk. They were following me rather closely. I tried to let the pass but they jumped me instead. One held me while the other kicked and hit me. It wasn’t like they wanted to rob me, just to beat me to death. I struggled and broke free but they chased me. I ran up to the house of a neighbor. Oddly enough, I didn’t try to run to the house where I once had lived. No one came to the door. I woke when the men reached the porch where I was standing.

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Nightmares

Nightmare #79 – Hungry Ghosts

(Male) I’m embarrassed to try to explain this nightmare since it sounds so wiggy but I have to tell you that I woke up in the middle of the night too scared even to turn on the light! I was at my Grandmother’s house which still had to be straightened up and sold, which is a little strange because she’s been dead for 20 years now. The house was never in the greatest part of town and in the dream at least, it seems to have gotten worse over time.

…It was near midnight and we were also waiting for a friend of mine to arrive…

It was near midnight and we were also waiting for a friend of mine to arrive. He was passing through town and needed a place to stay just for that night. We wanted to keep the front door open so we could see him when he arrived but we didn’t want to leave it all unlocked. Around midnight a car pulled up across the street and this very tall man gets out and walks up to my grandmother’s porch. I say “Craig, I’m so glad you found the place. Sorry I forgot to leave the porch light on. Come on in.” The man enters and said something about “We knew right where to look.” I noticed that the car across the street hadn’t pulled away yet.

But that all became of second importance when I remembered that one of the reasons we hadn’t cleaned out my Grandmother’s house was that it was haunted. I didn’t want the ghost to embarrass me in front of my friend so I started to say a prayer — in my dream, the ghost was very pious and obeyed God — and in the middle of my prayer, the ghost started talking to me, trying to interrupt me. It even told me its name which it just said over and over and over (and which I have forgotten now that I’m awake.) I became immediately afraid for a daughter I had in the dream. I actually have a daughter who is much older but in the dream my daughter was only 9 years old and peacefully asleep in an upstairs room. I was afraid that the ghost would hurt her even more than I was afraid that the man I had let in the house wasn’t my friend at all. When I got upstairs, I discovered the place crawling with creatures who liked to eat human flesh. They were very calm about it. They strolled through the rooms looking at the furnishing like they were window shopping at a store while they casually talked about their favorite ways to cook people. They didn’t seem to recognize that I was a human yet so I thought I could slip amongst them and get to my daughter’s room. But as I passed close enough to a pair of them, the squirted some kind of poison in my mouth. As I collapsed, I heard them say “And you’re the kind we like to roast.”

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Nightmares

Nightmare #83 The Sick Scavenger Hunt and The Fall-Apart Car

I was doing this scavenger hunt with a couple friends, though the clues seemed particularly demented and sick. The whole plot of the scavenger hunt was that we were looking for a child that had been kidnapped by a serial killer which even inside the dream seemed a little tasteless as a premise for a scavenger hunt. There were ransom notes written in crayon in a child’s hand that we had to decipher, etc.

There were three of us on our team. We each drove our own cars for some reason which seemed stupid to me because that just meant we could get lost. My car was the strangest thing but in the dream, it was normal. The car came in two parts, the front half had the motor and the steering wheel and foot pedals, and the back half started with the front seat. The way it worked was that the driver would get in, lift his feet and grab the steering wheel and pull until the two halves clicked together. We were in a hurry, I guess, because when I tried to fasten my car together, it didn’t quite click. There was a wide gap between the sections. When I got on the expressway, snow started to blow inside the car, mounds of snow that drifted up on the dashboard making it difficult to see. I turned on the heater to melt it which helped a little. Then I realized that the car really was not fastened together at all, that if I let go of the steering wheel the motored part would shoot off down the road out of control and the passenger section would smash into the car behind me. I drove along trying to keep up with the others because I was in an unfamiliar town but eventually I got lost and had to maneuver the car into a parking structure.

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Nightmares

Nightmare # 70 – The Crime Scene

(Male, 40’s) This dream had the feel of a film noir, especially the whole sense of “what have I gotten myself into now?”

I was going through some papers that I think my father left and I discovered a file cabinet full of what appeared to be quite rare stamps. I called someone who worked with my dad who happened to be a stamp expert and he came over to evaluate them.

Next thing I knew, this expert had called someone in to help him. They were bent over this one page from a stamp album. Neither man wanted to say definitely whether the stamps were authentic or fakes.

They came across an address of an office nearby. I said that I’d check out the office because I couldn’t be any help with the stamps. My wife and I went to check out the mysterious address. It was in a college, an old European kind of college where all the buildings look like churches with carved stonework and soaring arches. When we found the office itself, the door was locked but we could see through the windows that it had been ransacked. We tried another door along the side and it was unlocked. We let ourselves into the office where we discovered it wasn’t only ransacked, it had been a crime scene. There was blood caked into the furniture and the walls. Papers were strewn along the floor. And the weirdest detail was that a small, disposable camera hung from the ceiling strung from twine. I took this all in at a glance and I knew I had to call the police. I found a phone in the office and dialed 911. A voice answered that said “This 826-4531 how can I help you?” I asked if this wasn’t the police and the voice said that it was the police but that they were doing some remodeling and he didn’t want to confuse people. I told him that he might want to say that it was the police or 911 or something instead. I started trying to explain what I saw and where I was but I had lost the slip of paper with the address. I tried to describe the crime scene and the buildings in the area. Then I asked why they needed me to tell them all that, couldn’t they just trace the call. The voice said of course they’d already traced the call and he was just trying to keep me on the line until the police arrived to arrest me. I tried to explain again that I was just discovering this scene when a man arrived, highly distraught. He looked vaguely like an undergraduate humanities professor I’d had. His blond hair was wind-blown and his jacket — a dreadful wide plaid of pastel colors — was disheveled. He ran toward me saying “No, no” And that’s when I woke up!

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Nightmares

Nightmare #62 – The Stalker

(Male, middle-aged) I kept dreaming this dream all night though I woke up a half dozen times. The sense of outrage, of powerlessness still stick with me.

My sister in law came to stay with us for a little while because she was being stalked by one of her customers. The police knew everything about this guy including where he lived, what he did. My sister in law even was shown pictures of him. The stalker had been placed under house arrest and was given one of those electronic tethers, but he had escaped from them before. Furthermore, the stalker had even killed a couple other people — his previous stalking targets — but for the most part everyone was treating him like he was relatively harmless. Not entirely harmless — my sister in law was encouraged to leave town until he lost interest in her — but the stalker also had some kind of special skill or profession that made people overlook his “faults.” He was a surgeon or something, though I shudder to think of him operating on someone I love.

I felt pretty sure that I could protect her, even though I’m not strong or skilled with a weapon. I resolved that as soon as I saw the stalker, I would just have to kill him before he could take advantage of the situation. Somehow, just having that attitude was going to keep everyone safe. I figured I could kill him in a fight and no one would care.

One afternoon, my wife and her sister actually were gone shopping and I was at home with several people — our plan was to have lots of people awake and paying attention at all times so we wouldn’t be caught off guard. A couple of young children knocked on the door I went to the door but I knew it was him. I went out on the porch and closed the door behind me. I recognized him from his photos. He was very tall and very muscular and had short blond hair. When he turned to face me, he flicked a lit cigarette at my face.

“You’re a little jumpy,” He said.

“You’re not supposed to be here.”

“So she’s here”

“You’re not supposed to be out of your house. Your cage.”

I yelled in the screen window for the others to call 911. We started to fight, to grapple, to wrestle. He was much stronger than me, much taller than me. I kept calling for 911. I don’t know if anyone did. My plan now was to keep him busy until the police arrived. He wrapped one arm around me, pinning my arms to my sides. With the thumb of his other hand, he started pushing on my teeth like he was trying to crack them off into my throat.

I awoke face down in my pillow.

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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.

Categories
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.