Tag: lost

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Nightmares

Nightmare #219 – Lost in the City

(Female, 40’s) I had spent the weekend with my good friend in the Big City, and now it was time to go home. I had to catch a train in 2 hours and she was leaving on a plane in 3. I guess I went to check out of the hotel. I rode down in the elevator to the lobby, which also connected to a large shopping mall. The lobby and mall were really crowded with shoppers and I had to dodge my way across the concourse. When I turned about to head back up to our room, I had no idea which way to go. All the possible paths looked the same, with shiny walkways and store windows and doorways.

“… I kept walking around, conscious of the passing time and no closer to finding my way…”

I started to wander, but I was lost. I didn’t know which way to go. I kept walking around, conscious of the passing time and no closer to finding my way. I was feeling more worried and panicky all the time. Then I found myself at an exit, and I decided I should go outside, because I’d be able to look at the building and see where the hotel tower (it was very tall– we were staying on the 18th floor) was in relation to where I was.

Outside was even more disorienting. The facade of the mall was so tall that I couldn’t see any other buildings behind it. I was surrounded by tall skyscrapers; I was standing in their shadows and I felt cold. I decided to cross the street so I could see better. I turned about to see that there were 8 lanes of traffic on the street. The corners were far away, so I just started running across, dodging traffic as I went. I still couldn’t locate the hotel. I asked someone walking by where the hotel was, and he asked which hotel. I couldn’t for the life of me remember the name of our hotel. I said, “I think it’s the Constitution.” “There’s no hotel named that.”

Then I got a text message from my friend: “Where are you?” and I wrote back, “I am lost.” She texted me again and said to come back inside. I went into a subway station and she was sitting on a bench waiting for me. She had my suitcase with her. She had packed it up for me. I sat down to double-check that all my stuff was there, but when I opened the suitcase, nothing inside looked familiar.

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Nightmares

Nightmare #206 – Lost Hospital

“…it felt like an empty warehouse: dark gray walls and very high ceiling, probably 40 feet up and filthy, not like a hospital at all…”

(Male, 40’s) I had taken my daughter to the hospital for something serious. I think it was serious and bloody like an accident. She was probably 7 or so in the dream though she’s 18 in everyday life. My wife was with me too. The doctors whisked her away to start working on her and we never saw her again. At first a nurse came and said she’d been moved to a certain ward somewhere down the hall. So my wife and I walked down this long cavernous hallway. Seriously, it felt like an empty warehouse: dark gray walls and very high ceiling, probably 40 feet up and filthy, not like a hospital at all. But at the end of it, there was the ward we were told about. By the time we got there, though evidently my daughter had been moved. A nurse very impatiently told us to follow her and she shot off though this extremely crowded ward. It wasn’t much like a hospital either. The rooms were too large, more like school class rooms. There were no actual beds, just mattresses laid so closely together that there was barely enough room to stand. The mattresses were each filled with at least one patient, sometimes two. Some of them were wrapped with bandages discolored with rust and black. Often visitors or family members stood in the small gap between the mattresses. The lights were off in the room so everything was a dim twilight. Many of the occupants were coughing like they were sick though the bandages made me think this ward was for physical trauma. Maybe they made no such distinctions in this hospital. The large grey windows were all thrown open for ventilation, I suppose and a torrential downpour of hot rain was coming down outside. The nurse we were following very deftly traversed the mattresses and crossed the room in no time while my wife and I stumbled slowly behind her. She disappeared out the door on the opposite side before we made it half way across the room.

The hallway on the other side of the room was completely different, much more like a hospital hall but not entirely. It had been painted white at least and there was the sense that there were many many rooms just like the room we’d just left, rooms crowded with patients. There was no sign of the nurse or of any hospital staff for that matter. My wife and I wandered down the hall and eventually we found an elevator. The door of the elevator was tarnished brass though the casing around it was quite fancy, filigreed. When the door opened, the elevator car was round, spherical in fact. You couldn’t stand up in it but rather had to sort of sit in it, leaning against the walls and bumping into the other passengers. At first we weren’t going to get on but the people who were already in encouraged us to come aboard. “We’ll make room” The doors closed and it became evident that no one really knew how to make it work. The “floor numbers” or the place where one would normally indicate what floor one wanted didn’t have numbers on them. And the car itself didn’t just seem to move up and down; it also rocked side to side and I think it actually moved side to side.

I don’t remember getting off the elevator but next I was in what felt like an upper floor. It was regally appointed. Brass, maybe even gold, rich red velvet, fancy rugs on polished floors. It was crawling with loud fraternity college students. They were all raucous and mostly drunk. There were different tables set up, I gathered, for different fraternities to recruit but based on their boorish behaviour, there was little difference between them. However, in the middle of this room there was a collection of fancy arm chairs. i think they’re called wing chairs because of the shape of the upholstery on the side. There was a collection of distinguished men sitting in these chairs, distinguished but not pretentious, just quietly powerful. None of the fraternity animals seemed even able to see that these gentlemen were in their presence. I walked over and spoke with one of these men. I can’t remember exactly what I said but I think I said I was looking for my daughter. The man said “Are you?”

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Nightmares

Nightmare #123 – Mad for Shoes

(Female) I’m afraid this dream won’t make any sense or that you won’t find it scary at all. It was frightening to me, the person having the dream, so I think it qualifies as a scary dream, because I felt like maybe I was losing my mind. So if it’s not a scary dream, at least it’s a weird dream.

I was meeting my best friend at a retreat centre of some sort out in the country. She was there for a meeting of some organization of which she’s a board member, and so I came to see her and spend some time with her after her sessions were done—something that we’ve actually done several times in real life. I was so very excited to get together because she lives very far away hence our real life meetings are far between.

We were staying in a little two room cabin, sort of rustic and woodsy. The place had a sort of Japanese style, with few furnishings and wooden cabinets, a very peaceful Zen atmosphere. She came into the room, and we hugged and greeted each other and talked about our lives and our families. It was so nice to see her again and so cozy in the cabin. We were going to have a good time.

…I’m afraid this dream won’t make any sense or that you won’t find it scary at all…

Then we were going to go out, I think, to dinner so we started to get ready. She got her shoes and her jacket and stepped out on to the porch to wait for me to come outside. I went to the closet where I’d left my coat and shoes, and I took my coat off a hangar and put it on. Then I slipped my foot into one of my shoes, but I couldn’t see the other one. I looked around in the closet, which was basically empty, but my shoe wasn’t there. It wasn’t like my closet a home that’s full of stuff so a shoe could be hiding under something else. No, this closet was basically empty but I still couldn’t find my other shoe. Still, I looked from one end of the long narrow closet to the other and back again, because, after all, where could my other shoe be?

Wearing just the one shoe, I limped out to the other room and threw open the closet doors there. There were shoes in the bottom of this closet, maybe a dozen, left behind by previous guests, I suppose, but my shoe wasn’t there. There were a lot of single shoes in fact which seemed like a strange situation. I rummaged around and found a shoe that would fit me, but it didn’t match my other shoe at all and it had no mate. I couldn’t go out to dinner wearing two different shoes! I was starting to panic—what was I going to do? How could I have lost a shoe in a closet?

I started back into the bedroom because I was certain my shoe was in there, but I couldn’t find the door. It was a two-room cabin– How could I get lost? How could I not find a door in a two room cabin? I could feel myself getting more and more panicked, and a blush of shame spreading across my cheeks. What was going on? Was I going insane, or was the cabin trying to confuse me? I turned around slowly, three or four times, studying each of the walls, looking for the door. Oh, there was the right door over there. I went back into the bedroom and opened the closet. There were different things objects inside the closet now, a set of folding chairs that hadn’t been there before. But still not my shoe.

My friend was outside on the deck, talking on a cellphone and waiting patiently for me. She waved at me through the window, unworried and unaware of my trauma. I turned toward the closet again and got down on my hands and knees, and systematically began to search through the almost empty closet once again. I started at one end and moved to the other, looking at each item on the floor of the closet, and then going back to the other end again. Over and over, I kept looking for my missing shoe until I woke up.

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 #28 – The Infinite Crossroads

(Female, 40’s) I have this recurring nightmare scenario that plays on a couple of my real-life obsessions. One is my sense of orientation, by which I mean knowing which way is north, and therefore east, south, and west. In my head, I place myself on a map, most of the time, and I know where I am. And the other is a sense of direction, so that I know where I want to go on that map in my head.

My recurring nightmare image is more like a backdrop than a plot. Whenever I find myself in that dreaming place, I’m filled with a sense of dis-ease. I’m at the place where two country roads intersect. There are no street signs at these four corners. The roads stretch on in all directions far as the eye can see, and farmlands and fields cover all the ground. At some junctions, there’s a house or two, but no one is home at any of them. There are no signs of life, no cars in the drives. In these dreams, I’m usually traveling, either walking or driving or occasionally riding a bike. Sometimes I’m trying to get somewhere, like to visit a relative, or get away from someone who is following me. The scariest part though is not knowing where I am or which way to go. I travel on and on but the landscape keeps repeating. There’s no way out.