Tag: families

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Nightmares

Nightmare #157 – The Wolfman’s Typewriter

(Male, 40’s) It’s funny how I can see parts of my day reflected in this nightmare but all twisted and strange. I actually DID have a conversation with someone about typewriters

In the nightmare, a kid comes up to me – teenaged, maybe a bit older – and asks if I know where he could get a typewriter fixed. He’s all distraught because he barely knows how to work a typewriter let alone about anyplace that would fix one. I took one look at the thing and I could tell for some reason that it was haunted, that bad luck was going to befall whoever held onto that typewriter. I thought the best thing I could do for the kid would be to take the typewriter off his hands. The kid seems very relieved but if he knew it was haunted, he sure didn’t tell me.

I got in my car which was parked at the top of a long winding road. The car wouldn’t start but I figured that wouldn’t be too much of a problem because I could slip it into neutral, roll down the hill and likely coast to the typewriter repair store. It was that close. So I start rolling down the hill and the car stops abruptly right at the bottom. Rats. I have to get out and carry the typewriter up the street. When I get to the place that USED to have a typewriter repair shop, the shop has long gone out of business. It’s getting dark so I decide to take the typewriter home with me for safe keeping.

Around this time, it starts getting dark. It gets dark very fast so it is fully evening by the time I’m home. There is something following me in the bushes. I figured that if I just went into the house, the creature could simply follow me in so, in perfectly logical thinking, I climb up to the roof of my garage. I don’t really have a garage but this was one of those perfect suburban garages, white painted clapboards, asphalt shingles, the garage of my youth. From this vantage, I can’t see anything down there though I know it didn’t go away.

My wife sees me on the garage and joins me on the roof. She seems to think this whole business is pretty silly. I don’t really understand why or how, but my wife grabs me by the arm starts swinging me off the edge of the roof. Perhaps she was trying to lure out the creature because that’s exactly what happens. A long and lanky monster walks out, with the proportions of a man walking on all fours but covered with black dog hair. The creature jumps after me trying to claw and scrape me. I try to explain to my wife that this is probably not the best thing to be doing but right about then, I wake up.

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Nightmares

Nightmare #154 – Loaning the Car

(Female, 50’s) This is one of those weird dreams that are really hilarious when you try to explain it to someone but that probably mean some kind of strange buried anxiety.

In the dream, my son’s fiancé has borrowed my car for the afternoon. She comes back and enters the house and she looks exasperated. I asked her “How’d everything go?”

She said “There was a little problem. It’s just easier if you look.” So she leads me outside. The car is parked in the driveway. The driver’s side door is completely bent backwards on its hinge. Honestly, I didn’t know how it was still attached. But the roof was even more remarkable. The metal of the roof had been rolled back in a spiral like it was an opened sardine can.

I said “That doesn’t look like a little problem.”

And my son’s fiancé replied “That’s what I thought!”

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Nightmares

Nightmare #136 – Undead Babies

(Male, Middle aged) This wasn’t a nightmare in the sense that there was a monster jumping out at me or anything but it was pretty weird and just awfully sad. I was in the house where I grew up and I think I might have been a kid just because I looked at things like a kid would, looking for fun, having little responsibility. I was just playing around in the garage and the backyard. I had a wooden scythe – yup, like the Grim Reaper but I was waving it around like a drum major, spinning it around my hand. As I type it down now, I realize that I could have easily sliced my own head off with it but that fit perfectly with the dream, that sense of stupid self-confidence, of adolescence.

Then a car pulled into our driveway and pregnant woman in a pink jumpsuit got out. She was probably in her late twenties or so. It was my cousin’s ex-wife — I mean, back when she was this age and having babies, she was still married to my cousin but they aren’t together any more. She waved at me then went inside. I was curious so I followed her. She was talking to my cousin who I didn’t know was there. Strange but my parents weren’t in the house. The two of them looked concerned. One of them explained that she had just come from the doctor. Though she could still feel her baby moving and kicking inside her, the doctor could find absolutely no evidence that the child was alive or that she even was pregnant at all. No heart rate, nothing on an ultrasound. My cousin had his hand on her belly, I guess feeling the baby kick, but they looked so sad, so confused.

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Nightmares

Nightmare #122 – Baby Traps

(Male) Let me start by noting that I realize this nightmare is anatomically impossible for SEVERAL reasons — I paid attention in “Health” class enough to know that. I was visiting my mother who apparently lived in a different city. We were strolling through this nice, gentrified area that obviously used to be freight warehouses in a rail yard but that had been transformed into a series offices, coffee stands, lofts, places to eat over-priced lunches and small shops that sold small, expensive pieces of junk. I was very surprised when we came to one door that Mother indicated was her office, surprised because Mom retired something like 20 years ago. We entered and I found a dark and dirty room, cramped to begin with but that was made even more difficult to navigate by this huge, old-style dentist’s chair bolted right to the middle of the floor. It was in bad shape — the arm pads had been torn up by generations of fingernails clawing against the pain. Mom had me sit in the chair. She had an assistant in this tiny room as well, a burly young woman who stood quietly in the shadowy corner but seemed prepared to hold my legs down if it proved necessary.

…Mom asked me to open my mouth and she forced this bottle down my throat, open end down…

Mother explained that she needed to “harvest some babies” from me. She showed me a simple device that would do the work. It was a clear glass bottle, probably half a liter with a very wide mouth and this weird attachment that dangled from the mouth inside the bottle. The attachment looked a bit like a noose. Mom asked me to open my mouth and she forced this bottle down my throat, open end down. The way the trap worked, I was lead to believe, was that a developing fetus would eventually grow to be so large that it had to stick its head inside the bottle and once it did that, its head would be trapped inside the noose. The baby would be caught and Mom could then gently twist the bottle out of my throat and she’d have a baby. Yes, I realize how twisted this sounds. At least this was how Mom explained the procedure to me. I didn’t question why she kept putting another and another bottle down my throat, pushing them in hard, screwing them to force them down my esophagus. If the idea was that they were to catch a developing fetus, well, wouldn’t I only need one at a time? That is, even if guys DID develop fetuses at all! And why were they going down my throat? I woke up snoring so badly I was choking.

And since I bet you’d ask, no, my wife is not pregnant.

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Nightmares

Nightmare #117 – A Fixer-Upper

(Male) My wife and I were helping my elderly mother get her house ready to sell. She was sitting on the front porch in a house dress, distraught, acting senile if not downright psychotic. Mom said something like “I’ve got less that you expect. You’ll see.” Which made absolutely no sense to me but I ignored her because I knew I had a LOT of work to get the house into an even somewhat presentable condition. I went inside the house and over heard my wife talking on the phone very sternly to someone. There must have been something wrong with the roof. She said something like “We’re VERY disappointed with this, Mr. Brockway.” I thought that was kind of strange because Brockway was the name of a friend that my Dad knew when he was a child.

…I knew I had a LOT of work to get the house into an even somewhat presentable condition but I didn’t expect this….

I continue walking through the house which is in bad condition but not beyond repair. I walk out the back door to the back yard where I’ve decided I’ll start working because it’s a nice sunny summer day. I’m walking around in my bare feet. The grass if vibrantly green and perhaps it needs to be cut. There is grass everywhere, even where there used to be drive way. Unfortunately, someone has driven a vehicle down this grassed area and the wheel has cut a deep muddy furrow probably 8 inches deep. The strange thing is that there is only ONE tire gash so this vehicle must have been one very heavy unicycle, or so I imagine. I walk up beside the house and there, right beside the chimney is the true horror: an immense rodent hole. It was probably a foot and a half in diameter and from the scratch marks all around it and from the way that all the grass had been torn up, I figured it was pretty well used. I tried to imagine whether it was occupied by lots and lots of regular sized rats or whether the inhabitants were just a few but much, much larger ones. I was frankly pretty scared. I tried to keep my mind focused and figured of course, before I do anything I should put on some shoes, possibly even some steel toed boots. As I head inside to put something on my feet however, I think that maybe I could start trying to scare the rats out of the hole. So I take the garden hose and I cautiously put the tip over the edge of the hole and turn on the water, hoping to flood them out. I can just tell that this isn’t going to end well but just at that moment, I wake up.

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Nightmares

Nightmare #113 – Fields of Asphalt

(Male) I don’t know if this is the kind of thing that you’re looking for but it’s a dream I’ve had for maybe twenty years now every once and awhile. The dream is extremely ominous and makes me feel extremely sad. The thing you have to know for the dream to make sense is that I used to spend summers on my aunt and uncle’s dairy farm. Just acre after acre of open fields. I learned how to drive on a tractor when I was like 12. There were periods of intense work like when they harvested hay but then other times when I had nothing better to do than gather wild strawberries.

Anyway, in the dream, I’m visiting the farm and my aunt and uncle. I look across the old dirt road and there a construction crew paving over the field where I used to gather wild strawberries. In the distance, near the woods, there were the beginning structures of a strip mall. I am horrified and I ask when this happened. It doesn’t seem like a big thing to my aunt and uncle. They seem so beaten down and fatalistic in the dream which is not what they’re like in everyday life.

In the version of the dream I had most recently, they were down to four cattle which they kept in their front yard (!) They were heading into town to see if they could barter with someone, to see if they could trade four bales of straw (which is bedding material) for one bale of hay (which is food.) Even with just four cattle, one bale of hay wasn’t going to go very far.

I’ve had some variant of this dream so many times that whenever I visit my aunt and uncle (which perhaps isn’t as often as I want to) I just stand and stare out over the fields, just making sure that they aren’t being paved over.

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Nightmares

Nightmare #112 – Bad Shot

(Male) The dream took place after a small scale uprising of zombies. Yeah, yeah, I know exactly where the dream came from. I was watching a stupid zombie movie the day before I had this dream. But the zombie uprising was very localized and contained. Even though there were zombies stumbling around, it really hadn’t disrupted society too much. At the most, the zombie attacks had thinned things out so the town had a slightly under populated, slightly run down feel. Oh, and everyone carried rifles with them where ever they went, just casually slung over their shoulders. In the dream it was the middle of the night and for some reason I needed some cash, so I ask everyone in my house if they want to go for a ride up to the bank. (Cash machines still worked. Heck, money still had value so it wasn’t a ful-scale zombie apocalypse at all.) Everyone in the house was still up even though it was the middle of the night. I didn’t get the sense that they were keeping watch, in fact, I think my son was playing video games. My daughter agreed to ride along with me. It was a nice summer night, not yet too hot. There were a few people out on the streets and heck, there were a few zombies out on the streets too. Just a good night for a walk… though all things being equal, I’m glad I was driving a car. There were no street lights though, now I think about it. The only illumination was from advertising, or signs in shop windows. I drive in the bank parking lot and it’s pretty safe because there’s a large parking lot and it’s entirely empty. I get some cash out of the money machine but as I’m getting back to the car, I see a zombie shambling toward me across the parking lot. It’s no big thing. I take my rifle off my shoulder, steady it against the hood of the car, take aim… and miss. Miss completely. I shoot again, very carefully lining up the shot. Again a miss. It’s getting closer and this shouldn’t be a big thing. It’s a rifle and the creature is maybe 20 feet away. I miss again and I’m scared because I’ve let the thing get so close I don’t think I can get in the car and drive off before it attacks. I’m afraid for my little girl because she’s in the car with the window rolled down and likely the zombie will get her first. Just then I woke up.

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Nightmares

Nightmare #111 – Morning Vampires

(Male) In the dream it was morning. My mother and I had taken refuge for the night in the basement of a house. We were now waking up and then securing the house room by room in case something had gotten in during the night. By “something,” I of course mean vampires which seem to have over-run our small town. There was nothing in the kitchen, nothing in the living room or dining room. It was an old but not particularly spectacular farmhouse, high ceilings, painted wood work, drab flower wallpaper. Mom started making breakfast.

…I opened a small bedroom there were three vampires in there: a mom, a daughter and a son….

I continued searching the first floor and when I opened a small bedroom there were three vampires in there: a mom, a daughter and a son. I knew I couldn’t kill them all at once so I tried to let only one of them out. I succeeded in keeping the son-vampire locked in the room. I should note that the son-vampire looked like that kid from The Munsters only that he was a bit older, maybe high school aged. He looked VERY angry and vicious, with deep black rings around his eyes, but then again he was wearing the shorts and Little Lord Fauntleroy shirt of the Munster kid’s costume, so he was both ludicrous and terrifying. The mom-vampire looked about 50 and had wispy blond hair. The daughter was a little girl, maybe 6 or so. So they are flying around the room in a semi-human/semi-bat state. Yup, blond bats. Weird. I yell to my Mom for a little help but she says she’s in the middle of cooking the eggs or something and they’ll be ruined if she leaves them right then. So I’m trying not to get bit and in fact, I’m doing well enough fighting these things that I try to find something to stab them. All I can find is a foot long ruler. Like the kind you’d used to use in school. I snapped it in half to try to make it sharp on one end but it splintered, if anything making it even less sharp. All the while I’m fighting the two blond vampires. There’s sunlight streaming in the windows but it doesn’t seem to faze them. I give up on trying to kill them and resort to just swatting them away but I even get tired by doing this. The mom-vampire swoops in for the kill and I try to make a stand with that splintered ruler and just then, I wake up.

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Nightmares

Nightmare #104 – Purge by Fire

fire
(Male, 30) I was in a living room with my brother-in-law. There was a large stone fireplace, similar to the fireplace in my own house but this wasn’t my house. There was a roaring fire in the fireplace that my brother-in-law had started. He was busy doing something with the fire. I moved close to see what he was doing. He had just finished burning a large collection of my belongings and he was now moving on to burn the belongings of my daughter. Just that moment in fact, he was stuffing a huge gnome hat into the fire. (?) I was furious with him but I couldn’t stop him. My stuff was already all gone!

…I was furious with him but I couldn’t stop him…

I think I know what is going on a little bit with the dream. The most recent time I’d seen my brother-in-law was around his birthday. He’s not very into things but he had received a large number of gifts. He was trying to find people to take away some of this stuff. The idea might have come up as a dream because my wife and I are considering selling the house where we live, which means we’ll have to pack and move all the stuff we have, including all the new stuff we’ve gotten since we’ve had our toddler. Moving: now THAT’S a REAL-LIFE nightmare!

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Nightmares

Nightmare #96 – The Long Trip to the House that Wouldn’t let People Leave

(Female, 40’s) My teenaged daughter and I were on a trip to Toronto together. We were staying in a hotel downtown and going to attend a play in which a friend of hers from high school was performing. We were on our way to the play, which was to be held at a big church far from downtown. We got as far as standing outside the huge church, an old fashioned colonial brick-style building that was surrounded by a wide lawn spotted with huge, old trees in full fall colors. My daughter remembered that she’d left something back at the hotel, something she needed desperately, so we started on the trip back to the hotel, hurrying, because we thought that we could make it back again in time for the play.

We walked for a long while, then we took a bus, then the subway. Then we came above ground and I looked around for the streetcar stop, but everything was different. We started walking, thinking that our hotel was nearby, wandering really. We went far enough that I realized we had been heading in the opposite direction. Along the beach, we saw piles of skeletons, a stack of bare white bones on the sand, and I told my daughter that that was from last winter’s storms!!

Then I thought I knew a short cut back to our hotel. We went into a shopping center and across some walkways and made a series of turns, and suddenly we were inside a children’s hospital. I asked a nurse if there was a way out of there. She looked at us very skeptically, and pointed to an elevator. My daughter walked in, though these plastic flaps that were not like real elevator doors, and pushed a button. I jumped in as the elevator started to descend. She told me it was freight elevator, not a people elevator.

…”You really don’t want to,” she said. But I insisted…

We came out of the building in a parking lot surrounded by a fence. So we went back into the building to go out the front door. We walked a long time, down a bunch of different hallways, looking for an exit. Finally, up ahead, I saw a staircase and a woman carrying a laundry basket. We hurried to the end of the hall, which narrowed as we went. The end was covered with thick wire mesh: you could see those stairs but you couldn’t get to them. I asked the woman, “How do we get over there?” “You really don’t want to,” she said. But I insisted. So she pointed to a door.

We went through the door and we found ourselves in the basement of a house. We followed the woman up the stairs. She was the mother of the family, now widowed, and she lived in the house with her teenaged son and daughter and another daughter who was 6 or 7. The house was full of all sorts of objects; it looked like a very crowded museum.
The woman began to bring out newspaper articles and programs to show us that she was a very famous musician. We said we had to get going because of the play! But the family looked at each other and smiled. “I’m sorry but there’s no way to leave. We are all trapped here. We never can go out. The house will not let us leave. ”

I looked around. All of the windows were covered with an incredibly thick ivy. They couldn’t be opened at all. The backdoor lead down to the basement, the basement where we’d come in from the hospital basement, maybe, but the door we came through had no doorknob on the inside. I opened the front door and stepped outside. There was a
small cement porch with a short brick wall around the perimeter and a rusty wrought iron gate opening to a sidewalk. I could see the whole city from where I stood. It smelled so good to be outside. I looked over my shoulder and saw the family standing inside the door, watching me. I started walking toward the sidewalk. As I did, the
wrought iron gate reached out and grabbed me and held on. I twisted and pulled, but it wouldn’t let go. It gripped and stretched, wrestling with me, until I was panting and sweating. When I backed up, toward the porch, it let go. If I moved again toward the sidewalk, it grabbed me. I want back inside where the family and my daughter were waiting. “Do you see what we mean?”

We stood there in the hallway, trying to assess the situation. “What about food? How do you get groceries?” “Boxes of groceries get dropped off in the yard.” Their crazy claim seemed to be true. Then I saw a metal switch that I hadn’t seem before, like a built-in key that you could turn. I thought maybe that was the way out. So I turned it. A whole series of gears began spinning like I’d set an enormous machine in motion. There were these shiny columns composed
of hundreds of little gears all turning. A huge rumbling noise came up from the basement and a heavy metal drawbridge covered the front door and held it shut permanently.

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #95 – The Jack of Every Fable

(Male, 30’s) I woke heart racing and all I could think was, “Finally, something to send to the Grim Gnome!”

In an earlier thread of the dream I’d developed an unseemly crush on a Japanese lady I’d just met. This had just come to a close and I was feeling rather proud of myself for ceasing the flirtation as I wandered along some quasi-Boston streets that gave off a Venice vibe. The classic brownstones and familiar streets ran into what should’ve been the Charles River, sometimes neatly with sun-dappled willows lining unexpected parkways, other times the pavement and sidewalk terminating abruptly and requiring backtracking to equally unexpected bridges that crossed and recrossed the brown water.

My memory is fading somewhat but it was on this bit of walk that I began chatting with some college girl also walking there. My age hits me a bit; I’m not old, but she’s young enough to be right out as far as flirtation goes. The chatter is very much on the up and up end of small talk and so when we get to her house there’s nothing to read into her invitation for me to come in and meet her family. That being said, I’m constantly pushing to the back of my mind entirely inappropriate thoughts about how hot she is. Hawt. Very. Mm.

And something feels wrong, but I chalk it up to the inappropriate feelings. Still, crossing the threshold into her house, it’s hard to shake, this sense of wrongness. She’s talking about how she wants me to meet her grandmother, her parents, her brother. Something is out of place. The mood has inexplicably shifted.

I’m not kept in suspense long. We walk down the a tastefully appointed hallway and come to a bizarre room. The floor drops off to the right as though partially demolished and one can see the room below. To the left, opening directly onto the hallway are two rooms. As we approach, the contents of the nearest one remain obscured but the further one holds a woman. She’s sitting in a chair, wearing a white shift and as we draw nearer I can see that she’s an aged woman,
starved, with wirey grey and black hair tangled over a seamed face and eyes so sunken in their sockets as to almost be pits. In my shock I realize the girl who’s brought me here has stopped talking. She had been going a mile-a-minute practically since I met her, and now nothing. Am I looking at her grandmother? The horrible sense of wrongness comes over me again.

There’s a sort of noise from the storey below and I look down into the room and see a siamese twin, male and female, connected at the shoulder and torso. Both appear to be imbeciles but in good health – an impossibility given that one of the torsos ends in a twist of vertebrae. The sight is almost comic, like a really bad horror movie prop, but for some reason I know this set of twins is the girl’s parents. There’s something I don’t quite recall about her brother, who I saw next, a memory of something spiderish that’s swept aside as I realize I’ve come far enough to turn around and see the contents of the last room. There, scant feet from me is a creature that (now that I’m awake) I can only assume was inspired by Mattheson’s White Silk. It sat in a Victorian wheelchair, unable to rise. The hands were large, mis-shapen, pocked and clawed. The face was spider-eyed; there were no lips, no cheeks, just long, flat teeth like rodent’s incisors running the whole rim of the upper jaw. This was Grandmother; the other old woman was food.

I fled in terror away from the freakish family, but I fled deeper into the house.

Naturally, I lost my shit. I fled in terror away from the freakish family, but I fled deeper into the house. I made it to a room in which there was a ridiculously small window through which I know I should have been able to make myself fit, but I spent to long considering its smallness. When I quantified it as eight inches by four I knew I’d doomed myself. That’s simply impossible to fit through. The girl came to the room, all wolfish arousal and I tried to get a grip on how I was going to get out of this. As I played along with her entendres my mind scrabbled at my predicament the same way my hands had crabbed at the shrinking window moments earlier. Even though she knew I knew about her family I was still alive, so there were rules to this, if not reason.

I realized I was in a fairy tale. A misbegotten offshoot the Grimm Brothers. Had I actually heard this one somewhere? What were the rules for this story? She was panting and the climax which would either result in my escape or my demise was fast approaching. What to do? Continue? Flee? I was the Jack of every fable and had to come up with the unexpected solution…

And I woke up. Helluva dream.

Categories
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?

Categories
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.”

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #72 – Disposable Children

(Female, middle-aged) It was so scary and so sad. The dream was one of those visions where I could only see things; I couldn’t interact or stop them.

…I couldn’t stop them…

There was a woman, blond, slender, relatively young. She had five small children of different ages. She wanted to go out or do something that wouldn’t have been possible with them so she handed them each a clear plastic bag and told them to crawl inside. The children were all very obedient and they did as they were told even though a couple of them said they were scared and started to cry. She told them they could poke a little hole in the bag but not too big. It was clear she wanted them all to suffocate.

Then the dream just faded.

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Movies

Movie Review – “A Tale of Two Sisters”

by Elsa L.

This weekend found me caught in the spell of the Korean horror film, A Tale of Two Sisters (Janghwa, Hongryeon: 2003) The film stretches our American expectations of a horror film while conjuring an impressive sense of imminent and inexplicable danger as well as an effectively melancholy mood.

The story begins with the return of the two sisters to their family home after a stay in the hospital. When they are greeted frightening enthusiasm by their stepmom, we remember that underlying rule of horror films: things aren’t always what they seem. Could this parental figure possibly be as evil as she appears to be?

The family tensions play out further during the dinner scene: the cold and distant father, the out-of-control stepmom, the close bond between the teenage sisters. Bedtime finds us leaning forward in anticipation; we know something bad is going to happen or maybe already has. We just don’t yet know what.

The dark mood of the film is underscored by the large but darkly imposing house; the family is comfortable, maybe even wealthy, but still not safe. The camera convinces us that there is something frightening in the William Morris patterned wallpaper. We don’t know exactly what we are looking for, but we know that something scary lurks in this house.

Is there a ghost or something supernatural haunting the sisters or it is something more like rage and jealousy? I don’t want to reveal too much of the plot while at the same time acknowledging that the story is one that you’ll want to try to figure out. Many horror films offer a few “disposable characters” bumped off early in the film, but there are no such expendable victims here. We are drawn into caring about the sisters and their welfare. Like Su-Yuon, the older sister, we wait for the truth to be revealed. We depend on her to get to the bottom of matters.

Su-Yuon is our closest connection in the story but she proves to be an unreliable narrator– a device that catches me off-guard every time in movies or literature. I want to believe what I’m seeing and hearing, and to trust that the characters and the filmmaker are showing the true story to me. The film offers a lesson in trust to the characters and views both.

A horror film or a foreign film asks the viewer to puzzle out meaning. A foreign horror film challenges us twice as much perhaps. A Tale of Two Sisters crosses the cultural divide in ways that will fascinate, mystify and haunt you after the film is over.

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #53 – Stalked… by Bigfoot

(Male, 30’s) I remember one nightmare I had as a kid. It was a fever dream and fever dreams are especially vivid and realistic so it almost feels like a memory. I had noticed a large paw print in the dust on top of my dresser — though this was of course impossible because I would have been so short at the time that I couldn’t even SEE the top of my dresser. Then I had the feeling I was being watched. I looked over at the window of my bedroom and there was this huge hairy creature looking in at me. I wouldn’t have known the word for it then but clearly it was Bigfoot! I didn’t want him to get me. So I ran out of my bedroom and into the hallway. There was window at the end of the hall that usually had a curtain in front of it but in the dream there was no curtain. This allowed Bigfoot to look right in at me again. Then I ran into my sister’s room. She was disturbed by my running around but she was disturbed even more by Bigfoot staring in her window too. Finally both of us ran and hid in the closet which was the only place it seemed like we’d be save. To this day, I think we did hide in the closet!

Categories
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 #49 – Lost on Narrow Streets

(Female, mid 40’s) It was dark evening in this dream and I was riding my bike back to my car, which is not something I do in real life. My car was parked in a huge parking lot, like at a football stadium or the airport, and I couldn’t quite remember where I’d left it. I was biking up and down the aisles of the parking lot, watching as car upon car drove off. Soon the parking lot was nearly empty and that made it easier to find my little blue Honda, the car I really drive.

I put my bike into the trunk of the car, where it really wouldn’t fit in real life. Then I got in the car and started driving. I thought I knew which way I was going, but the streets didn’t look familiar at all. Still I kept driving, turning down different streets and trying to find my way. I turned down one street, but it turned out to be an alley running behind the backs of a row of buildings, rather than a street. I thought I would go around and come back out on the street, but the alley turned at odd angles. I turned down another alley, a narrower alley, that I thought would bring me back to the main road, but it didn’t. My only way to go was a narrower alley still, either right or left. There wasn’t room to turn around. Now the fences and doors and garages were even narrower. But I kept driving, slowly inching along. The sides of the alley were nearly touching my car on both sides, so I decided I’d better go back. I put the car in reverse and started backing up. It was so narrow that I had a hard time moving without scraping the sides of the car. Then I saw a door that looked really familiar– like it actually was the place I was going. I backed up the car far enough that I could open the door and I got out.

…”Finally!” she yelled, “finally you come but it’s too late! You are too late!”…

I opened the door to find this sort of hippie-gypsy looking room. There was draped cloth decorating the room, and incense, and lava lamps (!) I knew this place: it belonged to my step-mother! (I don’t have a step-mother in real life!) She was there, very angry, dressed like a hippie gypsy herself. “Finally!” she said, “finally you come but it’s too late! You are too late!” She was holding a baby, who was supposed to be my step-sister too. “You are too late to save her!” Then the step-mother knocked over a lava lamp, smashing it and making a little spark of fire catch on one of the shimmery draped cloths. In real-life, I know that the fire would have spread much faster than it did in this dream. She put down the baby to start more fires; she began to light matches from the incense and started dropping them around the room, laughing hysterically, like she was out-of-control crazy. I picked up the baby and carried her to the car and strapped her into her carseat in the back. Then I went back in for baby supplies. The crazy step-mother was still laughing and lighting fires. I knew I couldn’t do anything to stop her, so I left, closing the door behind me. Then I got back in the car and began to back out of the alley very slowly.

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.

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #43 – A Murderous Creature

(Female, teen) So maybe a lot of this comes from an episode of Alias I watched just before going to sleep but I still woke up too scared to roll over in bed. I was a spy on a mission. I was to go to somebody’s house and talk to a man who was involved with computers. When I rang the doorbell, the man’s wife and son came to the door and I met them first. The little boy went off to play and the wife showed me in to where the husband was. We talked for awhile about computers then I left.

…The creature sort of looked human…

But I could still see inside the house. I could see the room where the kid was playing. All of a sudden, a creature came into the room. The creature sort of looked human except it was bald and extremely muscular. But the muscles didn’t look like real muscles rather more like tumors just underneath the skin. It had tumors on its face as well. One eye was swollen completely shut and it had bright red bloody lips. The creature stepped right up to the boy and effortlessly ripped his arm off. Then it ripped off the boy’s other arm and then both his legs. Finally the creature opened the child’s rib cage. The boy was dead. It had only taken a couple seconds.

The dad rushed into the room and the creature attacked him too. It ripped off the man’s arms. Just as the creature started attacking the man’s face, I woke up.