“…I stood ankle deep in the dead shells and bones of these creatures. I was trapped…”
Tag: house
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Nightmare #247 – The Ghost in Blue
“…I thought she was just an apparition, an illusion…”
(Male, 30’s) In this dream, I went to a Halloween haunted house. It was rather unique because attendees arrived before dark and the house was actually built around us. There were no secrets. We watched the frame work go up, the walls, everything. It kept getting closer and closer to dark.
“…they were doing there best to be scary…”
There was a dim kind of illumination, very suitable for a haunted house. Then arms started reaching out from the walls. Very creepy, very Bergmanesque. Or at least for a moment. It was as if the arms were reaching out between the rolls of wallpaper, as if the walls themselves had disappeared. Then we were able to see who was behind the walls. All of them wore those cheesy rubber monster masks. And these masks all looked particularly ludicrous because all of these people looked like they were 5 or 6 years old. The masks flopped on their heads because they were all way too large for these kids. But they were doing their best to be scary.
But these tiny monster were getting a bit rough. Their hands were grabbing with a bit too much force, their fingers pinching. For some reason, I had a plastic tube, like a hollow baseball bat. Was it part of my costume or something? I gently hit a couple of these grabbing hands. Before I knew it, the little creatures were pushing between the tattered sheets that once were walls. They kept pressing in, more and more of them.I tried to keep them at bay with the plastic bat but soon they had knocked me down. It wasn’t that their flaying arms were particularly forceful or that the blows were painful. Rather it was more a problem that I was becoming crushed, suffocated by the weight of their bodies. More and more of them. Eventually, I woke up.
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NIghtmare #216 – Haunted Panther
“… if the folks there didn’t like you, you just might disappear….”
(Male, 50’s) I had a nightmare last night that was really unnerving in addition to having a couple really scary moments. I was riding around with my Dad. My Dad has been dead incidentally for a good 20 years. We were trying to get an old radio or something that belonged to him from someone in this dangerously small town. It was dangerously small because there was a real sense that if the folks there didn’t like you, you just might disappear. Like the gasoline in our car seemed to disappear, like it had been siphoned away and there of course were no gas stations in this town. And the vehicle we were driving kept getting parked in. You know, there would be someone parked at either end of it so we couldn’t get out. We ended up taking the radio which was immense. It was easily three foot by three foot by four foot tall. We strapped the radio on top of a scooter / three wheel motorcycle thing and headed out of town. I was riding on TOP on the radio. I told Dad that I really hoped he wasn’t planning on driving on any expressways. Even when we turned corners on the side streets, we’ve leaned like we were going to tip over. There were some scary moments on that ride. I just had to relax and hold on.
We drove through this industrial wasteland, factories that were shut down and rusting. Windows grey and smashed out. It was an urban hell. Finally we arrived at my grandmother’s house. My grandmother also has been dead for upwards of 30 years. She did used to live in a pretty run down and decrepit part of an urban factory town. In the dream she was dead but her house still lived on, so to speak. It was much larger than I remembered it and I mean the ceilings of the rooms were easily twenty foot tall. It was still filled with furniture. I asked Dad what he had wanted with the radio for, why we had to go to all that effort to retrieve something that we was just going to deliver to a house where no body lives. He didn’t reply at all and that was strange because in life at least he was a rather talkative person. I could tell that this was something big but hard to put into words, something like honor or the “principle of the thing.”
“…It moved silently so it would sometimes just walk into the room on those silent, deadly cat feet and it would start tracking….”
The scariest parts of the dream happened inside Grandmother’s house because it was haunted not by a ghost but by a panther. The panther was large, half way between the size of a real panther and a velociraptor. It only seemed to be able to see movement and even that movement it could see best from the corner of its eyes. The beast was also almost entirely deaf. It moved very quietly so it would sometimes just walk into the room on those silent, deadly cat feet and it would start tracking. Once it was right on top of me snuffling at the soft inner parts of my throat. One bite and I would have died immediately in a spray of blood. I threw something and distracted it enough that the creature moved away. It also got very interested in an empty plastic bag that was being blown around by the wind. Another time though this blood thirsty monster came up right between my legs and started to sniff at my crotch. It growled low. I figured that I could probably survive if the monster bit off my penis if I didn’t bleed to death before help could arrive. –where was the nearest hospital in the urban wasteland?– but all things being equal, I would rather keep all my parts attached. When it wandered away, I yelled at my Dad. “Why is that thing still here? Why didn’t you call a professional exterminator or something to get rid of it?” Again, Dad was silent like I was missing some very obvious point.
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Nightmare #214 – Not A Very Safe Haven
(Male, 40’s) This started off a much more normal dream but became a nightmare around this point. I had just exited a cottage, like a Hansel and Gretel kind of cottage, but it was on a suburban street of suburban style houses. All those houses though were empty and dark. Abandoned. It was evening, the last part of evening before things become totally dark, before it’s night. There was a woman there with me who had long blond hair. She stood facing the street like she was on guard watching for something.
“…They are more powerful than you can imagine…”
There was another woman, powerfully attractive, with long black hair. She stepped up to me, so close to me our bodies over lapped. It’s hard to describe but it felt like she was standing in the exact spot where my feet were standing. There was no point to embracing each other with our arms because we were already as close as we could possibly be. The woman with the black hair whispered in my ear. “Don’t be afraid of the wolves.” I looked down and a dozen wolves ran by us in slow motion. Some of them were real, flesh and blood wolves but others were the merest suggestions of wolves, like a wolf-shaped cloud or a wolf-shaped mist. The woman said “They are more powerful than you can imagine. They are always all around us. In the middle ages, astrologers thought it was the movement of the stars that determined our actions when really it is the movement of the wolves.” Despite what she’d told me, I was terrified of the wolves.
Just then the blond haired woman alerted us that she had seen something. When the black haired woman moved away from me, I found it hard to breath. We all retreated into the cottage. I was the last to enter and as I closed the door, I heard a gun fire many times. The bullets came toward me in slow motion and I was able to watch them and I knew they would miss. I watched them spinning in the air. Except they weren’t bullets; they were golden screws. Five of them. I watched them impact the door jam and slowly screw themselves deep into the dark wood. They were clustered tightly together, like a shotgun blast. I closed the door and I woke up
(Male, early 30’s) When I was just a little kid, I went through a period where I sleepwalked and this was one of the really intense dreams I remember from that time. My house was surrounded by trolls, monsters with knobby faces and weird tufts of hair. And if that wasn’t strange enough, these trolls were all very vivid colors, like day-glow fluorescent type colors of green and pink and yellow. They completely surrounded the house and then they started throwing things at me. It was fruit. I was being pelted my fruit thrown by trolls. They threw so much fruit that the house was starting to fill up. I thought I should warn my parents. I ran into their bedroom and tried to explain about the day glow trolls and fruit but in fact, I was just sleepwalking. My mom threw a glass of water on me to wake me up.
(Male, early 30’s) I was in a house but not my house in the living room, sitting in a comfortable chair, relaxing. Then I realized that several objects in the room — lamps, books, that kind of thing — were gently floating and moving slowly around the room. At first I thought this was pretty cool and I sat back and enjoyed it but then I realized that each of these objects was held by a ghost who was carrying it around. I should tell you that I’m terrified of ghosts and, this is going to sound funny, but it goes back to when I first saw “Ghostbusters” as a kid. So in the dream, I’m sitting there surrounded by ghosts. But then I realize that the ghosts are moving this stuff around just to mess with me and I start to get mad. I pick things up and throw them at the ghosts, which of course go right through the ghosts. Then I got out of the chair and started to fight with the ghosts using my fists. This was about as useless as throwing things at them except now the ghosts all ganged up on me. I felt the sensation of two strong hand grasping my ankles. I was knocked to the floor and then the ghosts started swinging me around and around, holding on to my ankles. When I woke up I still felt dizzy. I woke up my wife and told her the dream and she said I was crazy.
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Nightmare #92 – Gotcha!
This wasn’t a nightmare like the other one on your site but it still gave me a fright.
I just laid down the other afternoon to take a little nap. I mean that’s what weekends are for, right? I started to dream about my kitchen about walking along past the cupboards when all of a sudden a black cat jumps out from nowhere with claws fully extended and it slashes me across the back of both my calves. I literally yelled out loud so forcefully that it woke me up.
After that I wasn’t in the mood so much for a nap!
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Nightmare #81 – Ghost + Cat
I was in someone else’s house, a bright modern style house, on the second story in the bedroom the owners were letting me stay in. I became aware of the fact, somehow, that there was ghost lurking behind this small, gold painted door in the wall. The door was probably no bigger than 9″ or 10″ but it opened up into another full-sized room. I couldn’t resist opening the door and taking a peek. That’s how I learned both about the ghost and the full-sized room. I quickly closed the door and said some kind of prayer that God would keep the ghost on the other side of the door. It made perfect sense in the dream.
But then I realized that the family’s housecat had snuck into the room while I had the door open. I had to come up with a way to open the door, lure the cat out and keep the ghost locked away. At that point the dream became less a nightmare and more an anxiety dream, one verging on slapstick.
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Nightmare #40 – Demonic Garage
(Male) This is going to sound funny I’m sure as I tell it but as a dream it was pretty intense. I was going out to the garage of my parent’s house. Which is strange in itself because they haven’t lived in this particular house for probably 15 years but it was the place where I grew up. I opened the big garage door and I was rather amazed that the place was, relatively speaking, pretty clean and tidy. There were still all sorts of strange things hanging from hooks on the walls and there were boxes stacked on top of each other off to the side. But there was clearly enough room to get a car in there and that was definitely not the normal condition of the place.
I mean, you could have gotten a car in there except that set up right in the middle of the garage was a ping pong table. I stepped inside to investigate but it was extremely dark inside. Luckily there were probably a half dozen bare light bulbs hanging down over the table. I yanked on their pull cords one by one and they each turn on but each bulb is really dim and doesn’t illuminate much. It almost seems darker with the lights turned on than when they were off. I stepped outside the garage to find someone to play ping pong with and when I step back in, all the lights are off. I tried pulling the cords again and they were all dead, all burned out. And at that point I’m standing right inside this entirely pitch black space looking out at the dark grey twilight of the big garage door and I hear, behind me, all around me, this low rumbling growl. It feels sort of like I’ve stepped into the mouth of some enormous monster thinking it was a cave. I realize in a flash – and this didn’t seem that strange within the dream, oddly enough – “Oh, the old garage must be possessed.” Not haunted but possessed for some reason. So I get down on my knees and start performing, get this, an exorcism ritual – like I’d know how to do one of those, right? – And in the dream, I’ve got this really commanding and authoritative voice. And I somehow know exactly what to say. The garage starts to shake around me, dust and leaves falling on me from the rafters but I keep concentrating, keep talking and then suddenly a great surging wind gathers up around me and blows out the garage door. That’s when I woke up so I never did get to play ping pong.
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Nightmare #36 – Stuck in Time
(Female, early 50’s) I had this really weird dream where I was a newspaper reporter and also about 25 years younger. I was sent on an assignment to this large mansion out in the country, and I was to interview someone who lived there. I drove far out of the city, in a vacation area in the mountains with hotels and cottages all around– a place that had been popular long ago. I knocked on the door and waited a long while before someone came. It was a very old woman. Evidently she was the person I had come to interview. I followed her up three flights of stairs to a small room. It was barely large enough to hold a single bed and a nightstand. Everything in the room was old and faded and dusty. Even though this was a huge mansion, this was the only room of it that was hers. I didn’t quite understand.
I asked her lots of questions, trying to figure out her story. I discovered that she had been living there for more than 50 years. She’d had a summer job when she was young, and something happened and she could never leave. “I’m 75 years old now,” she said, “and when the phone rings, I have to go down 3 flights of stairs to tell him.”
Who?
The “him” turned out to be some boy she had an affair with that summer. Now he owned the hotel. Why did she stay here? What reason did he have for keeping her around or did she have for not leaving? Who was punishing whom? I couldn’t get her to answer those questions directly.
Another strange thing was that there was no phone in her room. Where did she answer these phone calls for “him?”
When the old woman was tired of answering questions she pulled up the window shade and revealed this huge beautiful green golf course he’d built. “That’s all new. It’s his too. But I’ve never been there.”
I couldn’t figure out how she got stuck there, like she was stuck in time and unable to change.
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Nightmare #32 – Appliances Amok
(Female, early 20’s) I was visiting a friend, an actual person I knew in high school but I guess we were supposed to be friends now. We were at her place and we decided to watch TV. After a little while, cockroaches started to pour out of the TV. She apologized saying that usually the place is pretty clean.
There was also this guy there who was never really introduced to me. He was in the bathroom and he dropped something. Before it could hit the ground, the toilet sucked had sucked it up and swallowed it. The guy was confused but he stood a little too close to the toilet for a little too long and then HE was sucked down the toilet too. All of him. Gone.
About that time we realized that all the appliances in the apartment were going on a rampage. The computer printer for instance had slices of meat feeding into it like a paper shredder, only they weren’t coming out the other side. It was devouring them. We noticed many little objects gone, presumably swallowed by the appliances. My friend said “Gather up your valuables and let’s get out of here.” So I started looking for my jewelry – like I have jewelry – and I say “I can’t find my engagement ring.” And my friend says “I didn’t know you were engaged.” And I said “I’m not, but I’m engaged to be engaged.” And my friend said “And you’ve got a ring for that?” And I said “I guess I don’t.” So then we started running down the street away from this apartment.
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Nightmare #26 – Monstrous Bees
(Male, mid-40’s) This dream was like a movie, a post-apocalyptic / giant monster movie. I was one of a handful of survivors. We were all more or less trapped inside this one house. It was a relatively large house but still there were probably about a dozen of us. And for some reason, everyone — at least everyone other than me was stupid, doing things that were incredibly dangerous considering our situation. I suppose that’s a lot like a movie too.
The dream took place in the near future where bees had taken over the world at least all of it we could see. And by bees I mean bees that had probably 4 foot wingspan and were intelligent. The bees were able somehow to plant crops. They had planted every square inch of soil for miles around this house with sun flowers. The sunflowers grew right up to the walls of the house, right beside the road and the sidewalk. They were every where. Miles and miles of bright yellow flowers. But the sunflowers short and weren’t tall enough to hide humans if we went outside. And of course everyone wanted to go outside.
For some reason, our big project was to try to scoop up some of these sunflowers and bring them inside and get them to grow in the bathtub. (Did I mention that everyone seemed stupid? I thought this was a stupid goal even in the dream but I wasn’t able to convince anyone of that.) One guy went outside and tried carrying in a sunflower, which seems to be very fragile which meant you had to move very slowly, and of course he was attacked and stung to death.
I awoke as we were organizing a party, including lookouts to keep watching the skies.
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Nightmare #20 – Scraping, scratching
(Male, 40’s) I was alone in the house. It was dark and I was watching TV in the living room. The layout of our house is that there’s a living room at the front of the house then an archway leading to a dining room and a doorway leading to the kitchen. All three rooms are in a row so you could see into the kitchen from the living room. The dining room and kitchen were dark, probably the only light on was coming from the TV. I started hearing scratching coming from the kitchen. Just every now and then. I knew that there was no one else there, no people, no pets. I ignored the sound. Then the sound got more regular, a scraping, scratching sound. Still I watched TV. Eventually the sound turned into a constant scraping and I looked and squinted and tried to see what was going on.
There were branches slowly being pushed into the kitchen from just beyond my line of sight. There were branches, and paper and trash. Something was pushing all of this stuff slowly into the kitchen. I didn’t want to go back there and confront it directly but I wanted to know what was going on so I went out the front door. I switched on the light and looked down the side of the house. I couldn’t see what was pushing the stuff inside but there was a huge white wolf. Gleaming white. Larger than a Labrador. It bared its teeth at me and snarled silently, menacingly. I tried to move, whether to get away or investigate I don’t know but every move I made, the wolf countered and continued to threaten.
(Male, early thirties) This recurrent dream has changed somewhat over the years. The first time I must have been just starting high school. A ghostly old woman appeared floating outside my second story bedroom window pushing a ghostly baby carriage. She looked in the window at me and said, “I’ve come for you.”
I ran away from her and she followed, screaming at me. In this dream, it’s this chase that is repeated. She chases me through houses that I’ve never lived in, decrepit old gothic mansions, filled will scattered debris and coated in dust.
Then at some point, I turned the dream around and I fired a silver gun at the ghostly woman. Now, I’m the one who’s chasing her. All the while I’m trying to scream at her but even though I open my mouth wide and push with all my might, no sound comes out.
“Underground Railroad Tunnel Door” by Docspond – Investigating tunnels in Salem, Ma.
Previously published: Salem Secret Underground:The History of the Tunnels in the City. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
(Male, recurrent dream since childhood) It starts with a Staircase, usually leading downward but at least once the Staircase lead up. Usually but not always the Staircase is hidden behind a secret passage.
The Staircase goes on and on ’til it ends at the Door.
One time, the Staircase was at my Grandmother’s house and I discovered it with my identical cousin (someone who incidentally doesn’t exist in waking reality) We chased each other down the stairs, flight after flight, laughing until we found the Door.
Another time the Staircase lead to a small room, a bombshelter done up like a swanky 50’s-style cocktail lounge – one with cinderblock walls and an extra low ceiling. The Door in this instance was round.
When I open the Door, as I always do, I am confronted with opaque black, a dead silence. There is the sense of space but it is a blank space, an empty void.
Once the Staircase lead upward and the doorway looked like it would lead to an attic. When I opened it with the pull cord, there was that sickening emptiness again. But as I stared at it, a tiny black spider emerged, suspended on a thin black web. That was almost worse because something from the dimensionless void “over there” was coming “over here.”
When I’m confronted with that dimensionless void I can’t go backward or close the door, but I can’t go forward either.