Tag: work-related

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Nightmares

Nightmare #217 – The Silent Instructor

(Male, 40’s) I had this nightmare earlier this week and I’ve been telling everyone about it. It’s sounds so funny but trust me I was simply terrified in the middle of it.

“…I tried to greet the students and found that I had no voice….”

In the nightmare, I was a science teacher and this was my first day at work. I had the dim sense that I’d quit my current job and that I was finally doing something I really wanted to do. (And this sort of touches with reality. I’ve been giving a series of presentations at work recently. “Teaching” sort of, and I really enjoy it. I do wish I could do that full time.) So I’m a science teacher and this is my first day teaching… and I’m teaching in the exact same classroom where my Dad taught. He was a middle school science teacher. I loved his room when I was a kid. All those weird displays like a human skeleton, animals preserved in jars, oversized models of the human heart… So I was teaching in that very same room.

And just to make sure I did well on my first day, along had come my Mother who sat behind me off to the left. And my wife, who sat behind me off to the right. They periodically said vaguely encouraging things as I prepared for class.

The bell rang and students started to shuffle in. Up until this point I had felt relatively good in the dream, despite the presence of my watchers. I tried to greet the students and found that I had no voice. I busied myself passing out handouts all the while desperately hoping that my voice would return before I had to speak.

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Nightmares

Nightmare #208 – Shopkeeper for the Mob

(Male, 40’s) This is another nightmare I had while I was battling the worst cold I’ve had in years. Feverish dreams are wild!

“”…everything was a front for the Mob..”

I operated a little shop of some kind in a canvas tent pitched in a parking lot beside a highway. There were big bags of coffee beans and by big, I mean probably 50 pounds or so. There also were different kinds of spices and bags of food like it all had been directly imported from other countries.

And everything was a front for the Mob. Though it wasn’t explained in the dream, the set up sounds like there were drugs or guns being smuggled in with the coffee and other items. My position was extremely tenuous. There was really no reason to have an outsider like me so intimately involved with Mob work and I knew it. It was only a matter of time until I was killed. The Mob guys would show up every couple days, cut open a bag of coffee, spill the beans everywhere and then take off. There would be someone holding a gun on me in case I wanted to make some kind of an objection. This one time the Mob people show up and they’ve got someone with them. In fact, it’s someone I work with, a nice enough guy. He chats with me, totally oblivious to the danger he’s in. He’s amazed that I run an import shop in addition to the other job. Then the Mob guys grab him and force him to his knees and without saying anything they shoot him to death right there in front of me. I am simply terrified. Shocked and terrified. I don’t know what to do. The Mob guys back out of the tent. I don’t know if I should run or call the police or what.

Then all of a sudden I’m in an apartment building. I get the sense that it’s also entirely owned by the Mob. I’m in one of the rooms possibly a room where I live and I look out of the door just in time to see a couple Mob guys drag another guy I know up the stairs and thrown him on the landing face down. They put these weights on his arms. The weights look like big coffee cans with a handle on the top. The guy is unconscious. One of the Mob guys prepares a syringe of something, maybe heroin for all I know. Then he backs up and makes like he’s going to throw the syringe like a dart. That part makes me cringe.

All of a sudden he realizes that I’m there, that I’ve been watching everything from just a couple feet away. He turned toward me and started walking. I backed up and at that instant I woke up.

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Nightmares

Nightmare #203 – Accident at the Alien Incinerator

(Male, 30’s) It started off as a normal dream. I was being given a walk-through tour of a place like NASA or something. A large scientific facility and this was the tour for new employees. One of the things we were shown was the incinerator. I remember seeing a small pile of ashes in front of it. We were told to be very careful in cleaning the incinerator because this was where the bodies of the alien creatures were disposed of and if the incinerator wasn’t properly cleaned, we’d risk spreading some kind of alien infection. I made a special mental note to clean the incinerator really well. At the end of the tour, I told the guide that I knew it was all business as usual for them but that I was still finding it kind of hard to get my head around the idea that aliens were real!

“…It wasn’t clear actually whether it really was an accident or whether she did it on purpose….”

So I started working there and things went fine for a few weeks. Then a woman I worked with got careless with the incinerator. It wasn’t clear actually whether it really was an accident or whether she did it on purpose but some the alien virus got out and started infecting people. They turned into some kind of zombie monster. There were strict protocols for how to deal with virus in order to keep it contained.

But some how my 9 year old son got infected. We were locked in a room together. I knew that I had to contain the infection which meant I had to kill him. But he had just started to turn so most of the time I would look at him and he’d be normal. Only every every now and then he’d act very aggressive and throw me around the room. It was impossibly hard but I realized that I’d have to kill him. I got a knife. When he saw the knife he went crazy, so I hid it behind my back. He calmed down. I approached my son and I hugged him, and as I hugged him I sawed off his head with the knife. By that point it was clear that he was a monster but still somewhere inside he was my son. He died mercifully quickly. But his head didn’t fall off entirely. So I had to sort of twist it around and saw for awhile on the other side until it separated.”

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Nightmares

Nightmare #188 – Bubble People

(Male, 40’s) This was pretty much a standard work dream except for the twist at the end. I was at work, though of course the building didn’t resemble the actual building where I work in the least. The dream building was a very tall structure of relatively short hallways, maybe 30 feet long. And by tall I mean absurdly tall, 30 plus stories so tall that is slightly swayed in the wind. The only way to get up and down this long tall building was to use the freight elevator that was on one end of this short hallway. It was a standard freigh elevator, extremely noisy, wide open and quite slow moving. So that was the NORMAL situation.

The NIGHTMARE part of the dream started when we had to evacuate the building quickly. I think it had something to do with zombies but at least within the part of the dream that I remember there were no actual zombies. However, there were people from the upper floors who were somehow flooding down to our floor to use the elevator, I guess. There was something wrong about them. They weren’t zombies and they weren’t even the threat we knew we were supposed to be avoiding. They were smiling broadly and dressed in normal business suits. Except they weren’t walking; they were floating down the hallway toward me. As they approached it became obvious that they weren’t human but they were actually BALLOONS, like balloon animals tied in the shape of humans. They floated with their menacing smiles. I picked up a broom and tried to keep them from touching any of my co-workers as they tried to escape onto the elevator. For some reason, I knew that if the balloon people touched you, their balloon skin would stick to you and you’d be done for. One by one, more of them would stick to you and… well, I didn’t know exactly what would happen but I knew you’d stop being human and you’d end up being like them. Lucky for me it was rather easy to keep them away with the broom because they were so light. However more and more of them kept pushing into the hallway.

I awoke feeling very anxious, uncertain whether I’d saved anyone at all.

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"What We Fear" Uncategorized

Nightmare #182 – Bugs Everywhere

(Male, 30’s) I’m not usually creeped out by insects in everyday life however…

In this dream, I was working at a brand new research facility. Incidentally, the building where I work is actually less than a year old too.) In the dream, everything in this new place was white and all the lights were extremely bright, either from sunlight or from overhead lights. There was just the faintest pattern on the floor, linoleum tile in very light gray and white checkerboard pattern. What all this white helped reveal was that we had a pretty significant problem with cockroaches. Whenever I’d open a cupboard, easily a dozen of the little things would fall out from the shelves almost like a black liquid spilling to the floor where they’d reform into a coherent mass and then run into some nook or cranny. It happened all the time, all day long. They’d appear from the cupboards, the drawers, the desk… everywhere. They were clearly not just an isolated group of bugs, rather we were infested.

I had gotten to the point where the puddles of black roaches almost — ALMOST — didn’t shock me or bother me when my boss in the dream insisted that a female co-worker and myself needed to canvas the neighborhood and find out who was sending us all these roaches. Yes, there was very definitely the sense in my boss’ mind that these bugs were somehow some kind of sabotage or something. So this co-worker and myself stop doing all of the work that WE have to do and go off on this pointless road show. We’re touring all the factories in the area and giving the same lecture. The factories are these ancient monstrosities, red brick with tiny windows very very high up that makes the work floors dark and makes them feel like they’re sunk deep into the ground. They were like factory buildings out of Charles Dickens’ time.

So we’re at one of these factories and it’s my turn to give the talk about roaches and if anyone sees any to let us know. The podium to address all the workers is about ten feet tall and made from soft red clay bricks. I climb to the top of the podium and at this instant I can see myself from the perspective of the crowd. I’m up there talking about roaches… when in fact the ENTIRE FLOOR of this factory is a mass of roaches, running here and there. It’s almost like a carpet or a field where the stalks of grain are all just black and are being blown back and forth by the wind. The roaches are running over the toes of people’s work boots and over the toes of my co-worker’s shoes but no one seems to mind. Do I have to point out that since I was now watching the speech from the perspective of the audience that these bugs were crawling over ME as well? I tried not to lift my feet because I could just imagine them crawling up my pant legs. But I did move my feet a little and it felt like I was stuck in molasses or scorched motor oil. Sticky. Black. There was absolutely no possibility that I could run away.

When I reach the part of my speech where I’m explaining that we’re concerned about the roaches, all of the bugs stop and prick up their antennae like they’re listening. Then they all start pouring, literally as if they were a shiny black liquid, they start pouring down this brass drain in the floor. For some reason, I had the sense that they were all heading for our brand new facility, that they were going to flood the place. Our speech wasn’t successful; our boss was going to be very upset.

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Nightmares

Nightmare #176 – The Stone Vampires

(Male, 40’s) Despite the fact that this nightmare was about vampires, the overall feel I had was frustration more than fear. I was a member of a team of about 5 professionals who were looking over a building with the perspective of renting it or buying it. It was a standard building by which I mean a generic office space without cubicles. And it was completely windowless. Sound like the office where you work?

The weird thing was that the place had about a half dozen life-sized marble statues. As we sort of wandered the space, these statues would quickly turn into flesh and blood, living (or I guess non-living) vampires, attack one of our group, then change back to a statue. We’d rush over and would notice the mutilated corpse and not realize that the statue had anything to do with it. This happened over and over but no one listened when I suggested “Hey, maybe we should get out of here.” Then I actually *saw* one of the attacks but again, no one was much concerned. It was down to me and the Boss, who incidentally looked like Jean-Luc Picard from Star Trek: The Next Generation. One of the statues changed and tried to attack him but he was able to hold it at an arm’s distance and do something to it to kill it. Now the trick became trying to kill the vampires when they changed but obviously before they changed back to stone which was much harder.

At one point there were two vampires attacking me — it probably doesn’t matter but they were female vampires with flowing glittery skirts, like they were nightclub vampires — and the only thing they could grab onto was one of my fingers which I kept them from biting, though I must confess I was getting pretty tired of being human at that point with all the drudgery of office work, the stupidity of my co-workers and the arrogance of my boss. But we defeated the vampires that were in the main room of the office.

My dream ended when I opened the double doors of a closet and there were two more, female vampires.

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Nightmares

Nightmare #174 – Co-worker’s Dogs

(Male, 30’s) I’ve recently been transferred at work from one building to another and I have to say I’m pretty happy I don’t have to deal with a particular woman at the other location anymore. She was one of those people who can’t stop talking and furthermore, who only talk on and on about themselves. I think she may have liked me because my sense was that she gravitated to me especially.

In the dream, I had gone back to the old location for some reason. I think it was just to say hi to my co-workers. I looked down this long corridor and I saw this talkative woman. She waved at me enthusiastically. She had beside her two very large dogs. I think they were terriers. I waved back to be polite and when the dogs saw me, they took off running down this long corridor toward me. I’m not a “dog person” in life that is I don’t have a dog but I like dogs. When these large creatures bounded down to me, I wasn’t afraid, even though they were barking. Some dogs do that when they’re glad to see someone. I started petting one of them and someone said, “Oh you shouldn’t have started to pet it. That just makes ’em angry.” The next thing I knew the dog had literally swallowed my entire left hand right up to the wrist. The other dog bit onto my arm a little higher up. I started to panic. It wasn’t so much because it hurt because it didn’t really hurt. Rather, I was trapped, held in place by these large dogs. I looked down the hallway for the woman to see if she was going to, well, call off the dogs. And she was gone. For that matter, there was no one anywhere. I didn’t want to cry out but I was really getting scared. I didn’t know what the dogs were going to do to me next.

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Nightmares

Nightmare #145 – The Airless, Shadow-filled School

(Male, 40’s) I had this dream three times last night, that is, I woke up twice and fell back asleep into this dream. I wear one of those breathing masks for sleep apnea so I suspect that figured in there.

In the dream, I was wearing something like diving gear or like a very light weight space suit and I was inside a very futuristic school. The school was held inside an eight sided room. The walls were thick at the bottom, probably 3 feet thick, and gradually got thinner as they approached the ceiling. They were some kind of dark metal. I got the sense that there might only be four rooms aboard this school. I say aboard because it felt like we were floating, maybe in space, maybe in water. The whole craft would sometimes shift a little to one side of the other like a boat on a lake.

But there was nothing sinister about any of that. The strange part was that we had been boarded by darkness or something that gave off darkness. I know that sounds crazy but darkness poured into the room initially almost like a fluid, like a gas. But it didn’t behave according to gravity, that is it flowed up along the walls at times and it also didn’t seem to dare enter the whole room. The darkness would flow upwards and fill areas of the craft. The hallway outside was filled first, perhaps before we even knew what was going on. We heard sounds inside the dark, loud scraping sounds like extremely heavy metallic chairs being dragged along metal floors. The darkness was inside the room too. Everything seemed discontinuous, like different moments had been cut and pasted together. We kept losing people. They would be there one instant and entirely gone the next. We had no weapons, no way to defend ourselves but as of yet there was nothing to defend ourselves against: there was just nothing there. This was pretty much how things were for the first two parts of the dream: an evil foreboding darkness that crept ever closer with some unclear but evil purpose.

In the third part of the dream the school had changed. It was now immense but the same geometry of the rooms hadn’t changed. It was almost as if that small school I had been inside before was just a cell that had just started to grow and divide and now it was full grown. The floor didn’t move anymore so perhaps it had anchored itself on something. The hallways were much larger and the darkness no longer roamed the halls and rooms; it had grown into the structure of the school itself. The hallways were patrolled by tanks, actual armored tanks with gun turrets though they to were shaped to be overly broad on the base. In this part of the dream, there were more people, not many maybe a dozen, but they were offering absolutely no resistance to the darkness. I was trying to sneak along one of these hallways and get access to a library. I could see the room I needed to get to. It was filled floor to ceiling with actual books on shelves which felt kind of strange because everything else in this dream was so high-tech. The only thing keeping me from there was the patrolling tank that seemed to scan the halls erratically, randomly. The dream faded just as I slipped inside the library.

Categories
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 #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 #134 – Endless Toil

(Male, 30’s) I don’t know if I can explain how disturbing this dream was, amusing too but disturbing. Maybe if you’ve ever had to evaluate a large amount of someone else’s work it might make a bit of sense. I was reading and grading a very large stack of high school English papers. This part isn’t strange because I’m a high school English teacher. I was writing a lot of comments on each paper, nearly a page handwritten for each paper. But I must have mixed up the stacks of which ones I’d finished, or maybe I put the finished papers on the bottom of the stack but for whatever reason that graded papers got mixed up with the ungraded papers. Pretty soon I found myself writing comments ABOUT MY OWN COMMENTS. I discovered that half way through the stack so I figured I should finish the whole set. But I lost track and pretty soon started commenting again on my own commented comments. Clearly this was going to keep going on for quite some time.

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Nightmares

Nightmare #119 – The Inept Robbery

(Female) This dream is probably as much embarrassing as it is scary. It involves a man I work with who is deceitful and underhanded but in a bumbling, doltish way. For instance, he recently stole a set of computer speakers from a co-worker’s office and tried to pretend he hadn’t, even though they were sitting right on his desk, connected to his computer. When questioned about it, the speakers appeared back in the co-worker’s office, unceremoniously dumped in a pile and this guy acted like nothing had happened.

Regardless, in the dream this jerk is trying to be a serious bad guy. He’s got a handgun and he’s robbing a whole room of people. It felt a bit like a “Great Train Robbery” set up. But he was sort of bungling this robbery too. I thought to myself I’d be damned if I’d let this idiot have my wedding ring so I slipped it off and buried it deeply in my bra. When he came around to me, I told him I had nothing. He leered in “Give me your JEWELS” like he was a bit more trying to be a pirate now rather than a train robber. And I showed him my fingers and there there were no rings on them. So he pats me down, quite roughly and thoroughly in fact but he is still too stupid to find my ring.

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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.

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #109 – Office Humiliation

(Male, middle-aged) This wasn’t a vampire or witch kind of nightmare but I woke up with my heart racing, unable to breath, terrified more than any horror movie ever made me feel. I was at work but the room was much larger than the rooms at work and it felt much more formal. There was real wood wainscotting on the walls and thick ornate molding around the windows. But there was virtually no furniture in the room. My boss — my real-life supervisor, who if I can say so is a an over-paid prick — was sitting in the only chair. I say he’s a prick but we’ve never directly had a conflict, not anything serious. Well, we had it out in this dream. Everything was verbal. He just sat in the chair and leaned back and rolled himself around the room like he was having fun. He attacked me personally, viciously, with petty sarcasm. I tried to counter him, tried to hold my own but all he did was laugh and I knew he was right to laugh. There was nothing I could do to him, nothing I could say that would have any material effect on him. I started to feel a physical sensation inside my chest, like my heart and lungs were literally deflating like a child’s balloon. It was difficult to keep my chest from collapsing in on itself. My shoulders started arching forward toward each other. I couldn’t stand. I fell to my knees. And all the while this stupid prick keeps laughing at me.

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #106 – Icy Skyscraper, Snowy Death

(Male) I was in a very large city that was located right beside a large body of water. Could have been Chicago, could have been New York, could have been Toronto… The city had been hit with an unprecedented winter storm, one that had gone on for weeks… months? There certainly weren’t many people left and the sense that that they’d abandoned the city or died. Survivors were able to get from building to building through underground passages. I had gone from the main building where we had set up camp to a neighboring building. I looked out through a window at a skyscraper, one of those glass windowed skyscrapers. It stood really close to the water and the spray from the water would hit the side of the building and freeze immediately. The ice built up and built up over these weeks upon weeks until there was a strange ice sculpture attached to the side of the building, almost as large as the building itself. The ice swooped out like the arms of a ghost, like the shape of the wind itself. It seemed like the weight of the ice would have the power to topple the building over soon.

I went to a different window. This one was just underneath the “snow line.” Snow had fallen so deeply that the first few floors of all buildings were submerged in snow. I looked out one of the window that was covered in snow but not too deeply. Light still got in and I was able to see shapes outside. There was someone out there! It was someone I knew, someone from work. He was laughing and it seemed like he was trying to walk along on top of the snow, unaware how dangerous this was, how unevenly packed the snow was, how he could fall through the crust on the top and suffocate. For some reason I thought I could save him. I opened the window and snow poured in the window. I estimated I was just 20 feet away from him. The snow here seemed very soft and uncompacted. I thought somehow that I could “swim” up to the surface of the snow. I jumped out of the window. I stamped my feet and compressed the snow underneath me then scraped more off above my head, gradually moving upward. But I eventually loosened too much and made my little cave unstable. Snow started to tumble down on me. It was light at first but then it trapped my legs. It got more deeply buried. It hammered into my chest, trapped my arms. I tried to thrash but I was trapped. I was suffocating.

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #103 – Self-Inflicted Injury

(Male, early 30’s) This was a quick little dream I had between the snooze alarms. I was heading off to work and I just got into the car. It seemed like a slightly larger car than the one I usually drive. I slammed the door and I realize that I was in such a hurry that I haven’t brought my leg into the car so I have just slammed the door onto my leg. I don’t remember actually feeling pain in the dream but I remember yelling like I would have if I had hurt my leg.

But the weird part of the dream is that I tried closing the door again, and I slammed the door on my leg AGAIN. This time I thought I must have broken the bone, that I really should take myself into a clinic to have it checked out. So I get ready to do that and I try to slam the door closed again and yet again, I hammer it into my leg. I must have continued to do this 5 or 6 times before the alarm rang again and woke me up for good.

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #102 – Backroad Handout

(Male, 30’s) I am a teacher and in this dream, which I’ve had four or five times, I’m on my way to work. I take a couple back roads on my way and somewhere along the line I get a little lost. I’m driving down a dirt road, not exactly certain where I am, and there in the middle of the road several people are standing. I slow down and roll down my window to talk with them and they offer me a gun to take to work. They highly encourage me to take it. So I do. It’s a handgun. I keep driving and I find my way to work and then I’m walking down the hallway at school when I realize that I still have the gun in my hand. What the heck am I doing? Why didn’t I get rid of it on the ride in or at least leave it in the car? I’m embarrassed, actually quite scared that someone will see me with this thing. I try to stuff the gun into my pocket but it won’t fit. I wake up feeling afraid and uneasy.

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #78 – Office Anxiety

(Male, middle-aged) You can’t honestly tell me that most of the nightmares that people submit aren’t more like this one. Just painful, realistic work-place related stupidity. And I should probably mention that I’m sitting here in the MIDDLE of my vacation, when my dreams should be about swimming pools and pina coladas and here I am dreaming about the jerks I work with who are miles away.

So in the dream, I’m at work and it’s kind of a strange building. It feels a little bit like a subway station because there’s ceramic tile on the walls and floor. The secretary’s desk is also covered with this gray ceramic tile. I’m in a hallway and the hallway is filled with people going this way and that. A woman I work with — she’s got red hair and a green pant suit — walks up to me and starts accosting me even before she gets very close to me. “There you are! Why haven’t you replied to that e-mail I sent you? I’ve sent you TWO e-mails and you haven’t replied to either one…” But what was really strange is that she didn’t even slow down to yell all this at me. She just kept walking past me until by the very end she was probably 30 feet away, walking backward, yelling louder. The woman didn’t really have any interest in communicating what her problem was much less in getting my help to fix it. It seemed she just wanted to yell at someone for a little while.

I guess the real nightmare is that’s exactly the kind of situation I have to look forward to when I go back to work.

Categories
Fears & Phobias

Phobia #2 – Closing Time Terror

(Male) This isn’t exactly a phobia but you also ask for “odd aversions.” And I REALLY can’t stand being in a store or really any place for roughly the hour before they close.

If I wanted to make this aversion sound logical and defensible I’d say that I used to work in a shop where I just HATED everyone who walked through the door during that last hour or so because all I really wanted to do was go home and not help people.

But there’s something else working here too, like a childhood fear of abandonment. I still have this strange fear that I’ll get locked in someplace and that instead of security guards, there’ll be Dobermans. I must have seen a movie with this as the premise sometime when I was a kid and it scarred me for life. Y’know a guy locked in a department store who has to survive until the store opens the next day.

Stores that are open 24/7 are a Godsend!

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #33 – The Avenging Spirit

(Male) This is such a politically incorrect dream, I can’t believe I’m telling you this but I was in a strip mall someplace and one of the stores was selling these just wonderful 100% Alpaca sweaters. All hand knitted. Earth-tones. Delicate patterns. Really lovely sweaters. The trouble was that a friend of mine had shoplifted one and now was experiencing threats on his life. And really odd threats, like poisonous blowdarts narrowly missing him

And I figured out somehow that it was a Central American avenging spirit or something that was getting even with him for stealing the sweater. So – and this made more sense in the dream – I was going to BUY a sweater and then give my friend the properly purchased sweater and return the stolen one so he’d be all squared up with the avenging spirit. Or something like that.

So I bought a sweater and then immediately I start finding poisonous blow darts aimed at ME. Which makes me realize – again this made more sense in the dream – that it was pissing off the avenging spirit that we even HAD these sweaters not so much how we had gotten them. So I figured, all macho John Wayne-like, that I’ll just have to kill the avenging spirit. I pull out the tiniest little hand gun, honestly the whole thing fit in the palm of my hand. And then instead of tiny little blow darts, I started getting hit with these six foot long spears. I returned fire and we went back and forth – and this is all happening in and among the little trendy shops of this strip mall. I have no idea how many bullets I had to start let alone how many I had left. Then the avenging spirit comes rushing toward me. I fire at it and I’m sure I hit it. Some how it continues running, running away, unaffected. I yelled out at the injustice “I totally hit you” like we were little boys playing.

The avenging spirit stopped running and turned to face me. It was my boss at work. He said “You can’t kill me with that.” I put the barrel right up against his temple. He said “That wouldn’t even penetrate my gray matter.” I pulled the trigger. I was out of bullets.