Tag: violence

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Nightmares

Nightmare #193 – Terrorized by Motorcycle Hooligans

(Male, 50’s) In the interests of full disclosure, I should admit that I bought a motorcycle a couple years back in the midst of mid-life crisis and that within the last week as it came time to winterize the thing, I’d been angry with myself that another season had passed and I hadn’t really gotten out on it.

I was with my wife and a female friend and we were crossing a parking lot, heading into a bar when this group of about a dozen motorcycle riders over took us. I started defending the women who were able to get away. This didn’t particularly make the hooligans mad. They just started messing with me instead.

This was a relatively outlandish group of motorcyclists really. Their bikes were all American made and chopped like very classic examples of the style. And by classic I mean original 40’s and 50’s era chopped bikes, simple, basic, with a few bits of chromed flair. And the guys themselves were straight out of a time capsule too, or at least they looked like they were trying to be. They had greased hair with big curls on the top. I bet there’s a word for that. They didn’t wear the bomber style jackets but rather something that looked more like a suit coat jacket that was made out of riding quality leather. They were a riding club – The Rockets – which actually, as I remember it now used to be a local band I really enjoyed back in the 70’s.

The Rockets pushed me around with a detached, ironic sort of torture, like a cat playing with a mouse, that bats it around between its paws. One of them had a package of metal “rockets” that sort of looked like those toys from back in the day that you could put a “cap” in and then toss up in the air and when it landed the cap would go off with a loud pop. Anyway, one of the gang members had a package of these, still on the cardboard like he’d bought it at a retro boutique or something. He took them off the card one by one and shoved them in my mouth til I was choking. I think this was some kind of a test of something to see if I’d choke or vomit. All the while they were laughing and joking while I was trying to keep from suffocating.

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Nightmares

Nightmare #191 – A Knock in the Night

(Male, 50’s) This nightmare woke me up out of a sound sleep. I swear I was screaming, or at least trying to scream. When I woke up, I could have sworn I had just heard myself yelling out in a small, muffled voice.

In the dream, I’m at home with my wife and my daughter who must be home for the holidays or something. It’s night time and we’re getting ready to head off to bed. We’re all sitting on the couch in the living room, laughing, having a good time. Then there’s a knock on the front door. It’s really late, like the middle of the night and my wife and daughter don’t think we should answer the door. But I thought that someone must be in trouble to knock at the door so late. So I get up and I flip on the porch light to look out and see who was there. And damned if the porch light is out. So I open the door and there’s no one there. I speak out like I’m a tough guy or something and I say “OK step out where I can see you.”

And this huge man steps out of the shadows and with one or two strides, steps into the house. He’s broad and tall, like he’s just been scaled up in all dimensions. He’s got one of those cliched “bad guy” mustaches from the 40’s and he’s we’re a fedora and a trench coat like a black and white movie. He steps easily into the house and reaches out and wraps his hand cleanly around my throat. While he’s grabbing my throat, he lifts me off the ground effortlessly, with a smile. I try to yell, to scream and of course, I’m being choked so not much actual sound comes out.

I woke up trying to scream.

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Nightmares

Nightmare #181 – The Dog Faced Slasher

(Male, 40’s) I haven’t seen a slasher movie for years but this nightmare was just like a bad slasher movie. It was night time and I was in an unfamiliar area, a farm. There was a barn, an old farmhouse, fruit trees, tractors in the yard. I think I was there with a bunch of friends or at least people I knew. We had the sense that there was something else around us somewhere but we all went along doing our normal everyday tasks, sort of relaxing since it wasn’t our farm and we didn’t have to do the work. But as I walked around, I would come across these acquaintances either tied up or taped up with packing tape. They were alive and well but no one could really explain how they got all tied up. I would help them out and then we’d go our separate ways… and then pretty soon I’d come across someone ELSE who was all bound up. It was starting to freak me out, like someone could come up on me while I was trying to undo someone. Then I came across two women, one blond one brunette and they were taped to the seats of this two seat tractor. Nope doesn’t make much sense. I started trying to take the tape off the blond woman and there was this look of absolute terror in her eyes, like she was seeing something over my shoulder. I turned around and there was the weirdest looking slasher I’d ever seen. He himself was all wrapped with clear packing tape. His face was elongated and it looked like he had a dog-shaped nose. His arms were taped straight with these long sticks and at the end of them was a long-handled rose bush shear. They were sharp and nasty looking. The only way he could work these shears though was by jerking his whole arm to snap them closed. He looked seriously deranged, powerful, perhaps not entirely human. It seemed that he wanted to use the shears to cut off the heads of one of the women. Or, honestly, maybe he was going to cut them free. I wasn’t entirely clear about his motivations or for that matter his ability to carry out his motivations either for good or for evil. One thing I knew though was that I was standing in between him and the two women. At that point, I woke up.

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Nightmares

Nightmare #179 – Tough Neighborhood

(Male, 40’s) I haven’t had many dreams recently so that’s what makes this one stand out so strongly. I’m riding a bike and it at least starts in my old neighborhood, the one where I grew up as a kid. Just down the street from where I lived, two different sets of people have moved out and have left stuff they didn’t want by the street. One is just furniture but the other one has a bunch of really cool toys and models. Several of the toys are themed after Scooby-Doo and a couple of the models are monster-related. The trouble is that all the goodies are stacked in a pile, maybe 25 or 30 feet tall. I find a stick and am able to knock down the stuff I want. But now I have to carry it on my bicycle.
And things change, pretty quickly. I’m still on my bike but I have NO idea where I am. In fact, I’m pretty sure it’s not the same city. (I suspect it might be the city where my Grandmother lived, a pretty tough place.) It’s winter, or at least there’s snow on the ground. I’m trying to pedal the bike even though I’m still carrying all this stuff. I can barely keep it upright. Most important is that I’m lost. I think that if I just start going around in a systematic way up and down the streets, I’ll eventually find someplace that looks familiar. The whole first street I drive down is abandoned which is a little creepy. But the whole second street is worse. There are lots and lots of people, just standing on the sidewalk and on the street. It’s hard for me to keep the bike balanced let alone to ride around them. And stranger still, about a third of these folks are “short people” that’s what they’re called, right? It feels like a very bad music video. The short people in particular seem to have it in for me. They’re waving metal sticks around over their heads, trying to hit me as a ride by. Eventually I realize that I can’t pretend they’re NOT trying to hit me and I try seriously to ride away. That’s when one of these large “bouncer” type guys starts to run me down. He keeps blocking me in, forcing me off the road. I just know I’m going to be beaten up and robbed if I fall off the bike. Last thing I remember, I’m teetering toward the side of the road with the big guy close to me, trying to knock me over.

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Nightmares

Nightmare #146 – The Obstinantly Haunted House

(Male, 30’s) I was trying to spend the night in what everyone thought was a haunted house. I knew deep down in my soul that there was just someone trying to scare myself and the other person who was there with me. I don’t think there was any reward involved, just the sense that if the place wasn’t really haunted that some kind of curse would be lifted, not like a supernatural curse but more like a psychological curse.

The house was dark but not entirely pitch black. We decided to try not to sleep at all that night so we just sat up awake in the dining room. The dining room opened into the living room through a large doorway but it was so dark in there that we couldn’t see what was going on in there. We could make out various whispy gray shapes moving but nothing more distinct. They shapes looked like window drapes and I for one wasn’t certain that wasn’t all they were. The guy I was with was pretty sure they were ghosts, though. There were also strange sounds coming from the other room. I thought they sounded like people knocking into the furniture as they walked around in the dark but my friend, as could be expected, thought they were ghosts. The hauntings seemed to come in waves, like there would be twenty or thirty minutes of nothing but boredom punctuated all at once by something happening. It drove my friend crazy but it just started to make me angry. I wanted to rush into the other room and catch the people in the act but my friend became hysterical at the idea of us separating. But one time, when one of these haunting assaults started, I picked up an end table and threw it into the living room. It didn’t seem to hit anything or make any difference. If anything, it just un-nerved by buddy more.

I was getting desperate to get rid of any sense of ghostly intervention, and angry and perhaps a bit scared. And this is where I literally don’t know what I was thinking in the context of the dream. I knew that there was a crack house next door, actually in the same building. The haunted house was like an attached brownstone, a brick building built into a long line of buildings. This one happened to be “haunted;” the next one happened to be a crack house. I knew that crack dealers and crack addicts could be dangerous in ways that fake ghosts and the people behind them can’t be. So the plan, I guess, to the extent that I had a plan was to alert the attention of the crack addicts next door and get them to terrify the people behind the haunting. I crawled down the staircase that connected the two parts of the building and somehow got the attention of the dope fiends. They ran out of their house and into the haunted house. The crack addicts flipped on the lights (why hadn’t WE thought to do that?) and there was gun fire going every where. I was hiding under a table with a table cloth on it. There was a guy with a semiautomatic weapon standing less than a foot away from me. For some reason, thankfully, he didn’t see me. There was yelling and shooting and eventually they just left.

That’s about where the dream ended, with no resolution. I don’t know what happened to my friend. I don’t know if we lifted the curse on the building. I don’t even know if the gun-toting crack heads killed the “ghosts.”

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Nightmares

Nightmare #144 – Backyard Hooligans

(Female, 40’s) I was standing washing dishes in my kitchen sink– not an unusual situation at all, unfortunately. I heard the loud zoom and roar of a car engine. I moved to the window, looking down toward the street, assuming the noise was coming from there, and suddenly this golden Porsche raced down my relatively-short driveway, going extremely fast and somewhat out of control, tires spinning in the gravel. The driver’s side of the car scraped along the side of our beautiful new garage as the driver slammed on the breaks, and the car came to an abrupt halt. I went out the backdoor of my house and approached the car, bending over to see if the driver was all right. His head lolled back and forth, like he was fighting to gain consciousness or like he was on drugs, but he didn’t appear to be hurt at all. No blood. He was glaring at me through his heavy eyelids.

I went back inside to call the police. But first I called to my son. I asked him to sneak outside and get the license plate number of the car in the yard. Then I started looking in the phone book for the phone number for the police. I thought about calling 911, but I remembered reading a public service announcement that asked us not to call 911 except for true emergencies, not for car accidents. Whatever. So I got the yellow pages and started looking for the phone number there.

Meanwhile, the driver of the golden Porsche was attempting to flee the scene of the accident. He’d turned off his car lights and was slowly backing down the driveway, careful to avoid scraping any more buildings. I went to the front door and looked around, but I couldn’t see the car any where. I asked my son if he’d gotten the license plate, but he said “No” very loudly. I felt annoyed with him — “What the heck?” Then I noticed he was winking at me– he was covering, pretending he hadn’t gotten the license number because the golden Porsche was now parked in front of our house, among all the cars parked on our street. We went inside and my son jotted down the license plate number. His handwriting was terrible and I had to ask him what the numbers were!

Then I called the police station. I was routed through a series of push-button requests and put on hold, listening to musak. Then I heard the noise of a dozen car engines, racing and zooming in my driveway. The Porsche driver had returned with a bunch of his friends and they were driving 3 cars wide into our yard, making a terrible racket with their cars and their shouts. I went to the second floor, still holding the phone to my ear with the long cord trailing behind me, and I looked out on the rutkas. I leaned out of the window to see better, and I lost my balance and fell out, a whole story down, but I didn’t get hurt. The hooligans laughed at me. One produced a pair of shears and made a show of cutting the telephone cord.

I scrambled up and ran back inside the house, locking the door behind me. Then I got my cellphone and dialed the police again. I waited patiently on hold again, musak playing in the background, wondering who was going to pay for repairing the big scrapes in my new garage.

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Nightmares

Nightmare #141 – Clumsy Bank Robber

(Male) I dreamed last night that I was waiting in line at the bank. As I neared the tellers I realized that I was carrying a handgun with me. I was flooded with a sense of embarrassment and fear but I figured the best way out of the situation was to rob the bank. So I stepped out of line and yelled at everyone to get down on the ground. I waved the gun around a little bit to show everyone just how serious I was. And I dropped the gun. I didn’t just drop it but rather I let go of it and watched it go sliding along the floor ending up probably twenty feet away from me.

…As I neared the tellers I realized that I was carrying a handgun with me…

There was a painfully awkward moment when the crowd at the bank wasn’t sure what I was going to do and when I myself didn’t know what I was going to do. At just about that point I saw someone I knew in line. He was extremely angry at me. I guess we had gone to the bank together that day with the idea of robbing the bank but that now I was messing things up, he didn’t know if he could save the situation. I felt so clumsy and alone. There were guards and security cameras. I was going to jail forever.

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Nightmares

Nightmare #140 – Extorted by my Fingertips

(Male, 30’s) This dream was very convoluted and crazy and parts were just so very sick and tawdry. I kept trying to do the smart thing but the situation just kept getting worse and worse. I was a college student and I was trying to fit in. There was a group that seemed very popular, not quite as organized as a fraternity, but perhaps more like a secret society. It was made up of at least 40 athletic guys and one very attractive brunette girl. They let me hang out with them for awhile but then, for no apparent reason, a half dozen of the guys beat me up, knocked me to the ground and kicked me until I couldn’t move. I think one of the guys peed on me when I was lying there nearly unconscious. They laughed and said it was part of the “hazing.” I wish the nightmare ended there but it just continued on and on.

…this secret society of thugs would do something simply horrible if they had that key…

I knew that this secret society of thugs would do something simply horrible if they had that key so I asked them for time to think about it. I used that time to gather together my family, my mother and father and our pet dogs (?) and get us all into a station wagon so we could flee. I didn’t know exactly how powerful this society was but I had reason to believe they could hurt my parents and it would be best if we just re-located to someplace far far away. This station wagon was a mess by the way, it barely ran at all. It was gray and dingy on the outside. I drove it down these heavily rutted gravel roads because I was trying to avoid the major roads that might have been watched.

As I turned a corner, the car flipped over into a ditch. There was another vehicle there, conveniently, a small red car. We piled out of the station wagon and started carrying our luggage over to the red car. It was clear we were going to have to leave many things behind, probably most of our things. Just then a big truck appeared with a dozen or so of the society thugs. I stopped loading up the car we were using to escape. I turned to face the truck as it pulled up and right then, I woke up.

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Nightmares

Nightmare #139 – Riots in the Streets

(Male, 30’s) Maybe this isn’t a traditional nightmare but I woke up pretty shaken. I dreamed there were riots in my home town, riots about unemployment. The economy had gotten so bad that most people didn’t have jobs and they were really angry. At first I saw on TV how crowds of people were standing beside the major highways, throwing stuff at the cars that went by. I think that the thought was if you had enough money to buy gasoline, you must be in management and therefore responsible for the people being out of work. I was trying to get across town, actually not even going through downtown and I was walking since I was unemployed like everyone else. But as I walked across a smaller street, there were already dozens of people lining that road as well.

…Everyone was so angry…

I was amazed that there were that many people living in the city. I tried to make it down an even smaller street, a residential street. There was a package I had to deliver. The sense was almost that if you weren’t standing beside the road you were breaking a picket line. Everyone was so angry. I finally found the house where I was to deliver the package. Someone accepted it at the door, though he was initially unwilling to open the door. I had hoped he would invite me inside at least until things got a bit safer on the streets but he didn’t. I turned and started the long journey home through the riots.

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Nightmares

Nightmare #138 – Convenience Store Robbery!

(Female, 20’s) – Maybe this isn’t exactly a nightmare but it was pretty exciting and I remember it vividly to this day even though I had this dream about ten years ago.

…There were many men, a whole carload full of them, all with guns…

I was riding in the car with my mother and we pulled into a convenience store to get some gas. We were getting ready to pump some gas when we looked over at the store and saw it was being robbed. There were many men, a whole carload full of them, all with guns. At that moment they saw us and started to pour out of the store. They ran right toward us. My mom said “Get back in the car.” But even when I got in the car, I wasn’t safe. The robbers started firing their guns at us. The bullets shot right through the windows and the doors of the car. My mother said “Get down” while she started the car and pulled out of the gas station. It was just like she was an action adventure heroine!

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Nightmares

Nightmare #135 – Turf Wars

(Male, 30’s) I’m an art teacher. Let’s just leave it at that. In the dream, I went to school one day and I entered my classroom as usual when someone jumps me. This person gets me in a head lock, bends me over and starts questioning me. “Who are you? What are you doing here?” I choked out some answers but the answers didn’t satisfy my attacker. Then I realize that the person who has me in this choke hold is another teacher, one of the business teachers in fact. I try to explain “This used to be my room. This used to be my room!” When I woke I could still feel the hands around my throat… because I had my own hands on my throat. Weird. I must be worried about layoffs or something.

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Nightmares

Nightmare #130 – Death and Disposal

(Female, 20’s) Last night I dreamt I killed someone, and then I did something worse. I lived in a tall house surrounded by farmland and someone had broken in. I fought with him at the top of a very tall circular staircase. Finally, I pushed him backward and he fell, over and over down the stairs, until he was dead.

“The dogs will know. The dogs will smell him and they’ll know.”

I was horrified by the thought I was now a murderer, that I had committed murder. I needed to get rid of the evidence so I dragged his heavy body to the bathroom and put him in the tub… where I proceeded to cut him up into pieces so I wouldn’t get blood everywhere — This gets a little grisly here — And then I figured that still there was too much blood left in these pieces so I put them in the oven, at least as much as would fit, and baked him until the pieces were dry. Then I sewed these parts into a scarecrow that I put out in the field, all the while thinking “The dogs will know. The dogs will smell him and they’ll know.” I still had to get rid of the rest of him. I figured I could take little pieces of him out to various parts of the farm and bury them where no one would ever find him.

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Nightmares

Nightmare #129 – Beach Attack

(Female, early 30’s) This is a nightmare I remember from my childhood. My parents had rented a cottage in the Irish Hills, a resort area near where we lived where there were many lakes and woods.

…This strange little man took out a knife and he threw it at me…

In the dream I was down by a lake playing in the sand near the water when a taxi all of a sudden drives up, onto the beach and down to edge of the water. A man gets out, a weird little man with a big hat and a long overcoat. He was oddly mis-shaped too, overly round almost like that character Grimace from the McDonald’s commercials. This strange little man took out a knife and he threw it at me. I move fast enough that I duck out of the way. The knife whizzes past me, but it keeps going. It travels all the way around the world. In about 20 seconds, I looked up and the knife was flying at me again, this time too close to avoid.

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Nightmares

Nightmare #120 – Celebrity Cop

(Male) I was a movie star and I was researching a new role. Since I was going to portray a policeman, I was riding along with some policemen in their car, just out on patrol. A call came in suddenly that there was an armed robbery taking place just a couple blocks from where we were. We had to respond. We pulled up in front of the bank along with several other police cars. There were apparently three robbers and they had taken some hostages. It was going to turn ugly. But then without thinking or asking anyone I started walking toward the bank. I was already in costume, that is, I was wearing a policeman’s uniform and I had a gun in my holster, a real gun with real bullets for some reason. Without asking anyone, I walked into the bank and said something like “Hey cut that out.” Then I smiled broadly with my movie star smile. The robbers recognized me immediately and let down their guard. They said “Hey it’s {whatever my name was} What are you doing here?” And I say “I’m doing research for my new movie and I saw some guys in here who might be fans of mine.”

And then I took my gun out of my holster and shot each of the men square in the chest – one, two, three – and then I shot them each again – one, two, three. The expression on their faces didn’t change. They didn’t understand what had happened. They just sort of melted down to the floor, dead. Situation resolved. When I woke up I was horrified at how cold and callous I had been, that’s the part that was a nightmare.

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Nightmares

Nightmare #115 – The New Guy in Human Resources

(Male, middle aged) In the dream, I had just been hired to be the human resources guy at a moderately large firm, maybe 200 employees. I frankly wasn’t very sure of what the company did but I was desperate for a job and the place was quite prosperous. The offices were very modern looking with lots of common spaces and internal glass which gave the areas a feeling of open-ness and air-iness. My first task was to hire someone to produce the company newsletter, just a 4 page weekly publication, primarily aimed at employees. There were two candidates and I decided to interview them both at the same time. We went to one of the open conference rooms and by open, I mean that there was no door. The room opened directly out on a lounge area and beyond that there was a glassed in hallway. I chose this spot because it showed off the design philosophy of the building and, I thought, of the company. I started going back and forth between the two candidates, one who was a man in his 30’s and the other a woman in her 20’s. I would ask a question of one then ask it of the other, alternating as to who answered first. The man had more experience and was perhaps more reliable but the woman had more insight and creativity.

…I was terrified, as much of getting shot by the police as by being attacked by their prisoners…

I was trying to make up my mind which set of skills would be more important in this position when a flurry of activity in the glass hallway distracted me. A phallanx of heavily armed police wearing black armor and carrying what looked like electronic shotguns were leading a group of people who were dressed in grey-brown rags and who had their hands on top of their heads. As this strange parade turned the corner though, something must have have happened to spook the cops because they opened fire on their prisoners, shooting off round after round. The glass did not break even though it must have been repeated hit by these electronic bullets. I was terrified, as much of getting shot by the police as by being attacked by their prisoners who must have been very dangerous to be treated like that and who must be very desperate. I hid as best I could under the table. The interviewees couldn’t seem to understand my response. “Don’t you see that they have everything under control?” Then the interviewees started talking between themselves about me. It was then that I realized the whole thing, the parade, the revolt even the interviews themselves had been some kind of test that the company was putting me through. I had failed the test.

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Nightmares

Nightmare #114 – Contraband in a Deadly Wrapper

(Male, 40’s) A friend of mine was performing in a play that was being staged in someone’s living room. There must have been 30 people in the “audience” sitting on couchs or chairs or standing. I was in the kitchen and was able to watch the play through the doorway. I started making myself some tea when the front door is kicked in and probably two dozen policemen pour in all dressed in riot gear. They forcibly subdue everyone, and I mean everyone, from the people sitting on chairs to the actors on stage. I drop to the floor and roll myself under a shelf full of cookbooks to a place where it’s highly unlikely anyone would see me. I can overhear what’s going on and watch a bit of it. Once about half the people have been dragged out of the room, bleeding and unconscious and in shackles, there’s a team of policemen who begin scouring the house looking for something.

“It’s in the couch.” I hear one of the policemen tell the sergeant. “But it seems to be wrapped in animal hides.” The police start tearing the couch apart and sure enough there appears to be a large trunk, like a foot locker that is wrapped in what looks like the pelts from male lions, complete with shaggy manes. But these pelts also still have their paws and claws.

There are six of these skins draped over the box. The police suspect a trap and they are right to. What appear to be skins are actually werewolves that have been hibernating during the journey while the package was being shipped. Now they are exposed to light and the noise and commotion of the police action, the top werewolf comes to life. It growls and actually inflates itself with breath while it snarls and howls. As the police begin to fire on the werewolf that is fully re-animated, the next werewolf on the pile begins to stir. It is clear that the police weapons are going to be totally ineffective as they begin to be torn apart by the monsters that rise from the pile, one after another. The lucky audience members were the ones who were beaten and dragged off first. I cowered in my hiding spot, hoping that the werewolves would be too busy with the police and with securing their cargo and wouldn’t pay attention to me.

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Movies

Movies: Potato Head Psycho

This is just dumb-dumb-dumb but kind of fun anyway. True film-snobs will note that it’s only a paraphrase of the original and not a shot for shot remake which could be an interesting “finger exercise” for would-be filmmakers. Just imagine how many different ways this iconic scene could be re-envisioned while keeping the same editing pattern, possibly even the same soundtrack: an unsuspecting shrub that gets pruned, blissfully unaware mise-en-place that gets shredded into mire-poix, etc. Incidentally, if you actually try any of these variants, let me know and I’ll post them as well.

But now, on to this installment of Friday Night Movies:

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #89 Murder Art

I was walking through a suburb very much like the one where I grew up except at the edge of a cluster of houses instead of a woods, there was a wide expanse of water, possibly an ocean, possibly just a Great Lake. Leading up to the water was a long flat sandy beach and on this beach were houses just like those of the suburb though much farther apart. From one of the houses, I heard cries, then screams. Someone was being beaten, then murdered. I recognized the assailants but since there were three of them and only one of me I didn’t intervene.

Later, I was at a small bookstore, so small it was the living room of a house. They were having an art exhibit and when I looked at the names of the artists, I recognized them as the three young men who had killed that person. Evidently everyone seemed to know that they were guilty, but that no one seemed to care too much beyond the fame it brought them. The artworks weren’t extremely compelling, though they used some materials in slightly novel ways. One of the artists for instance seemed to paint with melted wax crayon and to paint inside old cooking pans. Interesting perhaps but his brushwork and composition were barely competent. The bookstore owner noticed my attention and said the artists themselves would be stopping by later. It was as if he didn’t know how dangerous these young men were. I was afraid and I left.

I was walking home from the exhibit, angry and scared, through the suburb I grew up in, in fact just a block or two from the house where I lived. I passed a liquor store and two men started following me. They were twins, slender, brown-grey, in ragged suits with crumpled hats. They talked as if they were drunk, or more precisely as if they were pretending to be drunk. They were following me rather closely. I tried to let the pass but they jumped me instead. One held me while the other kicked and hit me. It wasn’t like they wanted to rob me, just to beat me to death. I struggled and broke free but they chased me. I ran up to the house of a neighbor. Oddly enough, I didn’t try to run to the house where I once had lived. No one came to the door. I woke when the men reached the porch where I was standing.

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #67 – Protestant Trespass & Stigmata

(Male, late 30’s) I was visiting the church that I attended while growing up.  I was there with my wife but it wasn’t a Sunday morning.  It was a Saturday afternoon or a Sunday afternoon. We were in the basement which was traditionally used as a large recreational area. It was entirely dark.  On the floor every foot or so were piles of fabric which we figured were child-sized sleeping bags — probably hundreds of them.  We figured the church youth group had a sleep over. But where was everyone? Most of the sleeping bags seemed empty but the room was also filled with that hushed sound of slow breathing, like all around us, people were sleeping.  We tiptoed through the area and gradually came to an area where there were adults.  They were mostly very old and very awake and for that matter, pretty mean.  They said “Who are you?” “We don’t recognize you” and “You don’t look Methodist to me.”  I explained how I had attended this church as a child, how my father had been the choir director but they must have called the police. As we were leaving, a police car arrived. I raised my hands and turned to face the policeman and I saw he had a rifle aimed at me.  He must have been startled when I turned because he shot a bullet clean through the palm of my left hand.  I looked over at it and thought to myself, “That son of bitch just shot me” and while and I looked at the blood coming out of my hand, the police man shot me again in my right hand. I don’t remember the pain so much as the force of the impact and then the sense of the tissues giving way and being torn aside by the bullet. Finally, the policeman shot me in my belly and I woke up.

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Nightmares

Nightmare #62 – The Stalker

(Male, middle-aged) I kept dreaming this dream all night though I woke up a half dozen times. The sense of outrage, of powerlessness still stick with me.

My sister in law came to stay with us for a little while because she was being stalked by one of her customers. The police knew everything about this guy including where he lived, what he did. My sister in law even was shown pictures of him. The stalker had been placed under house arrest and was given one of those electronic tethers, but he had escaped from them before. Furthermore, the stalker had even killed a couple other people — his previous stalking targets — but for the most part everyone was treating him like he was relatively harmless. Not entirely harmless — my sister in law was encouraged to leave town until he lost interest in her — but the stalker also had some kind of special skill or profession that made people overlook his “faults.” He was a surgeon or something, though I shudder to think of him operating on someone I love.

I felt pretty sure that I could protect her, even though I’m not strong or skilled with a weapon. I resolved that as soon as I saw the stalker, I would just have to kill him before he could take advantage of the situation. Somehow, just having that attitude was going to keep everyone safe. I figured I could kill him in a fight and no one would care.

One afternoon, my wife and her sister actually were gone shopping and I was at home with several people — our plan was to have lots of people awake and paying attention at all times so we wouldn’t be caught off guard. A couple of young children knocked on the door I went to the door but I knew it was him. I went out on the porch and closed the door behind me. I recognized him from his photos. He was very tall and very muscular and had short blond hair. When he turned to face me, he flicked a lit cigarette at my face.

“You’re a little jumpy,” He said.

“You’re not supposed to be here.”

“So she’s here”

“You’re not supposed to be out of your house. Your cage.”

I yelled in the screen window for the others to call 911. We started to fight, to grapple, to wrestle. He was much stronger than me, much taller than me. I kept calling for 911. I don’t know if anyone did. My plan now was to keep him busy until the police arrived. He wrapped one arm around me, pinning my arms to my sides. With the thumb of his other hand, he started pushing on my teeth like he was trying to crack them off into my throat.

I awoke face down in my pillow.