insanity – DailyNightmare

(Male, 50’s) This was an epic length anxiety dream which at some point turned into a full bore nightmare.

I was on vacation somewhere at a retreat center in a rural setting during off-peak season. There may have only been one or two other people there. Simple setting, plain rooms but generally quiet. Except a construction team was building a new parking lot in the back of the building on what used to be a swamp. It wasn’t going well. There was angry yelling, machinery grinding and squealing then silence. The team had discovered something that was supposed to stay buried. The subcontractors who were supposed to fill in the swamp and raise the grade to where it could get asphalt had sunken a half dozen or so 55 gallon drums into the still mucky wet soil. Water or some liquid oozed all around these drums that gave off an oily, rainbow colored sheen. The people who drank from wells fed by this swamp might all have been poisoned.

That would explain all the birth defects that had been occurring in the area… Somehow I knew that there’d been birth defects even though I was just vacationing in the area.

It was getting dark but word spread fast about the poison. Rumors spread about possible weird side effects. Not quite zombies but people out of control, like feral beasts. I decided to turn off all the lights and brave it through the night rather than be trapped out on unfamiliar dirt roads in the dark.

At some point I heard the sound of music. Next door to the retreat center where I stayed was some kind of music camp. They were practicing. I went over to warn them, in case they hadn’t heard that crazed ex-humans were on their way. It was a music camp for orchestra players roughly aged 8 or so. They played pretty well for their age, not concert quality but not painfully bad. There were less than a half dozen adults. “The children have been practicing for weeks and since martial law has been declared, we don’t know when they’ll be able to play their instruments again. We wanted to let them have one last concert before they put their instruments down, possibly forever.” I couldn’t convince them of the danger they were putting themselves in. And in fact, they convinced me to stay for the concert. There were all sorts of foods, intricate pastries and hard boiled eggs. I didn’t know when I’d get to eat again, what with the mass of crazies headed our way.

The music was pleasant enough but in the middle of the first piece, one of the adults stands up. He’s clearly gone crazy if for no other reason than he’s got a full beard — I remember thinking that in the dream! He must be crazy because he has a full beard, which is odd because I have whiskers myself– He’s foaming at the mouth and his hair is frazzled. He pulls out a gun and aims it at one of the other adults. Bam! He shoots her in the heart and she’s dead. He aims again. Bam! Another adult shot dead right through the heart. The third bullet was meant for me but I simply decided that I was not going to be shot. Time slowed greatly. I leaped from my chair, grabbed a broom handle and swatted the gun from the lunatic’s hand.

At that instant I woke up, my heart just racing.

(Female, 40’s) This dream was something like a movie set in the 16th century. Everyone was dressed in period costumes, the women wearing long heavy dresses with velvet and brocade and the men in suits. The rooms were lit with candlelight and each had a fireplace or two. The walls were stone and very tall and shadowy. The whole house was drafty and dark.

…The house belonged to a crazy uncle who was a retired general and his wife…

I had been invited to this huge, old house in the countryside to be the companion to a cousin. We were both teenage girls in a household of older people. The house itself belonged to a crazy uncle who was a retired general and his wife. With them also lived several elderly aunts, another uncle, his mother and father, and his sister, who didn’t like children. That aunt made a point of casting disapproving looks at my cousin and me on every possible occasion. If she didn’t like the way we sat at the table, the speed at which we knitted, or the amount we talked, she’d glare at us. She was frightening.

My uncle was frightening as well, in an unhinged sort of way. We were called down to supper, which was set up in the kitchen at my uncle’s insistence. Usually we ate in the dining room but tonight he wanted to sit in where he could watch the food being prepared. The cook had made, among other things, Steak Tartar. My uncle explained to the cook that he couldn’t eat Steak Tartar because it reminded him of meals in the army. Unfortunately, the cook spoke only French, so he didn’t understand my uncle nor did my uncle understand him. My uncle insisted that the dish had to be removed from the table and thrown out. The cook insisted that the food was good and that there were many other dishes on the table to eat. Finally my uncle stood up and took the dish of Steak Tartar and began the smear it all over the front of the cook’s white apron, handfuls at a time. The cook stood there, shocked. The family also sat in horror as my uncle emptied all the plates of food onto the front of the cook’s apron.

Did I mention that the house was haunted as well? In the evening, my cousin and I were in our room. The aunt that disliked us came in to scold us about something. She left the door to the room open and stood talking loudly and firmly to us. Then through the door came a very tall and wispy ghost, at least 12 feet tall. She was constantly moving, her arms and the drapes of her dress swaying like they were blowing about in a gentle breeze. Her appearance wasn’t as frightening as it was ominous. She’d come to warn us about something but we couldn’t understand what. My aunt was surprised into silence, but after the ghost disappeared, she said, “See? That is what will happen is you disobey.” But we didn’t understand what she meant by that either.