Tag: death

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Nightmares

Nightmare #208 – Shopkeeper for the Mob

(Male, 40’s) This is another nightmare I had while I was battling the worst cold I’ve had in years. Feverish dreams are wild!

“”…everything was a front for the Mob..”

I operated a little shop of some kind in a canvas tent pitched in a parking lot beside a highway. There were big bags of coffee beans and by big, I mean probably 50 pounds or so. There also were different kinds of spices and bags of food like it all had been directly imported from other countries.

And everything was a front for the Mob. Though it wasn’t explained in the dream, the set up sounds like there were drugs or guns being smuggled in with the coffee and other items. My position was extremely tenuous. There was really no reason to have an outsider like me so intimately involved with Mob work and I knew it. It was only a matter of time until I was killed. The Mob guys would show up every couple days, cut open a bag of coffee, spill the beans everywhere and then take off. There would be someone holding a gun on me in case I wanted to make some kind of an objection. This one time the Mob people show up and they’ve got someone with them. In fact, it’s someone I work with, a nice enough guy. He chats with me, totally oblivious to the danger he’s in. He’s amazed that I run an import shop in addition to the other job. Then the Mob guys grab him and force him to his knees and without saying anything they shoot him to death right there in front of me. I am simply terrified. Shocked and terrified. I don’t know what to do. The Mob guys back out of the tent. I don’t know if I should run or call the police or what.

Then all of a sudden I’m in an apartment building. I get the sense that it’s also entirely owned by the Mob. I’m in one of the rooms possibly a room where I live and I look out of the door just in time to see a couple Mob guys drag another guy I know up the stairs and thrown him on the landing face down. They put these weights on his arms. The weights look like big coffee cans with a handle on the top. The guy is unconscious. One of the Mob guys prepares a syringe of something, maybe heroin for all I know. Then he backs up and makes like he’s going to throw the syringe like a dart. That part makes me cringe.

All of a sudden he realizes that I’m there, that I’ve been watching everything from just a couple feet away. He turned toward me and started walking. I backed up and at that instant I woke up.

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Nightmares

Nightmare #204 – The Old Fake Death Embalming Enema

GrimGnome notes: “I always love to hear nightmares from this particular guy due to the overwhelming joy that these weird dreams give him. It’s obvious from the way he tells them. He’s always got a fantastic dream and he has absolutely no inhibition about sharing even the strangest ones. Like this one:

…the procedure was extremely painful… and cold!

(Male, 30’s) “For reasons unknown, I had to fake my own death. And things had gone pretty well up until the point where I had to prove I was dead. The proof, however, was that my wife had to give me an enema of embalming fluid in front of witnesses. The enema was delivered in his huge syringe. It must have held gallons and gallons of fluid and the embalming fluid itself was fluorescent blue like antifreeze. It was also freezing cold. The procedure was extremely painful and cold and I think I even was screaming at some points but somehow it convinced the witnesses that I was really dead.

Or at least mostly, because there was some lingering suspicion. So my wife and I figured that it would look more believable if she got married to someone else. We chose a guy I’ve known since childhood and who is also currently a co-worker of mine. So the dream ended with me dressing up in a disguise to go attend my own wife’s wedding.
How about THAT for a dream!”

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #199 – Deadly Eavesdropping

(Female, 80’s) I’ve been on some pretty serious medication recently. The injections just make me feel so light, like I’m floating. It takes a couple days until I come back to myself.

I tried to tell her I wasn’t dead

In this dream, I was laying in my recliner, rocking back and forth. Since I got sick I have been sleeping in my recliner because it’s easier for me to get up out of it than out of a bed. I gradually realized that I could hear voices. The voices were loud enough that I could make out what they were saying. I was very curious. One of the voices was one of the preachers from my church. She was talking about someone who had passed away. “She was just sitting there rocking away in her recliner.” I felt sorry for this person and then I realized that the preacher was talking about me. I tried to speak, tried to tell her I wasn’t dead but I wasn’t in my recliner anymore. I was floating up by the ceiling. There was nothing I could do. I felt so powerless.

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"What We Fear"

Real Fear – “I’m Not Dead Yet!”

This cheery little news bit from the BBC reports that persons in at least FIVE British hospitals have been wrongly certified as dead. We’re not talking about Victorian England; one of these cases dates from 1996. I’m tempted to make a series of t-shirts and buttons with the warning “Are you really SURE I’m not dead?” As long as I can market this fear as a real and present threat, I’m sure to make a mint.

I know we have all sorts of things to worry about these days and there are claims made that those things are more important than, say, finding factual verification for premises from Edgar Allan Poe stories. But honestly, isn’t the idea of being mistaken for a dead person, well, at least a rather novel fear?

The BBC Report from 25 May, 2008 about Living People Mistaken for Dead Ones

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #137 – Arriving for the Funeral

(Male, Middle-Aged) My wife and I had just gotten into town, a small town with what appeared to be only one stop light and one main intersection. We arrived by train I believe because we exited a large brick station. I was wearing a black suit and black gloves and the only luggage I was carrying was my laptop from work which is in a black satchel. My wife is also dressed somberly. As we start to cross the road, a fancy old-style hearse turns the corner and heads toward us. It’s blaring a siren and flashing its lights which is pretty strange. Where would a hearse have to go in a hurry? We stop and let it pass. I am very tired, maybe from the journey, maybe from exhaustion or hunger. I am fighting to keep from passing out. My wife keeps telling me “It’s just a little way further.”

…They’re walking along, all in black, half like a mob and half like a parade of mourners…

Just as we are nearly across the road, I notice a whole family of people turning the corner where the hearse came from. There’s an older man and woman and their four full grown children and probably a half dozen other people. They’re walking along, all in black, half like a mob and half like a parade of mourners. The mother in particular is highly distraught and cries very loudly into a hankerchief. She keeps choking like she’s trying to stop crying. I recognize the family once they get closer. They must be arriving for this same funeral. They’re friends and normally I’d want to talk with them but in this dream I was filled with panic. I just wanted to get to my hotel room or where ever I was going and close my eyes. The fear of talking with them made me try to escape but I was horribly dizzy. They kept gaining on me and my wife but at last we entered the building where we were heading to. I felt worse and worse with every step, a little like my head was emptying, like my brains were just evaporating and pouring out my ears. Despite these disturbing sensations, I knew I had to hold onto my brief case because I had to do work while I was vacationing at this funeral. My wife was quite a ways ahead of me by now. She opened a door and held it open for me though I realized I would never make it that far.

At just about that moment, I figured out that I was arriving at my own funeral.

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #108 – My Happy Funeral

(Male) This wasn’t as much a nightmare as just a strange, strange dream despite its subject matter. I was attending my own funeral. It was being held in this little rural chapel, one maybe 20′ by 20′ in dimensions. The walls were bright white, the pews too, even my coffin was white. Bright summer sunlight gleamed in the windows. There was a crowd of maybe two dozen people and everyone was milling around acting so happy. I was milling through the crowd too and people were shaking my hand, smiling, as if they were congratulating me. I think some people were even smoking cigars, like I had had a baby or something. There was also a large sheet cake with a thick layer of that sugary white frosting usually found on wedding cakes. I was cutting it into pieces and handing it out to people when I realized that this wouldn’t be a very good lunch. I left the funeral and went to a small diner next door and ordered up a gallon of soup and some sandwiches to go. When it came time to pay, I seemed to have coupons in my wallet for a free gallon of soup and a free box of sandwiches which meant that all I had to pay was the tax. As I was leaving, I invited the guy behind the counter to come to my funeral, that we’d have plenty of cake.

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"What We Fear" Other Haunts

The Blackmarket Indian Bone Trade

Up until yesterday, everything I knew about grave robbing I learned from The Bodysnatcher (1945) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0037549/ (an enjoyable thriller that was the last movie to feature both Karloff and Lugosi)Then I read Scott Carney’s work on the Bone Trade from India.

Scott Carney’s Blog

His piece in Wired

His piece on NPR

The guy really did his research, from the bizarrely fascinating process used to create world-class medical skeletons, to the (post)colonial economics of the business to the laws that supposedly limit the trade today. He wore out shoe leather, knocked on doors and saw and touched stuff that I suppose I’d rather not see or touch. This is journalism at its best, vital but not lurid though slightly off-beat, focused on the humans involved. The centuries old traffic in human skeletons was finally banned in India after one dealer started selling child skeletons in great quantities, quantities that could only have been acquired by murder. Understandably, folks got upset, VERY upset even attacking foreigners suspected of being involved. But wouldn’t the existing laws against murder have been enough to address this problem? Was it primarily people from the other castes upset at the financial boon?

What the reaction suggests to me is an underlying set of values and fears related to human remains. If I understand correctly, Hinduism considers dead bodies to be unclean, hence their disposal is relegated to the lowest castes. Christianity by contrast with its insistence on some form of bodily resurrection has tended to nearly venerate human remains, lest there not be enough “left” to be resurrected. (I have heard that the decay of remains is enough of a theological problem that at least one sect determined the minimum requirements for bodily resurrection were that the skull and both femurs be in tact. Allegedly, this determination somehow related to the skull and crossed bones of pirate and Masonic symbology.) Bones are also used, I think, by some forms of Buddhism to indicate the transient, illusory essence of reality. But the contrasting value system posed in these articles is the enlightened practices of Western medicine and education. And of course, good old fashioned economic value. The black market nature of this economy has helped prices rise greatly.

The final thing that I was left wondering about was how many folks die in India during any given year. It surely has to be enough to supply all the medical schools that want them, doesn’t it? Perhaps I’m naive as to the real scope of this market. The industry also sounds like a mature one, where a fully manufactured product is exported, in contrast to a more colonial system where raw materials are exported to be refined in foreign factories with the products re-imported. The only way the ban makes secular sense to me is if India wants to stock its medical schools first before supplying the rest of the world.

Anything that can spark such trains of thought is definitely worth reading, especially you’re intrigued by the idea of grave robbing.

Categories
Nightmares Poetry

Nightmare #91 – The Back of my Head in the Mirror

(Male, middle aged)

the tilted mirror turned my gaze upward, inward.
my skullcap was discolored skin, scalded
freckled with scab-crusted sores.

how long had I been bald? A shameless
scalp naked to the sun’s corroding rays
too preoccupied to notice my corruption?

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #80 – Doll of Death

(Male, 30’s) The other night I dreamt about a doll, maybe 18 inches tall with the proportions of a baby. It was heavy for a toy and the surface of it’s skin felt like dirt, like soil with a high content of clay. The doll fell like it could have been made out of earth but it was solid like a like any other doll. It’s face was a cheery smile but it’s color, both of its fleshtone and its clothes were ashen grey. It was a doll that somehow represented death. Maybe it actually was death.

Its clothing was distinctive as well. Grey corduroy over-alls with a small satchel that it carried around its neck. The satchel represented a traditional item worn my people in my family (in the dream) an item that we received when we joined the family. The satchel is supposed to contain a few handfuls of seeds, some special variety of grain that the family had perfected over the centuries, I think it was a kind of rye that grows in particularly rocky terrain at particularly high altitudes. (I should mention that I don’t really come from such a family!) I think the idea here was that if you had that satchel, you’d never go hungry because you could always grow your crops again.

But the doll was dead. Somehow it had been allowed to die, as if dolls can die. I looked into the satchel and it only had lint and a few hardened clumps of something. There didn’t appear to be any seeds left.

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #69 – Unexpected Embalming

(Male) I had this one just last night. I woke up with tears in my eyes.

Two of my friends came along with me as I stopped at a funeral parlor for some errand. We went into a moderately large room where the funeral director was. He said my friends could look around while we did business and he told me to sit down. My friends looked at one of the coffins but it already had someone in it. They joked with the director “You do good work” which was a joke because the guy in the coffin was horribly burned on one side of his face. The director explained “He was in a terrible car crash.”

The director got down to business with me. “Have you considered the funeral?”

“Oh, yes I consider them very important. It’s like my chance to say good bye to everyone. And I’d like to plan it in more detail but not now of course.

“Of course.” He replied.

“I mean there’ll be plenty of time for that.”

He had wheeled over a tray with many things on it. “How do you see yourself?” (by which I took him to mean how did I want to appear at the funeral.) I told him I didn’t know. He said sometimes it helps people to look at themselves in a reflection. He handed me something that looked like a stainless steel crow bar, polished to a great shine. “Look at yourself in that.”

I did but the reflection was distorted. I held it close up to my face to get a better look. Then I started to cry. “Take it away. Take it away! It’s a trochor. It’s what you use to… Get it away from me.” The funeral director didn’t want to make me upset but he called his assistant to talk to me. By the time she appeared I had stood up and was near the doors. She put her arms out and grabbed me by the shoulders. “You don’t understand,” she said “You have to stay here now.” She was treating me like I was dead. I didn’t know why my friends hadn’t come to my aid during my struggle but they couldn’t seem to hear me. I pretended to go along with the assistant, hoping she would take her hands off me long enough for me to make a run for the door. But soon two other assistants arrived, large bouncer-types in black suits. One of them had a large heavy metallic circle they were going use to weight down my legs. I stood up and started wrestling with them. I lost any sense of dignity and I cried and I begged like a child. I thought it was interesting how I was starting life and ending it as crying infant. I tried to bargain. I tried everything. I didn’t want to be dead.

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Nightmares

Nightmare #51 – In Death, Face to Face

(Male) This part really happened: A teacher I had maybe ten years ago had a daughter a couple years younger than me. I don’t remember ever having a conversation with her. The difference between our ages always seemed so big at the time. Last month, his daughter died after a lengthy illness.

But after she’d died, I had a dream where she and I were both in this dark room. Just outside the door in a lighted space there were people who we both knew. We stood very close to each other for quite awhile, wordlessly standing, not exactly waiting, just sort of “being.” Finally I spoke, “I never really knew you.” Then she said entirely without inflection “Now I’m dead.” I nodded but since we were in the dark, she wouldn’t have been able to see. I didn’t know if her words supposed to mean that I was dead too, or that since she was dead that therefore we’d be able to get to know each other or whether, perhaps, her words really weren’t replying to me at all. I could hear a commotion coming from the people in the lighted space but none of their words were distinct enough to make out. We stood there, in the dark, face to face, until I woke up.

His daughter who

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #48 – Video Corpse

(Male, early 20’s) I dreamed I was inside of a video game, which I guess isn’t really that strange because I play a lot of video games. It was a first-person-shooter / capture-the-flag style game which means you run around a lot shooting at people and trying to get the other team’s flag. So in the dream, I get shot and I “die” which means I have to restart at a certain place and run back into where the action is.

The first weird thing that happens is that when I passed the place where I “died” I can see that there is a body there and that it’s me. My corpse is lying on the ground right where it must have fallen when I was shot. I thought that was weird because usually you just disappear when you’re shot. But I still was able to move around and play the game so I continued running around, shooting at people, trying to capture the other team’s flag.

Then I run past the place where I died a second time and my corpse is STILL there. But what’s really strange is that there are these other figures – figures who aren’t players in the game – who are picking up my body and are carrying it away. I look around and all over the battle field there are more of these figures who are carrying away the other player’s corpses. This made me feel really strange and right then, I woke up.

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #15 – Strange Ice Cream

(Female, erly 80’s) I am trembling as I write this. I just woke up from a MOST TERRIBLE nightmare.
I was with my son and his family in an ice cream store. It seemed very familiar and was the kind of place where the owners lived in the back. However, the ice cream cones all had very strange names. My son’s family all got their cones and as I was waiting for mine, I started to faint and I tried to call for help and hung on to the counter. But EVERYONE had gone.

…I tried to pound on the counter but my arms were LIMP just hanging out of my sleeve and would make no noise when I hit on the counter….

My voice would not come out, only with a squeak. I tried to pound on the counter but my arms were LIMP just hanging out of my sleeve and would make no noise when I hit on the counter. I seemed to know that the owners were in the back so tried to crawl back there. The woman saw me and ran to call the doctor. The man came and I mumbled that my family was out in the car. He let me lean on his arm and we went outside on this very busy street with cars crowded together. I started to fall on the street in weakness and he said, “Don’t do that , here is your family.”

This FUNNY looking little square shaped black car pulled up. My family was all there, but all dressed up in fancy formal black looking clothes and were all squeezed together in this little car. I recognized my grandson, my son and I think it was either my niece or grand-daughter and some other people. I kept saying “Why did you leave me and where is my ice cream cone?” They all had just a very strange smile and did not know what I was talking about just as though it was now in a different time. I asked “Am I dead?” I kept trying to say that I was weak and needed to eat. I remember, at this point I almost realized that it was a dream and I was trying to jerk myself awake. Finally I jerked and broke myself loose and woke up.

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"What We Fear"

“Nightmare Death Syndrome”

Though this item sounds like the premise to a cheesy horror movie (in fact, the premise of a very enduring horror movie franchise) there is actually a medically recognized condition where normally healthy people fall asleep and never wake up.

Current explanation as to why? Nightmares.

These cases occurred in modern times–the first in 1977– in American cities– Sacramento, Chicago… and claimed more than 100 lives. Named apparently “Nightmare Death Syndrome” or “Sudden Unexpected Nocturnal Death Syndrome” (SUNDS) there is one other key piece of information about this phenomenon, namely that it effects a very precise demographic: immigrants primarily male from south east Asia.

Read in its full political and historical context, the whole story of these Hmong immigrants is perhaps more a tragedy than horror story.

Hmong Immigrant Situation

But what would cause them to die asleep in such numbers? Some have suggested the stress of acculturation compounded with guilt about leaving relatives behind. Another researcher examined the traditional culture of the Hmong and discovered a notion “dab tsog” or a nightmare that is not just a bad dream but an actual visitation. These visitations can be so traumatic, it is hypothesized, that dreamers die of shock.

Hmong Traditions

Sudden Unexpected Death Syndrome

I will reserve commentary on the very fruitful topic of such “visitation nightmares” to another time but I’ll close with the thought that if our dreams are stalked by malevolent entities who threaten our lives, why are there not entities equally powerful who protect us? How can we populate our dream life with them? That might be the ultimate task in coping with nightmares.