Tag: families

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Nightmares

Nightmare #42 – Vacation Warnings

(Male, middle aged) An epic length nightmare here and it sort of developed out of another dream. My family was on vacation, my wife and I and my daughter and my mother. We had spent a couple nights in this hotel in a big city but we hadn’t really been having too much fun. I think we just realized it was our last day.

…I heard a faint whispery voice from inside the hole. It warned “Get out…”

The hotel had a lot of strange services, in addition to what you’d expect like a pool and a gym. For instance, the hotel had a lab, like a chemistry lab that you could use to do experiments. I was in the lab with a couple other men who wore white lab coats. They were showing off things but I really wasn’t that interested. Although it was a pretty well kept hotel, there was a pretty serious crack in the wall of the lab down by the floor, a crack probably 6 inches wide. The two guys saw I was interested in this and handed me a telescoping meter stick for me to see how deep the crack was. I got down on my hands and knees and inserted the ruler and it registered over 25 feet which I thought was impossible. But as I was down there, I heard a faint whispery voice from inside the hole. It warned “Get out of the buildings. Even the cars.” Almost immediately a low insistent rumble started and I thought it was an earthquake. I ran to the hotel room where my family was and told them we had to get outside. It seemed to take forever since everyone felt they had to take a couple choice belongings with them and the hotel room was a mess, belongings strewn a foot thick over the whole floor.

When we got outside the streets were crowded with many other people who had heard the rumbling too. But this was part of the country that never had an earthquake so after a couple minutes people got skeptical and restless. Just then, a building in the distance collapsed literally like a house of cards, the walls and the floors perfectly flattening on top of each other. Another building much closer began to swell like it was a square balloon filled with water. Then, like an over-filled water balloon, the building burst showering the street with papers and furniture. The parking lot across the street was filled with cars and all of a sudden they flattened out, like they were cutouts of sheet metal painted to look like cars. Then they started rumbling forward, stacking on top of each other. I think some people were crushed underneath these advancing stacks of shelled out cars. The rumbling stopped but people were leaving the city without looking back. My family for some reason wanted to look back. They went back into the dark and abandoned hotel where we were staying and started packing. I could hear a series of loud thunks out in the hallway and tried to get them to hurry. I looked out in the hallway. There were a small gang of skin heads, systematically kicking down the hotel room doors and looting what was inside. I finally got my family to leave just before the skinheads got to our room.

Then eventually things went back to normal. For some reason we stayed in town and didn’t head home. The hotel had comped us several nights stay. When we went back to our room, all of our belongings had been picked up, the clothing put on hangers in the closet, the items on shelves and in drawers. No maid could have been so meticulous. We decided to take a subway ride and on the subway, I hear the voice again. “At the next subway stop, don’t look.” I told my family to close their eyes no matter what happened. We were just pulling into a station. I cupped my elbow around my eyes but still peeked out every now and then, especially when the screaming started. Evidently some thing had descended to the subway platform just as the doors closed. She was dressed in flowing brown clothes from what I could tell – sort of “Stevie Nicks” if Stevie Nicks was a monster who could float and kill people just by looking at them. Yup. Everyone who looked at it directly had their heads explode. Probably eight to twelve people in the subway car I was in succumbed. The train pulled away from the station and people were still screaming and crying.

The next warning came in musical cues and in the dream I was tone deaf. I had convinced someone else about these warnings and for some reason he was able to hear them too. He was a musician and was able to translate the cues for me. There was a small mark on the floor shaped like an apple that I was supposed to touch. Then there was a patch of light shining on the wall that I was supposed to touch. I guess we did everything we had to because nothing bad happened.

We were leaving the city by train when I heard the voice again. I asked my wife if she had a mirror. She had a small slightly convex one for some reason. My plan was that if the monster showed herself again that I would reflect her image back at her and thereby destroy her. No such luck. The warning mentioned something about cola. There was a six pack of cola that we’d brought with us. I touched the cans and two of them were extremely hot and starting to swell. I could imagine them exploding like bombs sending shards of aluminum throughout the train car. I opened the train window and popped open the cans to relieve the pressure and then emptied the contents and threw away the empties. The next warning came immediately afterward, something about deep fried food. I just then realized that the train car behind us was an old fashioned caboose that had been set up as a kitchen. I stepped inside. It was like something from another time. Wooden paneling and flooring. All the appliances were cast iron – the stove, the skillets… and at the end of the caboose, a huge frying vat filled with oil. Bubbles were starting to surge up from the bottom like it was boiling hot. I turned to my daughter who has some experience in food service and asked what she’d do with used deep fryer oil. “I’d wrap it in tin foil.” I looked back at the fryer, filled with over ten gallons of scalding hot grease and realized that wouldn’t be a solution. I just had picked up the handle of the frying baskets when I woke up.

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Nightmares

Nightmare #37 – Imposter’s Picnic

(Male, middle-aged) The first part of the dream involved a picnic I was having with some people who were supposed to be my family. There was a “wife” and two “children” though these people in my dream really aren’t my actual family. We were having a picnic in the backyard of our house, which again doesn’t resemble the house I live in at all. This house was a ranch style house in a large subdivision of ranch style houses. We were having our picnic back by the very edge of our property line were there were some trees and bushes — otherwise the yard was just plain, boring green grass. The picnic was taking place at dusk if not evening.

…I didn’t belong here…

We remembered something had been left inside in the kitchen so I volunteered to get it. I wasn’t able to reach the back door –which was a sliding glass door– I wasn’t able to reach it because two immense dogs were in the way. They were white with coarse black hairs in their coats like huskies though their shoulders were probably 4 feet off the ground. They were guard dogs protecting the house from intruders and they were the only things in the dream that realized that I didn’t belong here.

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Nightmares

Nightmare #29 – Tornado Girl, Dead and Un-dead

(Female, mid-teen) This dream took place in a small town. A tornado had just ripped through the center of the town, including right through the town’s high school where it had killed almost everyone. Life was just starting to get back to normal.

..Life was just starting to get back to normal…

A mother was in her kitchen working when she looked out her back window and saw the body of a high school girl lying face down in her back yard. It had been dropped there by the tornado. The mother called the officials and let them know. There were sounds of someone coming down the stairs. It was the mother’s five year old daughter. In the dream, my perspective shifted so that I was the little girl. The mother met the girl (me) as the girl (I) came into the kitchen and tried to block the view of the back window so the girl wouldn’t see the dead high school girl back there. But I looked around the side of the mother and I saw the dead high school girl. She was standing at the back window, waving at me, smiling. She was creepy dead, bruised, broken spine, leaves in her hair, that kind of thing. I woke up in the middle of the night and was scared to look at any of the windows in my room.

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Nightmares

Nightmare #27 – Killer of Families; Family of Killers

(Male, 44) I had this dream just last night so it’s still fresh in my mind. I’m still trying to get over it. I hope it’s not too extreme.

…I hope it’s not too extreme…

The situation is that there was sort of a Manson family sort of group holed up in this house. Except it was a real family, like they had kids too but they were also murderers who would invade someone’s house and butcher them. I saw the dream from several different perspectives, all pretty much at the same time, which was also weird.

From one perspective I’m one of the SWAT team who shows up to bring this group down. There are probably a dozen of us, each with a rifle and a site — a sniper’s set up — but what’s strange is that we’re right up by the porch of the house, probably 4 feet away from the family who’s just on the other side of some windows. It seems pretty clear to me at least that we are way too close to this situation for the weapons we’re carrying. In the dream this was my first time out as a SWAT member and I was crouching low, trying to get a good clear shot but there was too much reflection off the glass for me to risk anything.

Another perspective I had was inside the room with the mother and father and their kids. They had at least two kids, a boy and a girl, both probably 5 or 6. The place was a mess. They had ransacked the whole house and brought anything that looking interesting down to the living room and put it in a big pile. Also in that pile were bloody, lifeless arms and hands of the people they killed, thoughtlessly, casually. The mother and father knew that their bloody spree was up so the each pulled out a huge hunting knife. The father killed the son, just sliced into his throat so deeply he almost cut it off. Blood went everywhere. And almost immediately, the father threw up, a bright green vomit. (Did I mention this was pretty extreme?) And almost immediately, the mother did the exact thing to the daughter and then vomited as well. Somehow the vomiting meant that the parents loved their kids and regretted having to kill them.

And the third perspective was that I was a little kid, probably 5 or 6. I don’t think I was a member of the killer family; I think I was a member of the family whose house the killer family invaded. I was hiding. I had been hiding throughout most of what was happening. At the end, I found a telephone pole in the backyard and wrapped my arms and legs around it and sort of inchwormed my way to the very top so nobody would see me and I wouldn’t get killed accidentally or on purpose by anyone. I looked out over the neighborhood. The trees were a mass of leafless twigs sort of like steel wool. The house looked much bigger than it did on the ground. I just held onto the pole and waited. Eventually everything turned brown like in an old, sepia toned photograph which somehow meant that all the killing was over and that it was time for me to come down. It was time for the funeral for my family. Someone handed me a small silver tray that had six items on it. They were supposed to represent the other members of my family who I had lost. I started crying in the dream and the items started falling off the tray. When I woke up, I was still crying.

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Nightmares

Nightmare #18 – Box Cutter Monsters

(Male, early 40’s) This nightmare sounds almost funny when I write it down but it wasn’t at the time. I had this dream around the time I was moving my mother out of her house and into a retirement-sized apartment. Box after box of things we didn’t know what to do with but that we couldn’t discard ended up at my place.

…They were sort of like large, cardboard marionettes. DANGEROUS cardboard marionettes….

In the dream, there were boxes everywhere. Plain brown corrugated cardboard boxes with no markings would appear in tall stacks, for instance up against walls, blocking doors, etc. This was one of those dreams where it feels like you’ve really woken up from another dream and now, you’re REALLY awake. So in the dream I was sitting in my bed, surrounded by stacks of boxes and I wondered if there were even boxes UNDERNEATH the bed. I was a little scared to look but then I told myself that it’s not like I was a kid and there were monsters or anything under the bed. Except that when I looked, there in fact WERE boxes under the bed and further they in fact WERE monsters. The lids of the boxes pushed back and inside were these monsters made of brown corrugated cardboard. They were sort of like large, cardboard marrionettes. DANGEROUS cardboard marrionettes. They had huge sharp teeth like triangles but the teeth actually WERE sharp, not like cardboard but more like box cutters. They started attacking me, biting at my feet and their bites drew blood. I tried to run but the doors were all blocked with stacks of boxes. Finally, I hid in the closet, all curled up. I could hear them just outside the door snapping their jaws. Weird, isn’t it?

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Nightmares

Nightmare #16 – To Grandmother’s House We Go…

(Female, 40’s) I was driving around my hometown, showing a visiting friend where I grew up. I realized that we were just a block away from the house my grandmother lived in when I was a child so I turned to go down her street. The houses were all in terrible shape, however, and I became disoriented. My grandmother’s house was just like the two on either side of it and 2 down from the only two-story house on the street. That was how I figured out which one was her former house because it looked nothing like it was supposed to.

…The house was even worse inside….

Even though the lots were not large, all of the houses has been “remodeled” but had since fallen into a state of disrepair. The walls were grey and crooked, like a western ghost town might look, but people were living there. I stood outside the house and looked, with my mouth agape. I walked up to the door and tried to look inside.

The family who lived in the house saw me and, when I explained my connection to the house, the mother invited me to come in. The house was even worse inside. There were boards leaning up against half finished walls. The house had been made larger; you could see from the rubble on the floor where the original walls had stood. My grandma’s simple 4 room house was gigantic. The new bathroom alone was half as big as the old house. But it was all so ugly and rotten looking.

When I left, my hand got caught on the door. The broken window glass tore a hole in my palm. Pressing my hand over the dripping cut, I ran outside to my car where my friend was waiting for me.

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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.

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #13 – Drowning my Shame

(Male, 30’s) I don’t know if this is exactly a nightmare, but it sure is kind of strange.

I dreamt that my wife told me that the baby she’s pregnant with isn’t mine. My wife actually IS pregnant, by the way. For some reason, this revelation made me want to kill myself.

…For some reason, this revelation made me want to kill myself….

I can’t figure out exactly WHY I had to kill myself but it seemed obvious in the context of the dream, like there was just nothing else for me to do in those circumstances. So I went out to this lake that’s by our condo and I walked out into it. And of course I floated. Even in my dream, I realized that I would float in water. And I started getting angry, angry that I couldn’t drown. I dove under the water, hoping I could make myself sink but I kept bobbing back up to the surface. Over and over. I woke up just beside myself with anger that I couldn’t drown.

I thought the dream was so weird – and kind of funny – that I woke my wife up and told it to her.

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #9 – My Brother’s Wicked Imposter

(Female, a dream from childhood) I dreamt I was in the basement of my family’s house in the laundry room. There was a big pantry cupboard and a spare kitchen set up there, and I was down there with my mom, my sister who was older, and my younger brother.

…We were trapped and we were scared…

My older brother was there too, but he was being unusually mean and cruel. He knocked my younger brother down and yelled at all of us. We were trapped and we were scared. Suddenly, my older brother walked into the room. We were startled because we thought he was already there with us. Then we realized that the other older brother was a fake.

But now my real brother had to fight this fake brother to save us. He violently attacked the fake brother and wrestled him down to the tile floor right at our feet and they thrashed around in that small space until one of them beat the other one bloody and senseless while the whole family watched.

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Nightmares

Nightmare #4 – Fire Cleaning

(Female, mid-teens) Dad was cleaning up in the kitchen but he wasn’t paying attention to what he was doing. It was like he was thinking hard about something else. He cleared the counter top basically by putting everything from the counter into the dishwasher.

….flames started shooting out…

One of the things he put in the dishwasher was the little blowtorch we have for making creme brulee. When he turned on the dishwasher, somehow the blowtorch turned itself on. It burned a hole in the door of the dishwasher and flames started shooting out. Dad didn’t seem to notice this until I started yelling. He reached in and took out the blowtorch and started to carry it outside. But he wasn’t very careful about how he held the torch and he basically lit the whole kitchen on fire as he walked out the back door. Then he closed the door and left me alone in a burning house.

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Nightmares

Nightmare #2 – Home, Wrecked

(Male, 40’s) The setting is the house where I grew up, in the late twilight when nothing has much color other than dark steel. Familiar belongings from my parent’s house were strewn around the yard, broken. My dad’s reel-to-reel tape deck was in the driveway, its tape heads ripped out. I picked it up and tried to see if I could figure out how to fix it.

….The knob would not turn. The door was locked and what’s more, I realized, that door no longer existed….

Then I began to fear for my parents, afraid of what must have happened inside the house. I went to the screen porch around back and tried the door. The knob would not turn. The door was locked and what’s more, I realized, that door no longer existed. The whole screen porch had blown down in a storm 20 years ago and was replaced by an addition. In that time, my dad had died and my mother moved away from this house. I didn’t know why I was there or when these events were occurring.

I went next door to see if the people who used to live there still did. The light inside that house was pale orange, the only color in the whole dream. I tried to knock on their door but found my hands had no substance. The daughter who lived there when I was in junior high was there, dressed for bed. She looked out the window and when she saw me, she screamed.