Tag: monsters

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"What We Fear" Other Haunts

Japan’s Mummified Monsters

You’re probably thinking something along the line of Gojira-jerky or freeze-dried Gamera but these little darlings, found over at Pinktentacle.com are 10,000 times cooler.

Monster Mummies of Japan

Those familiar with cryptozoological frauds like the fiji-mermaid know the drill. Many of these wonders are fabricated from various parts of various critters. Others have a more obscure provenance and some, like the “living mummy” tradition of certain monastic orders are even weirder. All in all this is a post you’ve got to read — though it left me feeling oddly thirsty.

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Nightmares

Nightmare #196 – Monster Hide, Monster Seek

(Male, 40’s) I wrenched my back the other day shoveling snow so I had the worst night of sleep ever. Every time I rolled over, the pain woke me up and as it happened, I always seemed to be in the middle of nightmare.

One of the nightmares involved a game, sort of. There were at least a couple dozen of us, all adults who were playing hide and seek. Sort of. There was a cluster of little buildings, like cottages, I guess, tiny one or two room living spaces with white cotton curtains on the windows. It was night time, fully dark and it seemed like summer, at least there wasn’t snow on the ground. Some of the people were monsters. I would almost call them zombies but they didn’t move particularly slow or strangely. But if they grabbed you, you died. The people who were hiding were very scared. There was a woman with very white blond hair who was particularly scared. She couldn’t seem to move even though it was not a good strategy to stay in one place. I stayed away from the monsters for most of the night. I was trying to make it over to a nearby barn that had a tall concrete silo. For some reason, I thought I’d be safe there. As I crawled out of a window, I was spotted simultaneously by three monsters. I said “Aha, I still have three bullets left.” I made my hand into the shape of a gun (?) and fired at each of the monsters (??) Each one of them stopped and looked down at their chest to see if I had really shot them. They were starting to realize that it was all just a big bluff when I woke up.

Another dream also seemed to involve a barn though in stead of a hay mow, it had bookshelves, like a library with a huge gambrel roof. There was a dragon who was devouring the nearby town. Like in the last dream, I was trying to hide though it seemed easier to hide from a dragon than human sized monsters. Just when I thought I was perfectly safe, the dragon smashed through the stained glass windows … didn’t I mention? The “barn” also had huge stained glass windows like a medieval monastery or something… The dragon smashed through the window and spoke to me and the other people who were hiding with me. Someone yelled “Don’t run. He’ll have to kill you if you run.” as if it was part of the dragon’s code of honor, or something. I didn’t run but I also didn’t jump out of my hiding place either. The dragon was clearly going to burn down the barn if we didn’t surrender to be eaten. I decided to take my chances in the fire when I woke up.

There was another nightmare in there too, I think about a ghost but I can’t remember it very well.

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Nightmares

Nightmare #192 – Too Curious in the Museum

(Male 20’s) I was in a museum that had living exhibits as well as skeletons and stuffed models. What was weird right off was that I didn’t recognize many of the creatures. It wasn’t just that there was, say, a strangely colored bird but rather there were things that I couldn’t tell was a bird or a… well, I couldn’t tell what they were.

In one of the cages, and by cage I mean in this case a room the size of a ballroom with glass walls probably thirty feet high, there was a “Snape.” Yes, yes, laugh all you want. I realized the Harry Potter reference when I woke up too. But the creature here was maybe thirty five feet long, covered with dappled light and dark green fur — yup, FUR — and a head that looked a bit like a blunt hammer and a bit like a boot. It may have had very thin wiry black legs too but it was hard to see as it moved through the jungle undergrowth of its cage. I was extremely curious to see this creature closer so I pushed up against the glass so hard that some how I pushed my way through the glass. I was inside the cage. A great consternation arose in the crowd outside since the snape was extremely dangerous. Once it started to devour you, there was no escape from a very painful process that lasted for hours and hours. They were organizing some kind of rescue plan for me. All I had to do was stay alive and stay away from the snape until help could arrive. But I wanted to see the snape better. I could hear it circling around me. Once I got a very good view of it as it climbed along the glass wall but it ran away with great speed. I suspected that I was done for.

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Nightmares

Nightmare # 186 – The Metal Barn

(Male, 30’s) I was showing my wife the farm I grew up on as a child. Everything was changed, weird. We had gotten to the barn. It used to be wood with a concrete floor, a normal barn. But in the dream, it was metal. Rusted dirty metal. Thick pieces bolted together. We walked down the aisle where the cows used to be penned in, where I used to have to feed them while they were getting milked. It was all dark gray. It seems like even the floor was metal. The rafters and ceiling too. Cold metal. We got to the place that used to be where we stored the “chop” – ground up corn and oats, I think. I used to give the cows one section of a bale of hay and half a shovel of chop. But where the chop used to be kept in this open bin, in the nightmare, there was a rusted metal door with a dead bolt lock. I had a big keyring full of keys in my pocket. These were MY keys too, not like I’d borrowed them from someone. My house keys and car keys were on the ring too. For some reason I had to show her what was in there. But also I had to find out myself. I got out the right key but it kept slipping in the lock, like I had to turn the key just right to get it to “catch” onto the locking mechanism. But I eventually got the door unlocked and open and we went inside. It was the same space, probably six foot by twelve foot with a bin built into the side. But everything was metal. A gray metal that was splashed and dirty almost like it had patterns of rot on it. Everything felt so filthy. But really, there was nothing there. We turned to leave and discovered the door had closed behind us. It was locked. There was another keyhole on this side as well. I put my key in the lock and fished it around trying to catch onto the locking mechanism. It didn’t work. Then the door was pulled out of my hands. Some one was opening it from the other side. I felt relieved for an instant until I saw the hand that grabbed onto the door. It was pale and rubbery and it seemed to have too many fingers. I stepped through the doorway since I didn’t want to be trapped and from around the edge of the door there appeared this scary looking figure. I don’t know if it was a man or a woman or whether, really if it was even human. It had a rubbery face with droopy long nose and cheekbones and it wore a black hood. It was one of those instances where I didn’t know if it was someone wearing a Hallowe’en mask and jumping out to scare us or whether this was something that was really dangerous and I should be trying to protect my wife. It was certainly shocking.

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"What We Fear" Movies

Movies: Mist Monsters!

Lovely work here. These are clips of a sea monster projected on water mist. Very, very effective even with Youtube video quality. Sony created the beast to promote the movie “Water Horse: Legend of the Deep” though honestly, to my eyes, the promotion looks WA-A-Y cooler than the movie. Am I the only one who things something like this should have been done for “Cloverfield?”

Mist Monster in Tokyo Harbor

Tokyo News Report on the Mist Monster

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Nightmares

Nightmare #173 – Scheming Aliens and a Giant Monster

(Male, 30’s) I’m embarrassed to tell you this one because it’s so over the top grade-B horror movie but in this dream the Earth had been visited by aliens. Nothing scary at all about the aliens. They were were about three feet tall, greenish, humanoid and wore these big oval hats. They were like the perfect 1950’s era alien. These aliens were very friendly. They’d watched our TV and listened to our radio for decades and instead of talking to presidents and prime ministers they just wanted to be on Oprah. And they were. The aliens were the talk of the town all around the world. They were on the front cover of People Magazine, even though of course they weren’t “people” at all in the strictest sense. Everyone loved ’em.

But of course that was all a diversion. While everyone was paying attention to what nightclub the aliens preferred, there were other aliens who were assembling a giant monster. Each one of the fleet of alien spaceships had carried a different part of this huge monster. Evidently I was the only person to discover this fact. When the dream got scary, I was about 20 feet from one of their space ships. It was a classic “flying saucer” shape, by the way, metallic silver. I don’t know what I was doing there, probably trying to get an autograph or something stupid. There was a large gangway extending out from the saucer. One of the alien started walking very slowly down the gangway. It was leading something on a tether. Gradually more and more of the thing was revealed. It was an immense hand that was “walking” by its fingers dragging its palm and wrist behind it. The hand was shaggy, covered with some kind of dark greenish-brown fur — it might have been moss. Their plan became clear to me. The aliens were going to assemble this monster, maybe breed a whole army of them and take over the world. I had to warn someone but I was standing just a little way from the spaceship, there was an alien standing right there looking straight at me and it had with it the power to crush me utterly.

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Art papercraft

Papercraft – Slick Vampires and Monster Portraits

\"Medusa\" by Etsy artist Goobeetsa

I thought my eyes were wrung out and weary of smooth, digital illustration but perhaps I was only irritated that so much of it fixates on happy-puppy subject matter. Check out these pieces by Etsy.com artist Goobeetsa. The Medusa is my favorite of the “Spooky” portraits but my heart truly belongs to the Dracula paper puppets. Hours of fun on a rainy afternoon, I tell ya. And reasonably priced.

Dracula puppets by Etsy.com artist Goobeetsa
Dracula puppets by Etsy.com artist Goobeetsa
Categories
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 #150 – “Men of a Wolfish Nature”

(Male, 30’s) My wife and I were walking into from town and we passed a tent that was set up as a vegetable stand. The canvas of the tent was printed with broad stripes, I forget what color and there were wooden crates filled to the top with odd fruits and vegetables both inside and outside of the tent. The inside of the tent seemed much larger than it could possibly have been by looking at it from the outside. There were also strange items on shelves, things that looked magical if not just new age-y like a porcelain wall-hanging that depicted something about a woman’s anatomy, perhaps the stages of development during pregnancy, perhaps some strange phrenology diagram. There was a man and a woman who tended the stand both of whom were very friendly but the man did all the talking. There was another person there who was just finishing up her shopping. The man took a 5 x 7 framed photo off the tent wall. It was a picture of a woods, a totally non-descript area of undergrowth and saplings. He explained, “There’s a place where the old Dexter Road splits. Down the wrong path is where men of a wolfish nature congregate.” I nodded like I thought I knew what he was talking about. My wife accidentally dropped something that was like a tiny porcelain bell. It rang but it didn’t break. The shop keepers didn’t seem to mind. The man was cutting into an onion, a strange onion because instead of a papery brown exterior, this had a thick mottled purple husk like the skin of a citrus fruit. He held out a sample to me balanced on the edge of his knife. The onion was sweet, onion-y but sweeter than any onion I’d ever tasted. We thanked them and went on our way to town.

When we returned from town, I wanted to buy some of those remarkable onions but we found the tent completely abandoned. The flaps of the tent were blowing in the wind and the wind chimes were sounding insanely. It had started to get dark and quite cold so we decided to drive the last part of the way home (? I know that part doesn’t make sense. Like we just had our car in our back pocket or something?) But we got a little bit lost. We were driving down a dirt road that had been torn up quite badly so we couldn’t go very fast. What was strange was that houses had been built right up to the very edge of this dirt road on both sides. There wasn’t room for a drainage ditch, let alone a front yard. The road was only wide enough to go in one direction. Then we came to the end of the road. The road dead-ended at a small woods, similar to the one in the photo. No one could tell whether it actually WAS the woods in the picture because everything was so dark by this point. I say everyone because by now there were several people in the car with us. The car had also shrunk to the point that I sat in the passenger’s seat and had to have the door open, with one leg dangling outside just to have enough room for everyone.

We started back and soon we knew that THIS was the fork of the road that the man had told us about. The houses were strange shacks and the road — maybe we have to call it a path at this point — snaked up and around the houses, back and forth, very VERY close to them. We had to get out and close the doors on some houses so we could drive past. The final section of the path actually drove THROUGH someone’s living room. We talked about what we should do but we decided we had to go through. Once we cleared the house, we got back up to speed and tried to drive as quickly as we could. Then someone said “If that was the wrong path, where were the men with wolfish nature?” Just then we felt something heavy land on the roof of the car, something that started scraping with nails hard enough to shred metal. I was scared but not for myself. For some reason, I knew that the onion the vegetable man had fed me would protect me, that it was wolfsbane or something. But I was the only person who’d eaten it. Everyone else in the car was doomed.

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #131 – Finger Torture

(Female, teenage) In this nightmare, I was one of several people who were being held hostage and tortured by this evil creature that strangely enough looked like Sarah Michelle Geller, you know, Buffy? She was holding us hostage in this town house surrounded by other houses. We could see other people living their lives and having fun next door and they probably would have been able to notice that we were being tortured if they stopped to look closely enough. Someone next door saw me through the window and waved. I waved back and I dared to walk up to the window and I talked to this person through the window. Then the Sarah Michelle Geller-creature noticed me and came over. She threw a hand-grenade out the window at the family I was talking with. It was some strange kind of hand grenade that only blew up the people and left everything else standing. Once they were killed, the Creature moved us all next door into their house.

…I was one of several people who were being held hostage and tortured by this evil creature that strangely enough looked like Sarah Michelle Geller..

There was a pool in this area. One of the people who was trapped with us was a little girl. She jumped in the pool and started splashing around. All of a sudden a dog, like a terrier, came up out of the water and started pulling her underneath. We all rushed over to try to pull her out but the harder we pulled, the larger the dog grew. It eventually became as large as a bear. It tore her apart and pulled her under. We yelled at the SMG-creature, why did you do that? “Because she was having fun.”

There was a bowl and for some reason I thought that if I could fill this bowl with water from the pool, I would be free. So I started walking over to the pool, dipping my hands in to get them wet and then walking back to the bowl and shaking the excess water off into the bowl. All without drawing attention to the fact that was what I was doing. But one time, when I returned to the bowl, the sides of the bowl had grown incredibly tall, far taller than me. I sat down, depressed. Then I looked down at my hands and I saw that my index finger had been chopped off, raggedly, at an angle. It was bleeding but it didn’t seem to hurt. The creature laughed, “You won’t be able to fill up the bowl now.” She was holding a metal spatula, like the kind you use on an outside grill. It must have been especially sharpened or something. Then one by one she cut off all my fingers. There was nothing I could do to stop her.

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #128 – Aliens in Quarantine

(Female, early 30’s) I remember this dream from when I was a child. I must have just seen the movie “E.T.” which is a charming movie except for the part at the end where E.T. has been captured and is in quarantine. He seemed so sad and in such distress. My dream takes off from there. The wall paper in my childhood bedroom was covered in tiny dolls, each probably 3 or 4 inches tall. In my dream, each one of them was a space alien, a space alien as cute and vulnerable as E.T. The walls themselves were transformed into some kind of quarantine for the cute little space aliens. I tried to close my eyes so I didn’t have to see them anymore and it felt like there was a little alien floating over both of my eyes.

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #127 – My Chest Erupted in Terror

(Male, early 30’s)

…It’s almost like something has burrowed inside my pajama top, looking for someplace warm…

This is a dream I remember from when I was a kid and I went through a period of sleepwalking. In the dream, I’m lying down in bed, trying to get to sleep when I feel something on my chest. At this point it’s not in my chest yet, just on the surface, just on the skin. It’s almost like something has burrowed inside my pajama top, looking for someplace warm. Then all of a sudden, this something tears through my pajamas and pops out. Then I realize that it actually came OUT of my chest. And then another one crawled out. And another one. I jumped out of bed and ran to tell my parents, yelling “There are babies coming out of my tum-tum!” But in fact I was just sleepwalking. My mother threw a glass of water in my face — the family treatment for sleepwalking — and I woke up.

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Nightmares

Nightmare #125 – Attack of the Dayglow Trolls

(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.

Categories
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.

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 #85 – Zombie Farm

(Male) I was at a farm, along with an aunt and uncle of mine and a whole family of people from the neighborhood where I grew up. In the dream, they had just been featured on a television commercial for fast food tacos. For some reason we didn’t stay in the farmhouse but rather in the barn, and mostly in the cement silo. A spiral walkway had been rigged around the outside to allow us access to the living spaces higher up in the silo. When we left the silo, we were always looking over our shoulders, being careful of our surroundings. I walked through the farm yard with my aunt and uncle. My uncle showed me a new harrow he had bought. It looked exactly like his old harrow, which also looked like a toy I had had as a child.

…The area was over-run with zombies, but a kind I’d never exactly seen before…

The reason why we were so conscious of what went on around us, of course, were the zombies. The area was over-run with zombies, but a kind I’d never exactly seen before. They were gray and wrinkly like a prune from top to bottom. When they moved, clouds of dusty dirt flaked off them, like dustbowl golems. They didn’t seem much like animated corpses, though they were humanoid and extremely slow moving. However, the zombies were very powerful and it was impossible to get away if one caught you. The one fact we had in our favor was that the zombies weren’t able to climb, not stairs or ladders or even up the spiral ramp around the side of our silo. We were safe as long as we stayed on the second story. However, we had to keep the zombie population under control like they were an agricultural pest or something.

It was night. I was downstairs in the barn, around the stalls where we once kept cattle. I didn’t see the zombie until I had almost walked into it. He growled, low, deep, elemental. Before I knew it, there was another one behind me. I started to panic but I got out the handgun I carried in the dream and I shot both zombies. The first one collapsed into a pile of gray sand at least a yard high. The second one kept moving. Suddenly, I became aware of other zombies all around me. If I kept my head and kept moving I could likely get around them all. I started running and just as I cleared the barn, my foot slipped. I woke up.

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #57 – Deformed Mermaid

(Male) This isn’t so much a dream because I can’t remember the whole dream but just one image:

Everything was deep blue and grey, like a foggy day on the ocean. There were long swirls of kelp that were a dark blue-green. And swimming among the waves and the kelp was a mermaid, a half fish – half woman with long flowing black hair that glistened from the water. She pulled herself out of the water to rest for a moment. The Mermaid didn’t seem to know I was there or perhaps she didn’t care. I was so close I could reach out and touch her shoulder but I didn’t want to startle her so I called out to her gently. She turned her head and I could see that she had no face. Literally, everything between her chin and her forehead was gone, even the bone was missing. It looked like a shark or something had taken a bite out of the front of her head. The front of her teeth were missing, revealing a gaping throat; there were empty socket that might have been where her eyes were or perhaps they were the sinus cavities behind her eyes. The Mermaid wasn’t bleeding or in any obvious pain but I couldn’t imagine how she could still be alive after such trauma.

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!

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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.

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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.