Tag: work-related

Nightmare #349: Deadly Jailbreak

Post author By The Grim Gnome
Post date April 8, 2014

Jail cells at the Southborough Police Station. Photo by my_southborough. Used under the Creative Commons License.

(Male, 50’s) Just a dark and sad dream. I woke up really shaken so who’s to say this wasn’t a nightmare. I was on a 5-person team, and one of the guys was someone I used to work with at an old job. He was a good guy, creative, diligent, exactly the kind of guy I’d choose to bring along on whatever task we were supposed to perform. It was night, really late at night, maybe 3:00 AM, and we were in the courtyard of a stone building, just inside a tall stone fence that surrounded a large activity yard. It felt kind of like a prison. We weren’t supposed to be there. My job was to circumvent a computer-based lock, but the trick I used was a long metal rod, a mechanical exploit that bypassed all the fancy electrics. I felt pretty proud of the idea. We five were supposed to wait outside until something happened. We’d know it when we saw it. I leaned against the fence and started scribbling notes for a poem I was writing. Yes, I know that’s crazy, but I was writing a poem in my dream. If I had started writing down the dream earlier, I bet I could have remembered what it was about too. I remember that I was worried I wouldn’t be able to read my hand-writing because it was so dark. I looked up from my little black notebook and found the other guys on my team were gone. I was worried that I’d missed the cue.

Just then dozens of men in work shirts and khakis started filing up out of this building in a big hurry. The building was one story tall so the sense I had was that these guys were coming up from rooms underground. Maybe they were prisoners. Maybe factory workers though they “felt” like tough and clever guys, equal parts Marines and engineers. They ran down this corridor then out to the street where there were a lot of cars parked. Each guy knew which car he was heading to. They were rather strange vehicles by the way, half panel truck and half station wagon, weird looking with no windows. Each car could fit maybe 10 guys. I panicked because I thought we were going to take a helicopter out of here. I hadn’t expected cars and didn’t know what to do. I grabbed one of the guys running past me and he said to come along, that they’d find room for me. But there wasn’t any room for me in any of the wagons. I knew it was just a minute or two until the sirens would ring, and I’d be caught. The wagon-cars started racing down the road and I tried to run along behind them. I kept up pretty well.

It was a residential city neighborhood and I watched the car I was going to get in drive away down a street, only to hear it shot full of holes by machine guns. I thought that was pretty crazy, shooting machine guns in a residential neighborhood but there was no chance anyone survived. I ran the other way. I started to like my odds, figuring I could escape through the residential brownstones to escape the trigger-happy officials who were hunting us down. Worse case, I could go back to the woods that were across from the stone building we’d broken into. I’d be safe so long as they didn’t send out dogs. And just then I ran into two motion-sensor machine guns that had been positioned at an intersection. Who the hell puts motion-sensor controlled machine guns at a residential intersection? They pinned me down with crossfire and I couldn’t move, though I didn’t have the sense that I was hit. I hid behind a leafless bush, just some bare branches, trying hard not to move but totally exposed if the murderous officials came looking. It started to dawn on me that no one lived in this neighborhood, that maybe no one lived anywhere anymore. Those may have been the last humans living anywhere, those guys living underground. I hoped at least some of them escaped. Whatever set up those mechanized machine guns to strafe an intersection wasn’t interested in keeping a neighborhood safe. They would only be satisfied by killing every single one of us.

Tags darkness, escape, guns, prison, urban horror, work-related

"What We Fear" Doktor Fears & Phobias

Life Lessons from an Active Shooter Training

Post author By Doktor Leech
Post date December 9, 2013

I am not the bad-ass in life that I am in my dreams but today, I learned that I’m not very bad-ass even in make-believe. I “survived” a two-hour scenario-based training session designed to model responses to an active shooter in my workplace. It was not at all what I expected and in particular, my responses were not what I expected.

I thought there’d be little new for me. Heck, I’m a horror writer, who has researched mass shootings for my writing. I’m a gamer who has played my share of “First Person Shooter” style games. I have fired a variety of hand guns during my life from flintlock to nine millimeter. Ho-hum. Come to find out, however, I have not really been shot at.

The training started, as all training does these days, with a slide presentation. It was boring and factual and though it presented horrifying information, numbers can induce only a limited amount of shock. There were technical difficulties, but when the closing video finally did play, my heart began to beat in a different way. I’ve seen surveillance footage of school shootings, listened to numerous 911 calls but somehow this was different. I was being encouraged to actively imagine myself in this context, to learn from what was happening. The presentation took so long that I thought, maybe, there wouldn’t be enough time to run the scenarios, that we’d be let go chastised with a bit of book-learning. I was wrong. There was plenty of time. Many of the worst shooting incidents in history were over in 8 minutes.

We broke into groups, roughly the same number of students in an average class, and filed into classrooms. There were to be three scenarios where we were to model three different techniques: lockdown, barricade, confrontation. We waited until we heard the shots to start our reactions. The shot sounded fake, too high, lacking the presence of the rounds I’ve fired on a shooting range. If I didn’t know what to expect, it would have been extremely easy for me to dismiss it as something innocuous. I dove beneath a table, knowing we were sitting targets if the shooter came in our room. Then someone noticed an attached office. We regrouped into this smaller space, blocked the plate glass windows as best we could. The shooter entered and fired, describing the people he could see, naming his victims. I cowered behind a filing cabinet, out of sight I hoped.

The second scenario we were to barricade the doors. These doors had no internal locks, but the lever-action door handles meant that we could wedge a chair leg in such a way that kept it from opening. That was the idea at least. Our wedge slowed down our shooter for an instant but he still got in. We’d piled flimsy desks in front of the opening too, but since the door opened outward, they simply toppled out into the hall. When the gun shots started, some of us retreated to the back office to a secondary barricade back there. When this scenario ended, my back was pressed against a short cinderblock wall. It was difficult to coax my body to move.

After this second scenario, I began to realize I was no bad-ass. I could not feel my fingers on either hand, my lips were numb, I could see my pulse throbbing in my vision. I felt fundamentally weak in my upper torso, just above my solar plexus. I thought “Do they have many casualties during these trainings, old fat guys like me who keel over with heart-attacks?” Part of what I was feeling was dread though. In the first two scenarios I had not actually seen the shooter. I hid. The final scenario was to role-play confronting the shooter. I knew that in a couple minutes, I was likely going to be shot.

I mean of course “shot.” The shooter was a well-trained professional, skilled in the use of blanks. Still there was the scent of a discharged weapon in the air, that dry spicy smell, something like burning leather. It seemed so wrong, so out of place to smell gunfire in a classroom. The shooter entered. He fired. We began throwing things at him to distract him. We’d been equipped with foam balls to represent objects we could throw (water bottles, a stapler), but it didn’t take long to run out of easy distractions. He kept shooting. In the end, the most effective thing I did during the entire training was to toss a stack of index cards. They fluttered through the air in all directions, buying someone a couple more seconds of life. Then the shooter aimed and shot me. Dead.

And it was over. The scenarios had taken roughly 15 minutes. The survivors and the slain helped re-arrange the classroom. We’d broken three of the desks. The trainers warned us that sometimes the people portraying shooters are actually wounded by over-zealous participants in the confrontation phase. I had made a mental note, don’t be too rough on him since I still thought I’d be a bad-ass. The closest I ever got to the shooter was after everything was done, when I went up to shake his hand, to thank him for the valuable lessons I’d learned.

“Is it hard?” I asked him, “to play the shooter?”

He smiled, “Not really. I don’t cuss in everyday life, though.”

Maybe we were all role-playing, pretending to be someone other than who were really are. Maybe really, deep down, I am a bad-ass and I’d be a hero if the moment came. After today’s training, I hope I never, ever have to find out. But I did learn that it doesn’t take much to make a difference. A few seconds of delay, a bit of distraction, a frustrated entrance, an obscured shot. The scenarios –like the real-life incidents they model– were over before we knew it. Moral of the story: stay alive, keep responsive and keep looking for options, do whatever you can.

That’s probably good advice even for days when you don’t encounter an active shooter.

Tags guns, school, work-related

Grim Gnome Nightmares

Nightmare #339: The Needle and the Conqueror Worm

Post author By The Grim Gnome
Post date May 16, 2013

(Male, 30’s) I was staying at someone’s summer home, a sprawling house with multple floors. It looked out on landscaped terraces leading down to a lake but there didn’t seem to be any way to get out of the place. I was trying to sleep but some one much younger than myself was practicing bass guitar in the room above so I got up and wandered the house.

On the main floor of the place was a laboratory, sort of an industrial waiting room where workers stood around waiting for the shift change. It wasn’t clear what they all did. They were bored twenty-somethings, leaning against the furniture and counters. One of them seemed to recognize me and we spoke amicably. Another worker was edgy, clearly a dangerous jerk. He carried a hypodermic needle with him that he threatened to jab into people, his thumb on the plunger. Sticking out of his upper arm were spare needles. He didn’t seem to notice or care that they were skewered into his flesh.

He tried to bully me the way thugs on a playground would. I wouldn’t have any of his stupid threats so he stabbed me four times with his hypodermic, each time injecting something into my arm near the wrist. I demanded to know what it was. He was coy. “It’s nothing yu need to worry about, old man. Just cholesterol.” I didn’t believe him. but he didn’t tell me anything more.

Then, the flesh around the holes began to swell up. The holes grew large something started to poke out of the hole. It looked like a bead, a shiny black bead but eventually, a centipede poked its head out of my arms and wriggled, trying to get free. It squirmed and squirmed and finally used its hundred of legs to pull itself out of my flesh.

It was just the first. Soon, dozens of centipedes, hairy ones with thousands of tiny legs crawled out of the wounds on my arms, one by one, dropping to the floor.
Just when the waves of insects seemed to be slowing down, another large bead appeared in the one of my arms. It was the staring black eye of a larger bug, and pushed its way out. It was larger, hairless, hard round segments and thousands of legs. They followed like the poison inside me was evolving different kinds of bugs. They streamed out of my hand and fell to the floor.

The thug with the hypodermic needles seemed to find this hilarious but I was worried what kind of creature would follow after the centipedes.

What creature would crawl out of my flesh next?

Tags bugs, health problems, insects, needles, violence, work-related

Nightmares

Nightmare #316 – Interview Gone Wrong

Post author By The Grim Gnome
Post date August 6, 2012

(Male, 30’s) I was in a strange town for a job interview. I had just come in that morning and planned to head home that night if I didn’t get the job. I went to the building where the interview was supposed to take place, but it wasn’t an office. It was a parking structure as tall as a skyscraper. I started walking up, floor after floor. It was inhabited by street people. In the parking spaces, instead of cars, there was waiting room furniture: chairs, end tables, lamps that didn’t turn on. I could hear the sound of cars echoing through the cement walls but I guess the commuters had learned to park on other floors. Almost every seat was occupied with someone squatting with all their belongings in a garbage bag at their feet. Everyone wore too many layers of clothes, like a couple wool knit hats and several coats. I found a seat that wasn’t occupied and sat down.

Then I realized I had brought with me a couple strange items. One was an old brown comforter that I used to keep on my bed. I loved that comforter, as I recall. I don’t know whatever happened to it. I also had with me a leather briefcase, nicer and bigger than the one I own in real life. I had no idea what was in it. When I got up to leave, the comforter was gone. I felt a deep sense of loss but decided to let it go, decided not to hunt around finding it. I held onto that odd briefcase extra tightly though, so it wouldn’t disappear.

The homeless folks knew how to create some extremely powerful explosive. Occasionally for entertainment, it seems, they pour a bit of it into the gas tanks of the fancy racecars that are parked in the parking structure. These were not normal cars but rather were the very expensive racecars that folks watch on TV going around and around on oval tracks. When this explosive was added to their gas tanks, eventually they’d explode into a huge fireball. There wasn’t much concern from anyone about this. The commuters in their racecars seemed mostly just annoyed by the delays, not concerned about the carnage and destruction.

I started walking down the concrete staircase. I heard a roar from a few floors down. A whole stampede of commuters were heading up to their cars. I was likely going to be crushed underneath their feet. I looped my arms around one of the railings and hoped I could hold on. Then I realized I had a whole test tube full of that weird highly explosive liquid. It slipped from my fingers and fell, down, down, flight after flight of stairs until it hit on the ground floor.

It exploded with an earth shattering groan. Screams from thousands of voices, maybe more. I woke up.

Tags urban horror, violence, work-related

Nightmares

Nightmare #334 – Corpse in the Trunk

Post author By The Grim Gnome
Post date May 18, 2012

(Male, 40’s) This might not sound like it, but this is definitely a work-related stress nightmare. I was at work – well, not exactly the place where I work. It was a different building located right downtown Detroit near one of the old auto plants. I was working so much overtime that I hadn’t gone home at all for two nights. So, in the logic of the dream, I had loaned my car to a few coworkers so they could all carpool home in it.

It was morning and I was still in my pajamas, at work, remember. And my car arrives and a half dozen of my coworkers get out. The normal stupidity of work starts up and then I get a phone call from someone who is staying home that day. And my manager basically tells me I have to do his work for him in addition to mine. This is more than I can take.

I go out to my car and find it is in a sorry state. First of all the door locks are broken so the lock is just a metal rod flopping uselessly in the driver’s side door. The car has been broken into but I never have anything in it so nothing was stolen. The door panel on the driver’s side back door was torn off, revealing the inner workings of the door. It made sense to me that was how the thieves had broken in, by dismantling the door. Then I walk around the car and find an addict crouching by my car. He says “I didn’t do any of that stuff” but I notice that he’s stuck a used syringe into my rear car tire. He mentions that I might not want to look in the trunk.

At which point, I realize that someone has stashed a dead body in the trunk of my car. Next thing I know the cops are there, writing up a report. But the report doesn’t seem to have anything to do with my car. One cop says “The gorilla is still missing. That’s why we recovered the jaguar.” At first I thought he meant a stolen car, a Jaguar. But then I noticed an actual jaguar prowling around the parking lot. I panicked and ran toward the door of my office. The police yelled “Don’t run. It’ll chase you.” Sure enough the jaguar started running after me, obviously ready to pounce and kill me.

Tags animal attacks, animals, work-related

Movies

“The Selling” – (Movie) A Different Kind of Real Estate Nightmare

Post author By Doktor Leech
Post date April 11, 2012

Word dropped into my InBox about “The Selling” a film making the festival circuit about the difficulties of trying to sell a haunted house. The trailer at least makes the film look like an enjoyable and amusing tale.

Watching the spritely actors cavort in this quite enjoyable trailer made me realize what stinks about most straight horror movies: wooden acting. Perhaps it comes from a reliance on special effects, that is, the external aspects of gore and spectacle, the kinds of things that can be “fixed in the mix” that is added in during post-production. Real acting — even the exagerated cariacatured comedic acting in the trailer — obviously takes place during production but the groundwork has to be laid firmly in pre-production, dare I say it, even before the script writing occurs. We so often hear — and are supposed to be amazed by — reports of films that were written in one booze-drenched weekend. Yawn. I want the story that is deep and mature like a well cellared wine. Creep me out during the movie, sure but keep me scared long after I’ve gone home. I know grown men who were afraid to take showers after seeing “Psycho.” I digress, of course. Critics will note that it’s far easier to get a laugh than to inspire genuine fear. Maybe. There are cheap laughs and cheap scares. The richer experience in both genres, I believe, depends upon deep characterization (not necessarily deep characters) and actors capable of depicting them.

“The Selling” looks to be a blast, like a well-done comedy-horror film that wasn’t afraid to do a little work.

Tags creepy houses, ghosts, house, work-related

Nightmares

Nightmare #312 – Ghostly Dinosaurs

Post author By The Grim Gnome
Post date December 15, 2011

(Male, 40’s) This was definitely a nightmare and it seemed so real at the time. Honestly, it seemed real while I was dreaming even though this is all going to sound pretty crazy.

I was at work, though for some reason the office was set up in a house. The house was on a normal suburban street but the back yard was a graveyard. The grave stones started right outside the back door. The other strange thing was that it was night. I was working at night with someone else, someone I don’t really work with.

Whenever there was a computer glitch or problem, it manifested itself as an image on the screen. Mostly they looked like decaying humans. Ghosts, I guess.

The guy I was working with got tired which was understandable because for some reason I knew it was about 4:00 AM. He went to take a nap on the couch in the living room. And about that moment, there was a knock on the back door. I looked out the window and there were three of the ghosts that appeared on the computer screen. They were full sized human ghosts. For some reason they couldn’t come in, even though I had opened the door. Towering in the trees was another ghost, a monster about as tall as the roof. It looked like a minature Godzilla. Needless to say, I closed the door.

Then there was a knock at the front door. I opened it, thinking that the ghost wouldn’t be able to come in. But this ghost walked right past me and went over to my co-worker who was sleeping. I think it must have possessed him – or something – because the guy woke up and ran outside terrified. I ran outside to chase him. or at least warn him that there are ghosts all around. I had to wrestle him down because he seemed quite panicked or perhaps determined to cause himself harm.

Then we heard the pterodactyl.

It swooped in and attacked this guy. We hid around the base of an apple tree. The guy was totally useless. I tried to keep the tree branches between the Pterodactyl and us. Every now and then the monster would reach out with this long bony claw and try to grab us. For some reason, I figured that it was just basically a big bird and there fore it’s bones must be light, hollow in fact. Therefore, it would be easy to break them. None of that is rationalization after the fact. I very clearly remember going through that thought process inside the dream.

So the next time the monster reached out to grab me, I grabbed it by the forearm and tried to crack its wrist against one of the branches. I didn’t succeed but I Knew I would. Eventually, if I could just keep that panicky co-worker safe – I’d be able to beat that dinosaur.

Tags ghosts, monsters, work-related

Nightmares

Nightmare #311 – So Large, So Unprepared

Post author By The Grim Gnome
Post date December 8, 2011

(Female, 20’s) The dream I had last night was not a ‘scary’ dream per se, but one of those uneasy dreams that become increasingly uneasy.

So I show up to teach my composition class. I’m running late and feeling
rushed. I’m carrying an enormous amount of stuff with me, weighed down
with papers and books. I have a backpack that’s stuffed full and a
briefcase too, just brimming with manila folders and papers bursting out.
I’m out of breath as I arrive at class– only to discover that we’ve been
moved to a new room, a bigger room — almost a conference center room or an
auditorium.

My students are already there, spread out over a dozen tables, and since
there are only 20 of them, the wide expanse of tables look a little empty.
I have to turn my head back and forth to see everyone who is there.

And then I notice that the “audience” is made up of more than just my
students– there’s also a number of other people there. One notable person
seated at a table, pen in hand, is one of my old professors. In real life,
he is dead now, but in my dream I realize that he’s there to “observe” my
class and report on my teaching.

Unfortunately, I can’t recall what I have planned to teach in this class
session. Or more accurately, *if* I have *anything* planned for the class
today. Then I really start to panic. I open my briefcase, rifling
through, but my files of stuffed full of papers to grade. Crap– all those
papers turn my stomach.

So I step to the podium, which has a microphone and desk lamp– I wasn’t
expecting those. I speak into the microphone, asking my students to settle
down and get out their books and class work. I glance at my watch– we’re
already running late.

As I look around, I see that the room is even larger than I realized– like
really, really big. Almost a football field-sized room. Along the sides
of the room, there are shops and houses. Some of the buildings have lights
on and some boarded up.

Then a mass of people start to move into the room, marching in formations,
in between the tables. They are practicing for something. They’d reserved
the space earlier and they have no idea how the room was double-booked.

Neither do I. I have no idea what is going on, but I’m pretty sure I’m not
going to get a very good evaluation.

Tags crowds, school, school work, work-related

Nightmares

Nightmare #308 – Totally Out of Control

Post author By The Grim Gnome
Post date November 19, 2011

(Male, 50’s) I was in a car driving along a pleasant wooded road. It was dark but there was enough light that I could see the trees and the fields and I had the sense that there was a lake off to my right. A pleasant kind of drive that I’ve taken dozens of times in my life.

Then I realized that the steering wheel had become entirely unresponsive. I’m old enough to know what it feels like when power steering goes out and you’ve got to turn the wheel with a lot more force. That’s not what was happening. It’s like the wheel was totally disconnected from the movements of the car. I check the mirrors and there are no other cars on the road so I figure it’s OK to brake and at least make sure I don’t careen off the road.

But the brakes don’t work either. Not if I press down a little, nor a lot. So I try shifting out of gear and of course the gear shift doesn’t work. I was so desperate I tried shifting into reverse. Nothing I did had any effect. It was exactly like I was working on a computer and that f*ing little hourglass comes on for no apparent reason and the mouse and the keyboard just go dead in my hand for a few seconds, nothing I click or type makes any thing change. Exactly like that, except I’m trapped inside a metal box that’s cruising down the road, liable to smash into anything that gets in its way.

The road sloped gently downward so I’m picking up speed, not hurtling faster and faster but enough to know this will become a problem. Sooner or later, this’ll be a real problem.

Tags automomobiles, cars, helplessness, powerless, technology, trapped, work-related

Nightmares

Nightmare #228 – Dead Horses

Post author By The Grim Gnome
Post date August 29, 2009
1 Comment on Nightmare #228 – Dead Horses

(Male, 40’s) I have this enduring fear that I’ll end up living on the street in a damp cardboard box and this nightmare for some reason called that up.

“…the carriage itself was jet black as were all four of the horses…”

I was downtown in a big city. It had a pretty thriving city life, though things were very grimy and a big run-down. Like there were two extremely tall wooden houses built with timbers probably a foot or two thick and covered with dirty yellow clapboards. These houses must have been ten stories tall and then BETWEEN them, that is, over the street another house had been built that was supported by being wedged between them. It was a busy street and the supports to the middle house were obviously falling apart. It was just a matter of time until it fell.

I was dressed like a street person. I’m not sure that I actually wasn’t a street person. In one hand I held a large clear plastic bag with ice water and a couple dozen cans of soda. I guess I made my living selling soda to the commuters as they came out of the buildings to evacuate the city and go home to the suburbs.

There was a crowd of people. I had made enough for the day to cover expenses and get a meal so I was about ready to sell the leftovers to this other street person who had the same gig. Then a loud clackitty clanging sound came up the street. It was a horse drawn carriage. It looked like a couple had just gotten married, because the woman was dressed in a frilly white dress and the guy was in a tux complete with a tall top hat. Except the carriage itself was jet black as were all four of the horses.

And the strangest part was that three of the four horses were dead. They hung lifeless in their harnesses while the fourth and final horse dragged the whole carriage along. The people in the carriage acted as if it was nothing to have three dead horses attached to the carriage, perhaps as long as things kept moving along they didn’t really care about how it happened.

Tags animals, death, work-related

Nightmares

Nightmare #224 – Workplace Panic

Post author By The Grim Gnome
Post date August 7, 2009
1 Comment on Nightmare #224 – Workplace Panic

“…As I kept talking, my voice started to fail. I was unable to make any words, just the honks and squeaks that might come out of a saxophone…”

(Male, 40’s) To my knowledge I’ve never had an actual “panic attack” but those are exactly the words I’d use to describe this terrifying dream I had the other night. I was at work talking with a co-worker in the hallway of an unfamiliar building. She was explaining how the IT department, that is, our department were entirely unable to manage certain key attributes of the computers we’d deployed just last spring. As I asked more questions about what that actually meant, I learned that the computers couldn’t communicate on the network, though there would be no error given to suggest the attempt didn’t succeed, and what’s even better, these computers couldn’t reliably be counted upon even to save data to their own hard drives. Again, no error message would be given. My co-worker was telling me all of this in a matter-of-fact, world-weary sort of way, I gather the same way that we were supposed to inform the users. But I started going crazy. I couldn’t believe the callous attitude. I also couldn’t believe that there hadn’t been daily if not weekly memos from the IT director warning the users that, basically, none of the work they were performing was safe in any way. As I kept talking, my voice started to fail. I was unable to make any words, just the honks and squeaks that might come out of a saxophone if you didn’t know how to play it. My direct manager had been listening in but at some point, she had wandered off and this frustrated me because she needed to hear about these problems.

At this point, I found it impossible to stand still anymore so I just walked off down the hall. It was an unfamiliar, one-story building with offices that looked like elementary school classrooms. I was trying to find my cell phone. Inside these offices were large desks that were covered in construction paper, safety scissors (remember those? the kind with blunt tips so students couldn’t stab each other?) pots of that sticky white glue like they used to have in kindergarten… all this stuff on the surface of these executive’s desks. I needed to find my cell phone because I could tell there was a conversation I needed to be a part of. I could “hear” part of it when I held a can of spray paint. But it was white paint. I needed to find a spray can of black paint because I needed to spray paint my hair black. I started just running up and down this hallway, looking into similar offices, entirely unable to relax. I grabbed onto the can of spray paint tighter and tighter until my muscles were shaking. It was horrible.

Boy am I glad there’s a weekend coming up.

Tags urban horror, work-related