TV – DailyNightmare

(Male, 40’s) I was watching a DVD of a television show. Actually I was trying to watch a DVD of a television show, some kind of situation comedy or something, but the disc kept skipping. In real life my DVD player often skips or stops playing all together but this DVD kept skipping from this brightly lit sit-com stage to this really dark footage that was clearly out of place with the TV show. The TV isn’t hooked up to cable so it’s not coming from there. It must be somewhere hidden on the disc. The footage is a medium shot of a human form wrapped head to toe in dark grey burlap and then bound with thick ropes. The person is still alive because they’re flailing, slapping the concrete floor like a dolphin on dry land. And another thing is that the burlap is soaking wet. It’s shiny and it makes a slapping sound as the figure moves. For some reason, I know enough of the story line to know that this person has just been pulled out of a torpedo tube, “rescued” into the submarine… but then again no one seems in much of a hurry to undo the ropes and unwind the burlap. Some rescue. There’s no one in the footage though, just this figure struggling alone. The image will fuzz in and out to the sit com with a lot of static. This footage interrupts the sit-com so much it’s really starting to disturb me so I get up and I take the disc out so I can clean it, maybe make it go away. The disc itself is deformed, like it had been melted and then smeared down a plate or something. I don’t even know how it could have fit in the DVD tray.

(Male, 44) This may not sound too scary but the mood woke me up from a dead sleep.

I was sprawled out on the floor of my living room watching TV, which is strange in itself because I haven’t had a TV in years and I was playing with my pet cat which is also strange because I haven’t had a cat in, well, decades. If it matters, though the living room looks exactly like it does now.

On TV was an episode of the X-Files. Scully was walking across a pitch black courtyard with another woman. The other woman had blond hair if it matters. They were looking for Mulder but had no leads. The two women were having that typical X-files conversation about science vs. intuition, except the blond woman was a psychic, far more extreme and out there than Mulder ever was. She kept mentioning how she was picking up strange vibrations as they were walking, supernatural disturbances. These vibrations meant something was going to happen, something significant, possibly very dangerous. Eventually the psychic stopped walking and said “I can’t believe you can’t feel these vibrations too.” At that moment in the background between the two women a light flared on in a second story room to reveal Mulder bound in thick brown leather straps. I don’t know if he was actually hanging from his throat but it was clear he was in some kind of immediate danger. The women didn’t notice him but rather continued talking.

What was strange was that through most of the scene, the cat I was petting was calm and relaxed. But as soon as the psychic started talking about the strange vibrations she was picking up, the cat kept getting more and more agitated. She walked up and down over my lap, kneading her claws into my legs and into the rug. When the psychic stopped and said “I can’t believe you can’t feel these vibrations too,” the cat stared up at me and her hair all stood up on end, not soft like it was a puff ball but sharp and bristly like it was preparing to defend itself against some danger.