Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #30 – A Prison of Ice

(Male, early 40’s) I was at work but the building at work was half shopping mall, half military complex. The walls were all dreary cinderblock and the floorplan was a no nonsense labyrinth of corridors probably 15 feet wide. But every now and then you’d turn a corner and there’d be a picture window looking out on the mountains. It was some kind of research facility and maybe a dozen of us worked there but none of us seemed to know the layout of the building very well. The nightmare part started when a huge avalanche of ice pounded down on the facility from the mountains that surrounded us. It was pure ice, no snow, no rock because you could still find one of those windows and look out through yard after yard of diamond shimmering ice and see the mountains out there. We knew the building was pretty strong because it was made of cinderblock but we had no idea how much stress it could take, or for that matter how much ice was left to fall. The air started to feel compressed. It began to be hard to breathe. We all agreed to search the building and see what part seemed to have the least ice so we could begin tunneling out there. One of us, a woman, young, slender with long brown hair, in a mousy brown skirt and white blouse discovered a set of doors that had hardly any ice in front of them. She was able to push it away just by shoving on the door and once the door was open, she panicked. Across the parking lot , she could see some kind of fast food restaurant. She ran over to it, letting the door close and lock behind her, forgetting all about us trapped inside.

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #21 – Saviour, Monster

(Male, 40’s) For awhile I had a lot of dreams about zombies. I mean, a LOT. And they were all work-related which probably says a lot about how I viewed my job at the time.

I was in my office, which is at least a real, four-walls kind of office not a cubicle, even if it is very narrow and has no window. And an absurdly high ceiling, like at least 12 feet. I believe it used to be a storage closet because it’s got a steel door and a very secure lock. This isn’t part of the nightmare–or should I say, that’s just part of the nightmare that is my every day life. Even with my door open I can only barely hear what’s going on in the room outside, just the merest suggestions of what’s going on. I have two servers behind me that crank out a lot of heat and white noise. Again this is all my real life office and that’s pretty much exactly where the dream took place.

I’m in my office, working on my laptop when I hear the normal sounds of work in the other room stop. There’s the sound of a great rush, a great hurry. Then there’s a moment or two of quiet. I went to the door to look out. For the most part the room was abandoned, chairs knocked over, papers everywhere like folks left in a hurry. Then I heard a low moaning, a whole chorus of groaning voices. Zombies, of course. I mean, who doesn’t recognize the sound of a horde of mindless un-dead when they hear them, right? I grabbed my son who for some reason was standing in the room and pulled him into my office. I very quietly closed my door and locked it. The groaning got louder but I knew we’d be safe in this bunker of an office.

The terrifying part is what I heard next. Someone else, another human was out there. I could hear him crouching low next to the door, hiding so the zombies in the hallway couldn’t see him. He was begging me to open the door and to let him in. I hear the zombies come closer and I really, really just hoped they would kill him quickly before they realized that he was trying to get inside the door. I felt horrible. I had saved my son but I felt like a monster.

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #7 – It Wasn’t Lint on his Sweater

(Male, 30’s) I don’t know if this qualifies as a nightmare because I dreamt it when I nodded off at work one day. I was in an elevator of a skyscraper with this other man. We both were wearing business suits and staring straight ahead. When you work in an office building you don’t really make too much eye contact with people in the elevator. The elevator seemed to be taking an extremely long time between floors. The man was picking lint off his suit.

At least I thought I thought he was picking off lint. when I paid attention to him out of the corner of my eye, I realized that he wasn’t wearing a shirt under his jacket. Then what was he picking lint from? I looked at him and saw that he was bare-chested under his jacket. The skin of his chest was bright red like it was brutally chapped, possibly even bloody. And instead of lint, he was pinching these small pustules on his skin and pulling on them. Out from the tiny sores came long white worms the diameter of string. He dropped them to the floor like it was nothing strange. He didn’t seem to care that I was staring at him pulling these white worms. I kept waiting but the door to the elevator to open but it didn’t.

After that dream, I was glad to wake up and get back to work.