When I sleep, it’s either dreamless or pulsing with nightmares. There’s no in-between. (“But Mallory! Everyone dreams, you just don’t always remem–” HUSH NOW.) The odds of a nightmare seem to increase if I take a late-afternoon nap or fall back asleep after waking up too early in the morning, but it’s random enough that I generally have to pray to myself before losing consciousness that I won’t serve myself anything horrifying while I’m sleeping. (It doesn’t help.)
No advice on how to avoid dreaming or how to start lucid dreaming either, please. Horror stories only. In no particular order:
- I’m imprisoned inside of a tree floating slowly down a river to a factory where my soul will be removed from my body and given to my father (not my IRL father, my dream father, who has a beard) in order to extend his lifespan/consume my life whole
- I am being chased by a sinister man through an old movie theater. I am eight months pregnant. At some point I look down to find that I have gnawed through the top of my own pregnant belly and eaten the head of my fetus clean off. (SORRY)
- I wake up internally but not externally; I am imprisoned in my own body and I can neither move nor breathe for about 15-30 seconds (this one happens in real life! It’s sleep paralysis and it’s the worst!). It feels like dying, every time.
Okay, your turn. Make these stories count; I had terrible nightmares last night and I want company.
That my teeth are falling out, one by one. (Yes, I know this is a common anxiety dream.) They just keep crumbling and falling out of my mouth like tiny candies and I’m frantically collecting them in my hands.
I dream with some frequency that I’m trapped in my house while enormous beasts with teeth and claws roam the perimeter. I can’t get out or call for help or do anything other than watch huge, furry creatures come closer and closer and snarl at me through the windows. I don’t want to know what this says about me.
I have the crumbly teeth dream too. My mouth fills up with the crumbles and I can’t seem to spit it all out. It has exactly the same texture as the cement that I had on my braces when I was a kid. It’s not usually scary though, just annoying.
OMG yes, that is the exact texture of my nightmare crumbled teeth. I occasionally also dream that I’m back in braces and have to remove them myself with pliers.
Yes this. Exactly this. I just keep spitting out mouthfulls and it fills right back up. Most frustrating thing ever.
yesss i like how this is the first comment. i too was going to comment about the teeth.
and why do we always have an amazing surplus of teeth to lose in these dreams?
it always starts out subtle. one tooth, then another. i get worried, i call a dentist, i start collecting my own teeth. i put them in pockets and tea cups. i try to say my name, more teeth fall out, i put them in ziplocks. soon i can’t even say words because my mouth is a river of chiclet teeth all pouring out and not only have i lost my teeth i’ve lost my language. crying ensues as i wonder what i’m going to do with so many pockets full of teeth and will my mouth ever stop spitting them out like bad candy.
Yes, this happens to me too! Only usually I’m self-aware of it in the dream, like, “God, I dream about this happening all the time, I can’t believe it’s finally happening FOR REAL” and then I wake up and of course have all my teeth.
Gahhh I thought I was the only one who had halfway-tricked her brain into knowing it’s a dream, and then having her betraying mind being all “BUT THIS TIME IT’S REALLY HAPPENING, SUCKA!”
OMG me too! I swear I spend half my time unsure whether or not I actually have all my teeth.
My tooth-falling-out dreams sometimes get really graphic too, like there’s all sorts of nasty debris stuck in between them or embedded in my gums and when I try to get it out my mouth starts bleeding and all my teeth come out and I see that they’re horrifyingly rotted. Ugh ugh ugh.
I have only had a teeth-falling-out dream once, but it was really graphic (it still makes me shudder to think of it) – my teeth were falling out, and one had cracked open to reveal all the rot inside. I touched it, and it felt horribly slimy and disgusting.
I had a variation on the teeth-falling-out nightmare in which I was pursued by a dozen little gremlins who swarmed over me and started pulling my teeth out. They also plucked out my eyeballs and shoved them into my toothless mouth. This all happened on a cliff ledge beside a waterfall, which feels relevant somehow.
YES I’ve dreamed all the horrifyingly helpless teeth dreams. Teeth rotting, teeth falling out one by one and all at once, some kind of gunk in my mouth I can’t get out. My partner has gotten used to me waking up and making sure all my teeth are in my face.
I was feeling momentarily reassured when I saw the dream in Giant Mechanical Man (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=55XpUekYElo) but then another character responds IN HORROR which made me feel more anxious (even though, yes, it’s a movie).
Whoa! I have both of these same dreams!!! The only difference is that, when I have the animal dream, they’re not snarling or acting aggressive, they just get closer and closer and it carries a terrible sense of dread. I also have a similar one where I’m on a hike and I see a large animal (usually a big white bear, but sometimes it’s just a bison which isn’t even a carnivore) on a mountain across an overlook. It’s far away, but when I see it I feel this impending doom. It’s strange because I actually grew up somewhere with a lot of wildlife around and I’ve seen bears and coyotes and it’s never bothered me in real life.
ugh the fucking crumbly teeth dream. the one where i can feel them swimming around in my gums and they’re just shattering in my mouth. i hate that goddamn dream so much.
I HATE THE TEETH DREAM. It is the worst because it is one of the few dreams I have that actually seem real. Ugh.
I have the teeth one all the time when I’m stressed. Once in awhile my dreambrain decides to up-the-ante and then in, addition to teeth, my skull and spine start to crumble at the touch. And people wonder why I drink. (Nobody wonders why I drink.)
This weekend I woke in pure fear–and it made me realize how nightmares are just pure bodily exhalations of emotion. Scary emotions. In my dream I was playing with a cat (not my cat). It suddenly tuns feral, and I throw it onto a tin roof that has upside down nails affixed. The cat lands on the nails, is crucified for several seconds, then leaps back up and charges toward me, ready to seek feline Christ-risen revenge on me. I awake sweating, and trembling.
I have a strange recurring dream where my cat has an evil twin! Usually I’m playing with a cat that I think is my cat, and then my actual cat walks into the room and I realize that the cat I was playing with is some kind of demon that has assumed her form. As soon as I figure it out, I wake up in total terror, even though nothing that is objectively that scary has happened. I’m glad that I’m not the only person who has frightening cat dreams!
This sounds terrifying, and yet reading it I laughed aloud. I’m sorry. “Feline Christ-risen revenge”.
The worst dream I’ve ever had was a pregnancy dream I had in high school that was incredibly, completely realistic. I went to school and talked to my teachers about how I was going to miss class. I told my parents. I had morning sickness. People talked behind my back.
When I woke up, it took a good 5 minutes for me to talk myself down from it. The sticking point was that I *couldn’t* be pregnant – unless it was a second coming of the virgin birth.
I had one of those too! And the father was Benicio del Toro.
Ditto. I was a cheerleader (I wasn’t a cheerleader) and was sitting dejectedly on the sidelines, feeding my twin baby girls.
I once dreamed I had a baby and gave it up for adoption, and it was amazingly distressing – even when I woke up and knew it wasn’t real I couldn’t shake the feelings of guilt and despair. There was no way I could have been pregnant.
I had a dream that I was being flayed alive. Thank fuck I woke up before whatever was about to happen after that happened. (My nightmares tend to be of the epic medieval torture-horror kind.)
Oh my gods – when I was little, I mean really little, like four or five years old, I remember dreaming I was on top of a hill on a stone table and a lady was “peeling off my skin” because I’d loved her husband. I didn’t understand flaying or adultery, or what an alter was, but I was justifiably freaked out.
Horrific!
Oh my god! That is terrible.
– My mother twists off the arm of a baby monkey like she twists the stems off pears.
-Sinister firemen follow me through the streets then sit outside my house with their fire truck, watching. Their faces are shadowed under their helmets, but I can feel them staring.
-I am back in college again. Same dorm room, same roommates. “Didn’t I graduate?” I think. “Maybe everyone has to go back to college. It must be a thing. I hope my job will let me take this time off. I have too many papers to write to apply for a new job.”
My parents/pets are dying and I have to take them to be euthanized. I inevitably wake up bawling.
When I was about 4 years old I dreamed that my two best friends and I went to Never-Never Land with Peter and Wendy and John and Michael. And Captain Hook captured us and had us all tied up and he cut off all of our heads and in trying to rescue us Tinkerbell accidentally set his ship on fire, but then she sprinkled fairy dust on our heads and our heads all joined up in a line and flew home and I am obviously still scarred from this nightmare. Even worse, I was apparently screaming my head off, but my parents could not wake me up. Damn night terrors.
Somewhat more recently, the night I finished reading Ender’s Game, I dreamed that Ender killed me. Just stuck me through with a sword and I fell and rolled down a hill, and then I was trapped in my dead body for what felt like hours. I couldn’t move or wake myself up or anything. It was awful.
That last ties in scarily well with Ender’s own dreams of killing people…
My worst nightmares typically include some mix of (a) a sibling being in danger, (b) my parents no longer being who they should be, and (c) me being pregnant. In real life, I have one brother, two lovely parents, and I’m on the pill. Here are the ones involving (a).
My senior year of high school I had several nightmares involving the repeated death and resurrection of my twin sister. In the first, we were investigating a crime ring together, and had descended to the basement of a building during a sting. Suddenly, all the lights went out, except the dark red glow of a vending machine at the foot of the stairs. When an emergency light flickered back on, my twin was slumped next to the vending machine with a fat needle sticking out of her neck, connecting her to the machine, which had drained most of her blood. Her eyes were still open. The next thing I knew, I was being held in contempt of a court for flipping out at a suspect in her death, who they had declined to convict.
The second dream, I was exploring some kind of lush, watery, Atlantic-type world. It was populated but in ruins. Parts were entirely underwater (note: another deep fear is drowning) but other parts had water routed into huge, transparent pipes. Before I woke up, I had reached the outlet of one of the pipes, and as I reached it, the waterlogged body of my twin tumbled out. She still had her eyes open. She was alive, in a way, but angry and vengeful, and not herself.
The third dream, my twin and my (real) brother had been captured into slavery by other members of my family, notably my aunt and uncle, who were part of some cult, wearing burlap robes and blank white masks over their faces. My twin had already been killed. In order to save my brother, I had to sacrifice myself, but it was my dream so I couldn’t die, and couldn’t save him.
That first one is so horrifying. Good lord.
Many of my nightmares of late have been directly lifted from Doctor Sleep and NOS4A2, lots of children with needle teeth, do not recommend.
My vivid nightmare dreams often become reoccurring dreams where my subconscious builds the story and I learn more about my horrible dream space with each new visit.
In the most recent one I dreamed of a serial killer who targets his victims in nightclubs by puking all over them. When they leave to clean themselves up he hacks them to pieces, puts them in garbage bags and disappears.
What I’ve learned since having this dream a few more times is that he only kills pregnant women and he takes their bodies and feeds them to a monster in the sewers.
Holy crapballs! That’s scary!
I have instalment dreams too, although mine aren’t normally all that terrifying. They’re set in a school that is a hybrid of the two schools I went to and my university and there has been a parallel life running there for years. Unless of course that’s the real one and this is the recurring dream…
I’ve got to research this now! I never knew other people had these dreams.
I bet it means we’re really smart or whatever.
DEFINITELY.
A few months ago I dreamed I gave birth, but my baby looked like a baby monkey. I was so horrified by my monkey baby I neglected it until it eventually suffocated in a blanket. I woke up filled with guilt and shame and promptly burst into tears.
I have also had two dreams where I murdered friends and one where I was shot, but the monkey baby was the worst.
I had a dream once that I gave birth to a frozen chicken. I named my frozen chicken baby Rowena. Then she defrosted. 🙁
i forgot about my murder dreams : it’s always in self defense and i use whatever’s at hand (a broken chair leg or a dinner knife) but then i snap and keep going. i wake up and am all like, “holy shit, dude. that was a bit much, dontcha think.”
Man, baby neglect dreams: the worst. I have zero interest in children, which I’m sure is why I have the dreams, since social pressure suggests this is a Flaw, etc etc. But the whole “Oh shit, I have a baby? How did I forget I have a baby! Now the baby might be dead! I am literally the worst human being ever, who let me breed” is not making me change my mind in a hurry.
I have recurring dreams about rats. I can’t ever run, and I am unable to scream.
It’s happily been awhile since I had a full-on nightmare, which is due in part to learning that I can’t take Sudafed while taking synthetic thyroid hormone. But when I did, the worst dreams of all time were the ones in which I attacked another human being. I often have dreams where I’m running or hiding from someone (or something; definitely had a velociraptor dream once), but occasionally my dream-self will take stock of the situation and decide attack is a better strategy than stealth. And so I’ll dream that I’m trying to violently incapacitate whoever was chasing me, using whatever makeshift dream weapon was close to hand, and it is horrifying.
Side note! One time, I woke up from a violent nightmare short of breath with my heart pounding (this was a reaction to the Sudafed, I now know), but I stayed in bed until my body calmed down and I went back to sleep. When I woke up from the second sleep, I found that my cat had tucked her favorite toy under the covers with me. <3 Cats are the best.
Aw, kitty!
I have those attack dreams too! They’re always in self defence, but people just aren’t staying down and I get more and more violent until I feel like a terrible human being but I can bring myself to give in and be killed.
Yes! And the attacking is always really realistically horrific (and ineffectual — nobody ever dies or stops trying to “get” me or whatever) — the last one I had, which was really recently, involved me stabbing someone in the chest, over and over and over, with a metal nail file. It made horrible dull wet noises and they just wouldn’t fall down and it was really awful.
I get those too! I had one where I was trying to hit an attacker with a baby’s foam rubber building block. It – just- would – not – work.
I am totally about to reveal myself, if either my sisters read the Toast..but,
As a child (7 or 8 years old), I had a dream in which I was sealed naked in a glass coffin à la Snow White. To make matters worse, I was under inspection from my childhood nightmare dream team: Chucky and E.T. (let’s be honest, I’m still afraid of them) Suffice to say it was terrible, and I remember sitting on my father’s lap at the breakfast table the next day, and explaining the nightmare to him. ETA: After that dream, before I went to sleep, I would place stuffed animals strategically around my head, believing that this would make me more difficult to find when E.T. and Chucky came after me in my sleep.
Last night I dreamed that someone was trying to steal the bobby pins that my husband just gave me in my Advent calendar. Boy, I was angry when I woke up!
For some reason I read this as “Chuck E.,” as in “Chuck E. Cheese”. It was still terrifying.
When I was a little kid, I didn’t think you could move when you were asleep, so when I woke up in a different position than when I feel asleep I decided that there were flying monkeys who came out of the wall at night to mess with me. I would set up my stuffed animals around me for protection. The king, and the most important guardian, was my stuffed bear named Gaga.
I don’t know if this is the *worst* I’ve had, but it’s the most recent. Warning, it’s gooey and graphic. I was in my parent’s bathroom, and I had a pimple on my hip. I pick at it, and it starts oozing and the skin around it puckers. I, naturally, pick at it more and more until I’ve opened a gash in my thigh that runs to my knee. It’s open and bleeding and I can see my muscles and bone. My skin is flayed out and peeling off my leg. There is still oozing puss coming from where the pimple was (although now it’s deep into my hip). I am completely horrified, but I can’t stop picking. I wake up when my mother comes in the bathroom and I tell her I think I need to go to the hospital.
I had to perform surgery on myself, and walk around holding my own full bladder by a cord that attached somewhere in my body. Until it was punctured and I could feel myself dying.
I once woke up paralyzed to a dark figure watching me at the end of my bed (the worst), which soon multiplied into countless, identical silhouettes that spanned back into limitless darkness.
I summoned an army of skeletal horrors once. Skeletons of totally unnameable and terrifying creatures chasing me. (In the dream I was terrified but I woke up with a “whoa cool”)
Sweet dreams everyone! I love reading such good nightmare stuff.
Re: thing at the foot of the bed, from Edward Gorey:
“Each night father fills me with dread
when he sits on the foot of my bed;
I’d not mind that he speaks
in gibbers & squeaks
but for seventeen years he’s been dead”
I once had a nightmare that I was being chased by velociraptors through an abandoned farm, which culminated in me stabbing my evil doppelganger in the stomach in a grain silo (looking at your own face while being stabbed is an intensely disturbing image which I had just about managed to forget until just now; THANKS A LOT MALLORY).
Dream velociprators, man. The worst! I would love to see a graph of all the details from our dream reports: so far we’ve got two for velociraptors, several for monkeys, several for babies, and at least one for monkey-babies?
In my velociraptor dream, I was in a marsh, waist-deep in water and surrounded by trees. I couldn’t see the raptors and they couldn’t see me, but I knew that splashing in the water would give me away, so I would try to stay very still until I heard the velociraptors move, and then I would move, hoping their splashing noise would cover mine.
I realized later that this was pretty much a high-stakes dream version of Marco Polo, which I had been playing in a friend’s pool the night before.
FUCK doppelganger nightmares. Nothing worse.
OMG! I also once dreamed about stabbing my doppelganger! After a very long time of being chased through a mansion by an ax-wielding cannibal, who then turned out to be my spouse, who then turned out to be my doppelganger.. We realized we were dreaming but couldn’t wake up, so decided the best course of action would be for her (the doppelganger) to become an evil zombie and me to stab her to death. So we did that. And I woke up. Or “we” woke up. (shiver) SO disturbing.
Running from tornadoes. Always tornadoes.
Me too! The last one I was hiding in a clapboard house but all the homes around it were already being destroyed.
Mein gott!! I always dream about tornadoes.
I had tornado nightmares a lot when I was a kid! It would crouch at the mouth of my neighborhood and we’d know it was coming but it would never actually move closer.
Yes. All the time.
My worst dreams all revolve around missing planes, or being late for work—but there’s always a supernatural/apocalyptic element as well. I’m not just late for work, I’m late for work AND THERE’S ZOMBIES.
I mean the zombie parts are cool but I inevitably end up sprinting down the street on my way to work with a 20lb bug-out bag on my back, being chased by zombies, and I can never get to the office. It just keeps getting further and further away.
Also my boss is usually Admiral Adama from the BSG reboot, and the vision of his pock-faced disapproval as he yells “You’re FIRED!” jolts me awake.
being fired by Admiral Adama is a nightmare in itself, never mind the zombies
love that zombies are really not the main concern in this scenario. Like, man, stuck in traffic again? And ALSO zombies. Jeez.
Read more at http://the-toast.net/2014/12/17/lets-talk-worst-d…
When I was a kid, I had a dream that my mother, sister, and cat had all turned on me and didn’t love me anymore, which stayed atop my personal Worst Nightmares list for at least five years.
In my most recent super creepy dream, I was following a girl of about ten walking to a pond, and we had this conversation:
“Where are we going?”
“To the water.”
“Why?”
“Because that’s where we go.”
“I’ve met you before,” I said, meaning I’d dreamed her before.
“We have never met.”
“I’ve seen you.”
Said playfully, “‘Seeing’ is not the same as ‘meeting.'”
She turned around, and I saw that she was cross-eyed, which didn’t seem to bother her. She reached up and grabbed either side of my forehead.
“I can try to help you remember–you always forget her,” and I knew this referred to another young girl, this one sinister and so far unseen, that I’d had run-ins with before.
She was interrupted by the dream perspective jerking to focus like a movie camera on a patch of empty air twenty yards behind me. “It’s her,” she said, a bit frantic, and she tried to keep hold of me, but my breathing went ragged and I woke up gasping, as if the sinister invisible girl had just ejected me from my own dream before the other girl could help me fight her.
So kudos, brain, for constructing a logically-consistent lucid dream horror story!
That feeling of being suddenly ejected from your dreams by a creepy Someone is the worst. I’ve had something like that happen a couple months ago, and I’m still shuddering.
When I was a kid, I had a dream that my mother, sister, and cat had all turned on me and didn’t love me anymore, which stayed atop my personal Worst Nightmares list for at least five years.
There’s this episode of the Moomins cartoon where Moomin’s appearance is completely altered by a magical hat, and none of his friends and family recognize him, or believe him when he tells them who he is. He’s in tears and trying desperately to convince them while Moominpapa just says, “You don’t look a thing like my son” or whatever. It makes me cry every time – it’s so horrifying to me on a visceral level.
I used to have night terrors as a kid and still regularly wake up screaming because I think there’s someone standing next to my bed, but this is my worst ever:
– A man gets on the bus I’m riding. He is holding a hammer. He swings the hammer full force at my face and before it hits me I notice it’s the sharp, nail-removing part, not the hammer part, that will sink into my head. My vision goes black but I can hear my skull as it’s crushed and other passengers screaming and a scuffle as someone tackles the man before he can hurt anyone else. The sounds get further away as I die.
The morning I woke up shaking and described this dream to my husband he shared his dream about “walking around, taking nice photographs” because his brain doesn’t hate him.
Every once in awhile I dream that I’ve murdered someone, and I have to live with that for the rest of my life. They’re the kind of dreams that seem to last for years, and they’re very vivid. I woke up from one convinced that I had accidentally dreamed somebody else’s dream, or worse, somebody else’s life.
I also have the teeth falling out dream (always such a relief to wake up and realize I still have healthy teeth!) and the buried under snow dream (used to happen a lot more when I was in school and feeling overwhelmed by assignments).
Sometimes I dream that my dad is back in my life (we are estranged, by my choice) and he won’t listen to me when I say no. I am usually saying no to pretty mundane things like do I need help with laundry or whatever, but he just doesn’t hear me say no and does whatever he wants. I hate these ones. 🙁
I get the murder dream too, but my twist is that I spend the entire dream trying to find a way to dispose of the body. No fun waking up from that, no.
I have the murder one too. Often, when the murder is happening, ‘I’ will be someone else, some other character, and kind of aware it’s a dream, and then once it’s done I ‘realize’ with a start that it was me doing it and I really did do it and now a whole bunch of lives are completely ruined. Then I agonize over how I could have just ‘absentmindedly’ murdered someone like that, and how I’m going to go to prison, and just when my life was finally getting good!
This is also, now that I look at it, the basic structure of my ‘Oh god why didn’t I get an abortion???’ pregnancy/child rearing nightmare. In those I begin ‘in medias res’ being too far along for an abortion/in labor/holding a baby I realize is mine, and then the same sort of ‘Holy shit what was I thinking???’ thing starts up. At least in those there’s always ‘Ok, but adoption, that’s a thing,’ but there’s still, for me, a deep body-horror at the idea of pregnancy and childbirth. I wake up from murder dreams just relieved it wasn’t real, but when I wake up from pregnancy dreams that Unheimlich sticks around for awhile.
The worst part of both dreams is this sense of helplessness that I betrayed myself, made some thoughtless decision that I now have to pay for.
One word: Zombies. Zombies are coming for me, for my family, for everyone, and we have to leave. But wait, the roads are blocked by zombies! And then I have to hide. But they’re still coming. Sometimes, I need to fight off whole hordes of them. Other times, they’re coming slowly up the stairs and all I can do is cower and wait.
Zombies can be pacified by bananas: all you have to do in those dreams is find bananas.
No lie, sometimes the grocery store full of zombies can be pretty hairy, but the dreams have less visceral horror.
Earlier this year I became convinced that my house – a turn-of-the century home in the historic district of our city – was haunted. For a period that lasted roughly three weeks, about every other night I’d be startled out of a dead sleep by someone either screaming or loudly stage-whispering my name. I’d awaken to loud banging on my bedroom door, the doorbell ringing (our house’s doorbell is one of those old-fashioned loud-as-hell metal bell things), and/or hideous claw-like scratching sounds on the floor, the ceiling, and most disturbingly, the outside of my bedroom window, which is on the second floor.
It turns out my house isn’t haunted, only my brain is. I have hypnagogic hallucinations (a form of sleep paralysis that occurs when the brain is transitioning from wakefulness to sleep. It’s apparently somewhat common in people with insomnia, which I also have).
GOOD TIMES
That’s horrifying.
…and reminds me a some of my worst waking up experiences. I’m sorry about the haunted brain! (what a great term though)
I’ve had dreams where I hear someone screaming my name, or hear loud banging and bells ringing. It is absolutely horrifying.
I rarely remember my violent bad nightmares like the one in this thread for longer than a few days or weeks (my heart hurts for all of you guys), but the one that recurs, and doesn’t seem that bad to anyone else, is always the same.
I am late. I am late, late, late. The things I’m doing, which I have to do, are taking forever to do, and I am late.
I know it doesn’t sound traumatic, but I wake up gasping and can’t get back to sleep for thinking about every mistake I ever made.
Samesies. It is very rare for me to have a dream with gore or actual physical danger. Mine are anxiety dreams where I’m late, or somehow inappropriate for the place where I am, or super frustrated about something. I think the most frustrating recurring dream I have is the one where I don’t have peripheral vision. Seems simple enough but makes me SO ANGRY in the dream.
I don’t lose peripheral vision, but suddenly everything is just SO BRIGHT and I am squinting but I can’t see anything and why is there SO MUCH LIGHT HELP WHERE AM I.
I am also regularly wandering around without pants or shirt trying to pretend everything is cool, or I am trying to go to the toilet in places with hilariously tiny privacy doors.
Oh woah! Reading this I suddenly remembered–for the first time in years–the recurring dreams I used to have as a kid in which I was going blind. Regular anxiety-dream stuff, where I had something to do that I couldn’t accomplish, but things would get darker and more opaque until I just couldn’t see anything, but neither I nor anyone else would acknowledge that something was wrong.
I also have dreams the content of which is fairly neutral but from which I wake sweating and sobbing. It is not very exciting externally but really pretty terrible.
Oh god I have so many of these, usually involving the packing of some kind of suitcase and I am late late late to catch a plane/bus/train/rocket ship and I simply cannot make items stay in the suitcase or use my hands the way they were designed or remember what a human needs to bring on a trip.
And then once the suitcase is packed I forget to put it in the car, but it’s okay because I have a ton of errands to run before I go to the airport anyway for some reason so I can just double back and get it but every errand spawns three more errands and when I’m at home I realize I didn’t do the stuff I like to do before a trip like take out the trash so it doesn’t stink, and my flight leaves in ten minutes and I haven’t even made it to the airport oh god.
Also one time when I finally got to the dream airport, it was made of popsicle sticks.
I’m getting anxious just reading that because exponentially multiplying errands aggghhhhh.
I recently got through everything only to completely lose the Alice Springs airport. I have never been to Alice Springs, or it’s airport.
Yes. I have anxiety dreams, and I wake up from them feeling defeated and exhausted. Either I’m buried under a pile of obligations I didn’t even know I had, or I’m watching rats multiply. I have two pet rats in the real world. In dreamworld, I suddenly have dozens of them, and more keep popping up every time I look around. I don’t have enough cages for them to live in. I don’t have enough food to give them. And worst of all, I can’t tell which ones are my two, because there are just so many and their markings are so similar.
Ahhhh! I used to have those same kind of dreams when I had a fish tank! It would start small — I’d notice a fish in the tank that I didn’t remember having before. Then, every time I looked at the tank, there would be more and more strange fishes, until it was crammed full of fish, or it broke and I was desperately trying to scoop flopping fishes up off the floor, &c.
I think the mundane nightmares are the worst. If I wake up in a panic from a dream where my best friend is cutting my face off, that makes sense and my SO is pretty understanding. But I have a recurring nightmare in which I can’t find my favourite pen, and I usually wake up crying, because I CAN’T FIND MY PEN, and in the dream that’s the most terrifying thing ever, for some reason.
In real life I am fairly laid-back about pens.
I’ve had a few where I had gotten back with my ex, and neither of us wanted to be together and we were both really miserable, so I went to my former FWB who (in real awake life) had been trying to persuade me to start up with him again once I started seeing the gentleman caller, and said ‘I don’t mind cheating on this one, let’s get to it’.
I was a turtle on a quest, and I had to cross a jungle, and teamed up with a tiger to get me across the bits I couldn’t manage, but the tiger turned on me and then I was trying to escape it, but being a turtle in the jungle, I wasn’t having much success. Really frightening and vulnerable feeling.
On the other hand, I would probably watch a movie called “Turtle Quest: Return to the Jungle” no questions asked.
I once had a nightmare that I’d cheated on my girlfriend and was sitting on a bed freaking out about it while the woman I had just slept with cruelly mocked my distress and told me to forget all about my other lover and stick with her. Weird thing was, that woman was my girlfriend. I failed to notice this somehow until I woke up in a dead sweat and pretty much went ‘gasp, pant, wait, what?’ Cheating on your significant other with your significant other: whole new level of meta neuroticism.
I am late some sort of very important appointment, and I keep trying to call and let them know I’m late, but my phone won’t work or I don’t have the number or whatever and every time I look at the clock it’s an hour later and I wake up in an absolute panic.
Also I dream a lot about my exes – my brain likes me to relive every nasty thing that ever happened in bad relationships ever.
Oof. I had a bad breakup about 2.5 years ago and for probably a year after that, I regularly dreamed that the ex and I had reconciled, and then every time I woke up I had to come to terms again with the fact that I’d probably never see her again.
So the dreams were great, but waking up was pretty shit.
When I was in college and All the Shit Was Hitting All the Fans, I had this recurrent dream where I would wake up and everyone in the world would have disappeared — except that I would see these shadowy shape things from the corners of my eyes no matter where I looked. And then I would feel these little light touches on my back and my arms and my face.
I would start running to try and get away, but then they’d start grabbing at me and then hurting and finally drag me down and I would wake up yelling and scare the shit out of my college roomie (sorry, Sara). These days I take anxiety meds and just have dreams with seventh grade creative writing symbolism. o/
My most frequent one is that someone (usually my mother) is being ridiculous and hurtful or disrespectful and won’t stop no matter how nicely I ask, and I get more and more worked up and upset until finally I’m crying and screaming and hitting them and now I’m the worst person ever and their treatment of me was totally justified.
Also I can never, ever, ever operate a phone in a dream, even to call 911. The buttons are all mislabled, or the little touchscreen numbers move around so I can’t catch them.
YES, the can’t-use-the-phone dreams! The call is vital but I can never get the number right 🙁
Most commonly, snakes. Snake in every conceivable situation and permutation. Snakes in a box, snakes with a fox. Snakes on a boat, snakes with a goat. Definitely also had the paralysis one. Other than that it’s all being overwhelmed by an enervating feebleness that prevents me from stopping someone/thing from killing me/everyone I love.
But that’s all run-of-the-mill stuff, my favorite nightmare I remember was from when I was around six.
In the nightmare I was living in some sort of magical two-sided shadow box with a lot of compartments. On my side of the box I was living in one of the compartments and a friendly dragon was cozily ensconced in another. Possibly there were other denizens, I just remember the dragon because of the unalloyed horror of his fate. On the other side of the shadow box there lived a terrifying witch. Unfortunately, she also hoarded all of this small universe’s food, without which we would starve.
One day the dragon tried to sneak over to the other side to steal some food. But she caught him. She caught him and she punished him. With tickles. Terrible, dreadful tickles. I heard it all as I cowered in my little compartment shaking with fear, listening to her tickle that dragon mercilessly while he begged her to stop, knowing full well that she would come for me next. The dream ended when I got so scared I woke up in tearful hysterics. It haunts me to this day…
I don’t tend to have reoccurring nightmares, but I do have reoccurring nightmare themes. The most common ones are nuclear apocalypse dreams. Sometimes it’s the aftermath and I’m wandering around abandoned buildings looking for other survivors but finding nothing but creepy dolls and teddy bears. I usually have to look after a small child in these. The most vivid and memorable of these happened when I was 15 and my family was homeless for a while and staying with did ant relatives. I was at the playground near my childhood home and I saw the mushroom cloud over the woods, we piled into the car and got stuck in a gridlock, we eventually ended up in a refugee camp. Everything was covered in grey mud, & there were crying people covered in sores. When I woke up it took a good 5 minutes to convince myself it wasn’t real. Besides that nothing, besides waking up w/ the distinct feeling that I’m drowning when my alarm goes off.
Years and years ago, when I was single, I dreamt I pulled some fella and went back to his flat. I was a bit freaked out when I got there as it looked like the flat of an elderly lady.
The fella asked me to go and look in the wastepaper basket in the far end of the room. As I was approaching it, I could hear him very close behind me humming nursery rhyme tunes under his breath. I got to the bin and looked down.
And inside was my severed head staring back up at me.
Ugggggh I used to have sleep paralysis ALL THE TIME, and it was always accompanied by horrible, demonic dreams/ visions. It doesn’t happen much any more; I think it was related to how f-ed up my sleep routines were when I was a teenager. It’s seriously the most frightening thing that’s ever happened to me.
I occasionally get sleep paralysis, but I don’t really dream, so usually I’m just laying there like “….welp.”
I have teeth dreams frequently. Sometimes they’re loose and just fall out, sometimes I bite into an apple and they fall out, sometimes they just crumble.
Last night/early this morning I dreamed I was in my car driving down a highway. The only other people on the highway were famous rappers (??). I accelerated too much, and was going too fast coming into a curve, and woke up after losing control of the car but just before impact.
Usually my intense dreams are more thriller than horror- I’m working against a government agency that wants to catch me, that kinda stuff.
There was one dream I had last month or so where I and a few other people were being held and tortured, and then when we escaped, it turned out that we’d only had a false escape and were easily recaptured. I blame The Killing S2 for that one.
i have night terrors. they’re of the “home invasion and i can’t move to get away or scream for help” variety. i wake up sweating and shaking and raw throated and it’s really really REALLY hard to get back to sleep because that shit just went down in the room/bed i’m in. aaaaaahhh!!!
actual nightmares?
– i’m chewing bubble gum and it gets stuck in my teeth and i try to pull it out but it grows and grows and grows until i choke and suffocate.
– i return home to find that, while i’ve been away on an extended trip, many small animals (usually fish) have died from my neglect. (sometimes i discover that one fish has eaten all the other fish and now there’s a bulge eyed, fanged, blood thirsty fish monster lurking in the green water.)
– i realize i’m a murderer and i vaguely recall where i’ve disposed of the bodies but i’m still not SURE i’m really a murderer so i try to find the bodies to prove to myself that i really DID do it.
THE GUM YES
OMG the gum, I thought I was the only one! Also, ditto on the home invasion and forgetting to feed pets.
finding the bodies
even trying to find the bodies…
When I was doing the nicotine patch I would regularly dream that a villian was sneaking around trying to hurt my mom and I would have to strangle him or break his neck but he would struggle a LOT and it was so vivid and tactile. What the hell is in those patches?
I have heard again and again from friends that chantix is literally nightmare fuel.
I have the same thing – never remember dreams that aren’t terrible, usually only remember those if it’s been a nap or going back to sleep in the morning. I usually don’t remember them past a few minutes after waking up, which I feel is probably as learned defense mechanism. Like this morning, I’m working from home so when my alarm went off I didn’t have to get up right away, so I fell back asleep and had a terrible work dream but all I remember now was that it was about job descriptions. What can be terrifying about job descriptions? I don’t know exactly, but my day job is in HR.
There is one I’ve never been able to forget, one image from it at least, and it’s another pregnancy one. I’m pregnant and I do not want to be. So I try to abort it myself, but I’m at Mandarin, so I do it with chopsticks on top of the buffet. The fetus slides into a dish that’s red sauce with some kind of meat and people, totally oblivious to me, keep coming by and hacking off chunks of the fetus and eating it with the red sauce that is now half blood. My blood.
Gah!!
I AM ALWAYS ESCAPING. the location / characters/ reasons change but I am constantly fleeing and if we are caught ALL OF THE BAD THINGS WILL HAPPEN
I have had some years-long bouts with insomnia too and it’s still a huge relief to see other people have the hypnagogic hallucinations– I’m not the only person whose name gets called at weird hours of the night!
My nighttime visions also included a “ghost cat” (my dad had a cat and I don’t, but apparently my brain stored the noise of it meowing in my ear to scare me with years later) and jet planes taking off (from college, because the Blue Angels regularly practiced over campus.)
Oh hey! The other night I dreamed I was driving along a lakeside road in northern Wisconsin, enjoying my tunes, when the sedan in the next lane starts pulling ahead of me-
and I see a baby sitting on top of the trunk. Maybe eight months old. Just old enough to grow a little fine hair and scoot around a bit. And the baby is scooting and squirming around right now, just as though the baby was not on top of a moving car, and the car zooms along the tar-and-chip road, doing sixty-five and counting, just as though there were not a little baby perched on top of its trunk.
(I realize, through the sort of instant exposition dreams provide, that the driver had needed free hands that afternoon, which meant putting the baby down on the first convenient raised surface, which meant the trunk of the Buick. Ten busy minutes later, they realized they needed to get up to the bank before it closed, which meant leaving now. And after the bank, they could finally drop off those folding chairs at Dave’s. God knows the chairs have cluttered up the back seat long enough.)
What do you do, when you’re in one lane, and there’s a car in the other lane with a baby on its trunk? Do you honk? Do you roll down the window and scream? (What if you manage to convey the situation, and the driver instinctively stamps on their brakes? Sudden deceleration would be fatal.)
Do you pull in front of them and slow down? Do you roll up behind them and encourage the baby to cross to the relative safety of your hood? Do you call the police and hope they know what to do?
And as I’m considering all these options, I see the baby crawl over, teeter on the edge, and fall between the cars.
– That I was stuck on a deserted train with a bunch of covered bodies on gurneys and slowly came to the realisation that I had to lift the sheets and check all the bodies, because my friends and family were all under there but I didn’t know which ones.
– A recurring one about being in a room decorated with flayed muscles and other unidentified innards while a voice intones the life stories of the people they once belonged to.
agh gah this reminds me of a horrible one I had where I was on a train and slowly realized the cars were made of human bodies. Not recurring, thankfully, but that image is stuck in my mind.
Over the past few months I’ve had several dreams about being back in grad school. The one I remember most clearly was about me being offered a job and having to provide proof that I had my MLIS. When I called the university to ask them to send a copy of my diploma, I was told I had never actually graduated – I had failed some courses, which I couldn’t remember signing up for in the first place. I couldn’t get into my student account to see what these courses were, and when I reached out to my professors to try and figure it out, they said I had been such a terrible student that they didn’t even want to talk to me. So I had no way of finishing the degree I would need to qualify for jobs in my field.
It sounds silly written down, but I woke up filled with panic and it sucked.
Last night I dreamed I had “borrowed” my dad’s car to go get takeout even though I don’t know how to drive. I managed to cover a few blocks, heart pounding, before I gave up and pulled over. I called my mom and she came to pick me up but she was clearly not impressed with me. (My mom in the dream was not my real-life mom, who can’t drive either.)
When I was applying to my M.Ed. program, I had a dream that the school called and said “What is this, a joke? Your undergraduate transcript is garbage. You’ll have to retake all of these classes.” Confused, I went online and looked up my undergraduate record and saw that they were right — all of my grades had been replaced by the letter M. I had made an M in every course and no one would explain to me what the M’s meant or how to fix them.
I can’t drive either and I always have those stressful/scary driving dreams too! Sometimes though I’m not afraid and it’s awesome – I guess this is when my subconscious is feeling good about itself.
I can drive, but dream me regularly forgets this fact and has me doing emergency driving dashes with no prior experience.
My brain also likes to get me to drive from the back seat. It happens so often and takes me so long to remember they aren’t real that I’m still not 100% sure I have never actually tried to drive a car while sitting in the back.
Oh god, I have a variation on that first dream on a semi-regular basis, except that instead of a relative it’s a grown-up version of my childhood bullies, who have grown up and work in a retail store. They are horribly snotty and mean to me, and I become a monster customer, getting more and more upset and angry until I start screaming and hitting them, and now everybody thinks I’m the worst person in the world and I think that too. It is awful and I wake up wanting to cry every time. Even though I think I understand the dream (when I reflect on my bullies, I wonder if I did something awful to provoke them that I can’t remember), It never makes me feel any better. It just makes me feel like a terrible human being with a rage monster inside of me.
I tend to clench my jaw/grind my teeth while I’m sleeping and when it gets really bad I have these dream-nightmares (cuz they’re not full blown nightmares, just dreams in the discomfort/body horror category. Quasi-nightmares?) where my mouth is full of something, usually gum, and I’m trying to pull it out but it’s sticking and pulling out my teeth and I can never get it all out. Alternatively I dream that my jaw is locked and my mouth is super swollen. It’s always an enormous relief to walk up and discover my face is normal and my teeth intact.
I also get those sleep paralysis ones. Usually when I’m over tired. I’ll think I”m awake but I can’t get the lights to come out and I’m sure something horrible is about to happen to me and I can’t talk or more correctly. Nothing bad is ever actually happening – I just think I am away and I am terrified. Then I’ll like fight myself away only to fall back asleep right back into the nightmare. It’s so terrible. When it happens usually just have to say you win nightmares and go watch TV for a while. Sometimes I call outta work because the pressure of knowing I need to get up in a few hours just makes it worse. When your stuck in a sleep paralysis nightmare cycle you need to kind to yourself!
Omg we have the same gum nightmare.
Solidarity!
Michael Keaton shot my dad, and he was bleeding to death (his blood looked like tomato bisque just gushing everywhere) in the back of his pickup truck, and I was trying to get the people around me to dial 911, bring towels to stanch the bleeding, etc, but they were all unresponsive. So I ran into the house to get the phone, and as I ran back out, dialing, I knew that it was too late and I would have to watch my dad die while the ambulance was on its way. Then I woke up.
In the wee hours of the morning as my dad left for work, I begged him to be careful, because I thought it was a premonition and he’d actually be shot that day.
He wasn’t! He’s fine. Still keeps me up worrying, though.
I love the specificity that Michael Keaton was the culprit. Brains are the weirdest.
Ohoho, it was specifically “Much Ado About Nothing” Michael Keaton. All grody and renaissance-garbed.
That particular Michael Keaton always bothered me on some level. Dogberry. He looked like a crazy dude who licked dogs’ fur, and lamented when it never tasted like berries.
Ugh yes. I like Michael Keaton in general, but I HATE his Dogberry in that Much Ado. (OTOH, I was generally disappointed in Joss Whedon’s version, but Nathan Fillion’s Dogberry and Sean Maher’s Don John totally redeemed both of those roles for me.)
The nightmare that I remember best was one I had about ten years ago, in a dream version of my old high school; there was a dance or something, and I was trapped there when a school shooting started. The shooters were targeting women, and so I hid in the men’s bathroom. I remember one shooter (who was about ten years old) coming in holding a gun and asking if there were any women in there. The men there all said “no” because they were hiding me, but I remember very clearly looking at the deadness in the kid’s eyes and thinking, “If these men weren’t willing to hide me, I’d be dead. That kid would kill me, and it wouldn’t matter that I have parents and a sister. That I have cats that I adore. That I have a nice job, and friends, and I like to knit and I like to read, and I have hopes and dreams of the future…none of it would matter. This kid doesn’t care that I’m a person; he’d kill me without a second thought.” I was still shaken up by that dream the entire next day.
I suppose this isn’t a nightmare, but it was incredibly upsetting. I’d had my beloved 14-year-old cat put to sleep last year (she was diagnosed with leukemia — not the contagious, viral kind, so my other cats were safe, at least). A few months later, I had a dream that she was on my bedroom floor playing with my other cats. And then I thought “she’s not really here, she’s dead”, and that thought made her vanish. And in my dream, I started crying, because now she was gone.
These days, I mostly have haunted house dreams. They’re partly exploration, just wandering around in a strange house — not abandoned, but maybe one I’m thinking of moving into, or a friend has just moved into, and it’s still in a half-finished state. And there’s always a section somewhere that’s partially blocked off, but I can get through and explore those rooms, and then I have an increasing feeling of something evil lurking there, and I have to get out quickly and back to the “safe” parts or it will kill me.
My most recent bad dream that I can remember was that I was being prepped for surgery. They took me into the operating room and then the doctor told me they’d have to make an incision behind my neck, and I had to sit up and bend my head for them. I woke up after that, thankfully.
My recurring stress dream: I am exploring a fantastical endless building or city complex. This is normal, I often do this in dreams. Suddenly a vast evil presence begins chasing me through increasingly smaller warren-like streets and rooms. I don’t know what will happen if it catches me only that it mustn’t. I barely escape the complex and wake up at the same time. I absolutely cannot watch Evil Dead 2 because of this dream.
Also, small real life injuries become much worse in my dreams sometimes. A blister comes off my big toe = I am standing in front of a mirror as I peel thick white strips of skin off my face.
During a bout of depression in college, I had awful nightmares every night. I’d jolt awake several hours before my alarm went off and be unable to remember what I’d been dreaming about, but I couldn’t get back to sleep because of the sense of looming terror that would then stay with me all day.
The only nightmare I remember from this time went like this: I was alone, leaning against the wall in an empty hallway. I could feel [traumatic and horrifically painful medical condition that I don’t want to get into] happening again, and I slowly slid to the floor while starting to cry.
Lately, all of my anxiety dreams have taken the form of survival-horror. Everyone around me is turning into zombies or monsters or aliens, and I’m just trying to live as long as possible.
When I was a kid, I had an incredibly vivid dream where I was outside my body, floating above my own bed with me sleeping in it, looking down from the ceiling, which was at least three stories up. A number of real furnishings of my room were there. Suddenly, there was a giant fucking ant in the room, clicking its mandibles over my sleeping form.
Also when I was a kid, I would have dreams — a whole series of them — about a shadowly, Humphrey-Bogart-film-noir type figure, trench coat and fedora, face entirely shadowed so I couldn’t see it, but eyes gleaming. My bedroom was basically all windows on three sides (Florida architecture, ugh), and he would simply step through the east bank of windows, across from the foot of my bed, and stare at me. Sometimes he’d take a couple more steps towards me. I wanted so badly to scream, and couldn’t make a sound. And then I’d wake up with sleep paralysis, terrified. Finally, the last time I ever had the dream, I managed to get out the tiniest mouse squeak, and he never came back.
My skin is peeling from a sunburn, and I keep picking at it until it turns the consistency of deli roast beef, with the sheen and everything. I continue to rip off pieces of my legs. I wasn’t able to have a roast beef sandwich for a good long while after that one.
Weeping. Goddamn. Angels.
And let me tell you, lucid dreaming doesn’t exactly help. When you’re being led by a friend (who now has a reputation for being a dick in other people’s dreams) into a stairwell and you know there’s weeping angels there and you know you’re dreaming, but you DONT KNOW HOW TO WAKE UP lucid dreaming is USELESS. And that’s not the first nightmare I’ve had with those stupid angels. And they always end with me waking up, putting my back to a wall, trying not to close my eyes and not wanting to go back to sleep for a week.
I always drive my car off the side of the road. And I’m trying so hard to keep it on the road but I can’t. I just can’t.
The damn cars never work right in dreams. So many dreams where it’s stuck in reverse, the brakes don’t brake…and I was just trying to pull out of a parking space, how am I on this narrow winding road…
I was a journalist interviewing a reclusive cult leader for an article I was writing. Because the interview was face to face, I had to go to the walled compound where the anti-technology cult lived. Upon arrival, my car, laptop, and phone were taken from me and I was told that I was going to be forcibly married into the cult to save my soul from the sins of the outer world.
The next part of the dream was so hopeless because I kept trying to find a way to escape and couldn’t. I was put in a stone room with only a toilet, sink, and a chair as furnishings, and had a 24-hour female attendant who wouldn’t even avert her eyes from me when I had to use the toilet. I was told that I was a terrible person for using the Internet in daily life and for being queer. My clothes had been taken from me as well and I was forced to wear ankle-length skirts and long-sleeved, high-necked blouses because they were “modest”. I kept saying to myself that this was so surreal that it had to be a dream, but when it went on and on without me waking up or anything impossible happening, I was forced to conclude that I had really been kidnapped and stripped of any way to get word to someone that would help me.
Finally, I was taken to an outdoor ceremony where I was going to be forcibly married to one of the other cult members. I hoped I could escape at some point because there was a huge crowd, but I was marched to the front where everyone could keep an eye on me. Then, through a gap in the crowd, I saw two of my best friends dressed up like Mormon missionaries. I had to bite my tongue to keep from saying anything, and pretend I did not know them so that they could rescue me.
When I told these two friends about the dream later, one of them said “It was all real. We just took you home and put you in your bed afterwards.”
I have infrequent nightmares, but they basically come down to scary people I know or don’t know showing up at my house and not leaving. I’m a moderately chatty sleeper, and talk and laugh in my sleep pretty frequently, but about once a year or so I have a scary enough dream that I wake my girlfriend up with my shouting. (at scary people, to go away)
Some of the more memorable ones I’ve had over the years:
1) My (IRL very gentle and peaceful) brother takes a shotgun and point-blank shoots our family dog for no discernible reason. I can hear our dog screaming and wailing in surprise and pain.
2) I am pregnant and in prison. I don’t know why I’m pregnant, and I don’t know why I’m in prison. I go into labor and I have to give birth on a dirty mattress laid on the concrete floor, surrounded by rusted metal and dripping pipes.
3) There is a vibrant blue parrot sitting on a perch on my parents’ back porch, and I’m playing with it, talking to it, etc. Suddenly, it falls to the ground. Its belly bursts open like an overripe fruit and its guts spill out onto the ground.
4) I wake up and I’m in my parents’ house instead of my dorm room. Confused, I walk into my mother’s room and ask what the date is. Maybe I’m on break. Something about her answer tips me off that she is lying to me. I’m actually supposed to be at school, but my mother is keeping me here for her own reasons. I start yelling at her that I need to leave, that she needs to let me go – I even start throwing things at her, but she just smiles evilly at me. I suddenly realize that I’m dreaming – that if I could only wake up, then I’d be back in my dorm. I struggle with all my might to wake up, and the veil of the dream grows translucent; now I see my mother’s room overlaying my dorm, like two slides stacked on top of each other. I’m trying and trying to escape the dream, but I can’t. I don’t wake up until someone (IRL) knocks on my dorm room door.
A few: I’m always running from tidal waves or trying not to get sucked into the current. I can be on the beach trying to run through sand, or I feel the wave crash into my house, or I’m on a boat… any variation.
This one is gross and I hate it: I’m wearing my retainer and chewing gum and I’m trying to pull the gum out of my mouth but it’s caught on the retainer so I’m choking and pulling out Bubbalicious and it’s gross and awful and hurts.
And every once in awhile I have a full blown pregnancy dream and never know who/if there is a father.
the bubblegum/retainer dream—i also have this dream from time to time. it’s like i have too much bubblegum in my mouth or it’s caught on something, or it’s just sticky food and i’m choking and i can’t get it out of my mouth and it’s hard to breathe and it hurts. it’s awfulllllll
It was a little before Christmas, 1989—25 years ago, perhaps to this very day ooo-ooo. I was in kindergarten and had just turned five, and I had a dream that I was in an indoor cemetery. It was laid out like a Circle-K, with aisles of graves leading up to a counter in back. The floor was astroturf, and the lights were exposed fluorescent tubes. Some of the headstones were pink neon crosses; there were sprays of fake flowers everywhere and styrofoam wreaths propped up on stands. A clerk in a convenience store uniform stood behind the counter, and as I walked towards him I noticed a paper lunch bag on the ground. It was wadded up and leaking something. I pointed to the bag and asked what it was. Looking past me, the clerk turns in my direction and deadpans, “That’s Baby Jesus.” End of dream.
I’ve had DOZENS of dreams where I bound recklessly into some unfamiliar location to retrieve something or meet someone, and only once I’m right in the middle do I realize I am SURROUNDED by huge spiders on the ground and suspended in webs and stuff. I’m not afraid of spiders IRL (although where I live all we have is itty bitty li’l wolf spiders) but that sudden revelation of the arachnid miasma always fills me with a paralyzing horror.
I was stuck inside a building, and the building was stealing my senses. Like, as I lost the ability to see and hear, the building became sentient. It was disturbing as hell.
Re: Waking up internally. I once had a nightmare where I was being choked. I became aware that I was dreaming, but couldn’t wake myself up, and became convinced that something in waking reality was choking me (like that I had gotten into a ludicrously haphazard entanglement with my blanket or something). Terror on several levels!
I’m trapped in a turquoise motel with a serial killer and twelve other people. We have to figure out how to escape and he kills one of us each hour. It’s like a combination of Saw and Labyrinth.
Later, after I’ve gotten out, I have to do the whole thing over again, but with GREATER EFFICIENCY.
I have to save a bunch of animals from a fire or a flood. No matter how many I gather up, there are always more to save.
I’m at work and everyone is yelling at me. When I wake up, I can’t remember what I did wrong.
I never realized I was signed up for a college course, and now it’s time for the final and I have no idea what I’m doing. It’s always some kind of dense math or a foreign language I don’t understand.
the college course dream—ugh, i still have it every spring/winter around the time that finals would be, even though i’ve been done with school for years.
In the dream I’m 9-10ish and both of my parents are explaining calmly why they have to sacrifice themselves (I can’t remember the cause, they totally believed in it – I did not) and that I had to stand quietly and watch them die. I’m screaming and bawling and they’re stroking my hair telling me they have to.
I used to have this recurring dream when I was younger that my brothers and I had been kidnapped and while I was trying to save them I somehow got stuck in the floor of this house with only my head visible, and just as I looked up to see my brothers tied to the ceiling this giant blade swept across the floor and decapitated me, and it remains the wORST THING I HAVE EVER DREAMED
I also used to dream a lot that I stole my mum’s car, and I got into an accident in every single dream, with varying degrees of injury
A good 95% of my sex dreams are about wildly inappropriate people. When I wake up I spend the rest of the day shuddering.
Once I had a sex dream involving Mallory, but when I woke up I was just relieved that it was one of the 5%.
Oh God, me too! (The wildly inappropriate people part, not the Mallory part, unfortunately.)
It’s a relief to hear someone say it.
My greatest (worst) hits:
1) From my childhood: An evil version of my mother is attacking me with the bowling pin I got from my birthday party at the bowling alley. I eventually have to stab her with an unbent wire hanger to stop her. (This one would become all the more terrifying years later when she bumped the shelf in my messy room, the bowling pin fell on her toe, and she brandished it at me in a pain-fueled rage moment, bringing back the memories of the dream).
2) My father was shot and I had to watch him die.
3) I am running across a street, but cannot seem to get anywhere. My legs move slowly and my feet seem to barely make any contact with the ground. Like some odd combination of running in water and running on ice. Vehicles/other looming threats grow closer and closer and closer. This one happens about once per week.
4) Not nightmares, but for some reason most of the time when I try to nap, I end up suddenly snapping out of it screaming and trapped in a state of pure terror for sometimes up to an hour, crying and unable to grasp that I am awake and safe.
I dreamed that a family met a girl in a bookstore and adopted her or something, and then they all committed suicide together, except that I think one of them was buried alive. And I kept waking up a little bit and trying to imagine them alive again but every time I fell back asleep increasingly awful things would happen.
Oh also one of my recurring dreamscapes has shapeshifting demons whose default forms are green stags. They travel in herds in that form, but when they want to trap individual prey they take the forms of that person’s family members. Sometimes they don’t even bother to hide or dispose of the people they’re imitating, which is even creepier somehow, like they’re so powerful that they can just half-ass it and it doesn’t matter.
A bit relieved to see that Mallory and other people in this thread have had nightmares concerning pregnancy… though the nightmare I remember best started just after I’d given birth. I had the dream during high school, so basically I was a teen mom. I brought the baby home from the hospital and dressed her and wrapped her up in a nice yellow blanket and laid her in her crib. All throughout that dream I was worried sick over being able to care for a child, but when I saw her sleeping in her crib I felt so much love for her and I thought “maybe I can do this after all.” I left the room for a second to grab something in the kitchen, and when I looked back into the crib, the baby was lying there dead. All blue and tiny and stiff, her eyes sunken and her mouth agape. I woke up right after that and holy crap did it traumatize me. I feel like it’ll still be in the back of my mind if I ever have kids.
I also occasionally have nightmares where I’m in a car on a ferry or on a road next to deep water, and the car somehow ends up in the water and starts to sink. Luckily I escape or wake up before I drown horribly, though one time my sister was trapped in the car and I panicked just before waking up. Though once I did have a dream where a girl from summer camp shot me in the back of the head with a gun we’d found at a junkyard. I turned my back on her and felt a sudden strange sensation at the base of my skull, and collapsed. As I faded away, I heard someone ask the girl in bewilderment “why did you shoot that girl?” and she responded nonchalantly, “I just wanted to see if it worked.” GAH. Screw you, creepy summer camp girl.
I’m at my childhood home. My family is there. We see some brownish reddish rusty water welling up in the back yard. My mom wonders if it’s rust. Then the smell hits us. It’s blood. (This might be the only time I have smelled something in a dream.) The blood starts to soak the whole yard. The grass turns red. I step outside, wearing boots, and my foot sinks deep into soggy bloody ground. We watch as the blood eventually overflows into neighboring yards.
Then I’m alone in a new location. I see a tidal wave coming toward me. It’s coming closer and I need to cling to the railing outside. (I’ve had this dream dozens of times, the tidal wave rushing toward me.) Just as it hits…
I’m in my old house again. My friend Seth is there. He explains that he has to put his dog down. But for some reason, he thinks that the only way to do this is to put it in the oven and burn it to ash. He puts it in the oven and the dog just sits there sadly, in pain, while its fur catches on fire. I’m horrified. It’s burning alive. I don’t know what to do – should I open the oven and free it, even though that would mean that it will die an even longer death on the floor, since it’s been so badly burned? Do I leave it there? I’m frozen. The dog dies.
Then there are a few more fragmentary dreams about Halloween and candy and a dream in which I’m Natalie Portman and I’m having sad sex on a bedspread that’s torn and cotton keeps coming out of the bedspread and this makes me more sad.
Then I’m back in the old house and Seth is cooking ANOTHER DOG. …And at this point I was so disturbed that I woke myself up because I couldn’t handle it anymore.
I’ve had dreams of death and blood and drowning and fire, but there was something about this dream that was just so quietly sinister.
Sometimes I dream about soul-snatchers or mind-snatchers and spend the first half of the dream trying to escape but then spend the second half grappling with the confusing realization that I’ve already had my soul snatched but don’t feel any different, and still trying to save myself from I-no-longer-know-what.
Last night I had a super lame nightmare about being in a haunted house (THANKS BABADOOK) on a family vacation and becoming semi-immobilized so I could only drag myself across the floor, but when I got to the door and stood up I saw the monster/ghost, and it was Santa. So, my brain is not trying very hard to mask my subconscious anxiety about going home for Christmas.
My best friend passed away about a year an a half ago – it was completely unexpected, and obviously heartbreaking for our circle of friends and for our community, because she was an amazing, vibrant, generous and loving person.
A couple months ago, I dreamed that she came back. Everyone was so excited, but I knew that something wasn’t right, and I knew that if I was alone with her she’d hurt me somehow. At the end of the dream, I was sitting next to a door, and she was on the other side of it, and we were talking, and I knew that if I opened the door some bad thing would happen, and I knew I was going to open it.
I woke up and started sobbing and was fucked up for like a week – not just because the dream itself had been so unsettling and awful, but because of what my brain had made my best friend into.
That’s so sad! Not nightmares, but I had a friend die suddenly, and I used to dream all the time that he came back and it had all just been a misunderstanding. He’d just been away on vacation and didn’t realize everyone thought he was dead, and all my friends had found out about it ages ago but no one thought to mention it to me. “Oh yeah, he’s alive. You didn’t know?” Or else he had faked his own death but then felt sorry and came back. I was always so happy to see him AND angry at him for letting us grieve like that.
But when I woke up, I would usually be glad I’d had a chance to see him again.
Runner-up dreams:
A disturbing kid abusing the corpses of a goose and a duckling. Among other things, he made them vomit.
A dream I don’t remember, but when I woke up I wrote the words “Satanist county fair” and I don’t remember what this pertained to.
A dream in which I gave birth to a baby. The baby had a face, and seemed to be alive (blinking, nursing, etc.) , but there was nothing behind the face. I kept waving my hand behind the face and saying, “But where’s the brain?” Later I saw the baby crawling around. It had rubbed its face off somewhere, so now it was just a headless body. Still alive. I could see the bone and blood in the neck.
A dream that contained the following:
A VHS tape with Bill Pullman on the front holding a bloody knife and talking to a little boy.
A war. I shot an evil girl in the eye with a fork and someone else stomped on her head, crushing it; but the inside of her head was empty, a shell, with paper cogs spinning around. Then nearly toys in spheres spoke with her voice and said she had transferred her spirit to them.
A little boy playing with a little girl. The little girl dying. The little boy being blamed.
I wrote this afterwards, but don’t remember what it referred to:
“The mother had been cruel to the boy, treated him like a lower thing, because he couldn’t read. But then the little girl had taught him how.”
“So much death.”
I am browsing a large, shadowy bookstore just before closing time. Someone begins to whistle a faint, jaunty tune. Whoever it is follows me all over the store, just out of sight, still whistling. Eventually, a man steps out from between the racks, blocking my path. With a broad smile he sings, to the same tune he was whistling, “I don’t know what I’m gonna do, but I’m gonna do it to youuuuu.”
I actually love the nightmares involving monsters or post-apocalyptic scenarios, feels like being in a horror film!
I do get the tooth-falling out dream once in a while, another frequent one is being on a plane of some sort that either is acting weird or where parts of it are missing and exposed to the air. Also being on a university campus and realizing I have a test for a class I haven’t attended once all year.
I’d just busted out of a house where I had been trapped with a rapist. It was in the neighborhood plat where I used to babysit for rich people, but I ran screaming across the street and no one was coming out to help me, even though the rapist is pursuing me (never saw him, but he was). everything was extremely grey and close and humid. I knew the only person who would help me was a man who lived across the street in a wooden house. I knew he had a torture cellar, because i’d been trapped with him previously in my life and he’d done unspeakable things to me, but I knew he would take me back and, specifically, kill the current rapist. So run through the door and fall on my knees screaming and begging and crying. the man’s dog came up and sniffed me. The man had a beard (that’s all I see) and I saw his boots go to the door. I watched from the window with the dog as he walked out the front path, and the rapist who’d been pursuing me just slowed down and dropped to his knees, and then the bearded man stepped in front of him so I didn’t see what happened.
I had a whole history in that dream, but the worst thing was the strong sense of “I know this is how it is, I know what will happen when he comes back inside” but all I cared about was that the torturer I knew killed the rapist – specifically kill him, not chase him off, because I wished it. I woke up before he came back inside.
Oh, dang, we used to have this big armchair in the living room of my house, that was opposite the stairway into the room, and the armchair was set in the corner so that when you were a kid, you could easily fit behind it and hide there.
I used to have this recurring dream that I was hiding behind the chair while something stomped down the stairs looking for me. That’s all, I know, not a big deal, except for the fact that there were a lot of nights in my childhood when I would wake up in terror from the dream and then, when I fell back asleep, I’d be right back in it again.
I have insane dreams and love to talk about them! Jen Doll once decoded a very dramatic version of my roach infestation nightmare on this very site!
Another recurring stress dream I have is that I’m still married to my ex-husband, and I know we need to break-up, but he doesn’t, and the difficult conversation we must have looms vaguely in the near future while we go about our mundane lives and he keeps kissing and touching me. Ugh.
Also sometimes a friend who died 15 years ago shows up in my dreams, which is not nightmarish per se–we get to hang out!–but usually at the very end I remember she’s dead and try to physically hold onto her to keep her from returning to the ethereal plane or whatever and she just looks at me and smiles and then I wake up and yeah, she’s still dead. That sucks.
Two stories:
For a few years I had a reoccurring nightmare that a serial killer stalked me. This was the same man in every dream, but the dreams themselves would be normal until he showed up and he’d go after my friends and then start laughing at me. There was also always a german shepherd there – that was confusing. I even had a name, and I only learned later that name was the same as a not particularly famous man who killed his family. I know I must have overheard it on the news or something, but he’ll always be the nightmare serial killer to me.
I also have dreams where I die. “No you can’t die in dreams” well no you can and it is terrifying. I’ve had ones where old men shoot me in a van from when I was a kid (why old men?? Why in an old van??), and I’ve had a few where I’m on a plane and it’s crashing. My family is always with me, and it is literally what feels like hours of falling to our deaths, crying and trying to tell each other we all love each other. Everything is so realistic, and excruciating.
Once at the moment of impact I see – I can’t describe it. It’s a colour I feel like I’ve never seen before, and it’s impossible to describe. Everything is this colour, then I wake up, but when I close my eyes I’m dreaming and when I open them I’m in my real room. I often have sleep paralysis when I have nightmares and this wasn’t quite that because I could move, but my mind kept drawing me back into that colour, and back into death. Literally I had to keep my eyes open and mind awake, or die. Very few times have I had that type of fear response.
Needless to say I was in shock and had to take the morning off. I haven’t had that dream since (that was about six months ago?). I’ve had other crazy stuff, but that tops it.
My son falls into a river and plunges straight to the bottom. I dive in to save him but it’s so deep that I can’t hold my breath long enough to get down to him.
I have a baby that is tiny, with flippers. I tuck it into a Whole Foods takeout container, but then leave it on the roof of my car and don’t realize until I get home and it’s gone.
Many, many dreams that I’m trying to get back to my children, can’t find them, can’t get to them on time. Trying to call but the numbers on the phone won’t work.
Poor tiny flipper baby!!!
I’m in a gargantuan indoor playground, like Discovery Zone from the 90’s, but way more extensive, with like miles of those little plastic tunnels and rope bridges and ball pits. And it’s highly unstable; the whole thing sways ominously, and sections of it keep collapsing in on themselves, or breaking off and plummeting to the ground far below. And I’m scrambling around in there trying to stay alive.
At a wedding of people I didn’t know–older couple, both seemed very sad. I was standing by the bride, and as the groom came in, he was holding a small girl, toddler-sized, very thin, wrapped in a blanket. She appeared to be sleeping, but she was dead. He wanted her to be present at their wedding before she was buried. I offered to hold her, and sat down by my husband. Her body started twitching, and I kept telling myself it was rigor mortis, just hold her, just hold her, do this for them. Her hands found their way into my hair and scratched my scalp, and I woke up.
I’m sure it wasn’t a coincidence that I was teaching a class on Misbehaving Dead Bodies in 19th Century Fiction at the time.
As a child, I had a recurring nightmare that the Sesame Street Muppets had been quasi-zombified and were taking over my preschool. This nightmare persisted long after I was out of the audience for Sesame Street and had moved from preschool to elementary. The lights are dim, but not off, and as I approach my classroom, I see that the window has been marked with a masking-tape X. I peek inside (at no time when I had this dream was I actually tall enough to look through the window on the door) and I see children cowering. I say, out loud, “what does the X mean?” I then hear Grover say “It keeps us out.” I then see him and he’s Grover, but the skin over his torso is either gone or see-through, and everything from trachea to large intestine is visible, like a visible man model (which I first encountered no less than 2 and no more than 4 years after leaving this preschool). I know that if he touches me, I’ll become the same. I flee, and he does not pursue, but I’m surrounded by Big Bird in the same state and children they’ve touched, also changed. I alternate crying and fleeing until I wake.
I am five years old when I dream this, and I dream that my father has taken me to a hotel made out of sand in the local park. While he is checking us in at the front desk, I wander to a room off the lobby that seems to be empty. As I walk into it I begin to sink into the floor — it’s quicksand. My father comes to rescue me but is quickly sucked in and begins to go under. I struggle with five-year-old arms to bring him back to the surface. I wake up crying.
i am also the nightmare sort. straight-up nightmares, or weird twisty conspiracy dreams. just two nights ago i dreamed that i had gotten a new tattoo, and when i pulled the bandage off, it was all swollen like a huge blister of pus. and last night i dreamed that i was in a knife fight with someone and i kept getting stabbed in the hands and the knife went through like i was warm wax.
the hands down worst ones, though:
– my dad tries to rape me. i trap him in the shower and smash his penis in the glass door.
– my brother tries to kill me. i drown him in the bathtub and he won’t die and i keep bashing his head in brutally until it’s just mush but he still keeps trying to kill me.
– i wake up and there is someone in my apartment who is going to try to kill me. this is very realistic.
– i wake up in my childhood home and it is very quiet. i call out for my parents and when i get up and turn on the light, i see my whole family, chopped to bits all over the room.
– i am running back to my apartment to hide from someone who is trying to hurt me but the door is too small for the frame and i can’t get the locks to line up and shut the door.
A buddy had one Monday night in which he was on a hill, watching as mushroom clouds slowly filled the horizon. True, not my nightmare, but I lost sleep just hearing about it.
ohh, i’ve had this one. i had a few as a kid after my parents stupidly let me watch kurosawa’s rhapsody in august, where someone sees an eye in a mushroom cloud.
my most common one from birth until the present is that something scary (or at least very very foreboding) happens and I try to get people’s attention but no one acknowledges me and/or they’re asleep and won’t wake up.
one of the most vivid ones was that I was in a universe a la Stay Alive (you die in the game you die irl) and everyone was dying in the most awful and disgusting ways. The worst was a guy who climbed up onto a flying buttress of the mansion we outside of (?) and jumped into a puddle that then turned into acid and he got boiled alive in it.
also I used to have the worst night terrors about Hook but it was and still is one of my faves?
I could talk about this all day tbh
For whatever reason, I seem to be completely capable of dying in my dreams. I die, and then I basically watch the rest of the dream play out like a bored ghost and why can’t I just wake up/peace out to the underworld my dream is so boring without me uuugh. Which is to say, my more deadly-feeling nightmares often feel like an eternity of anxiety rather than terror, which is a blessing, or…something.
– I’m driving a car and it’s raining but I can’t keep my eyes open. Like I can crack them to see every few seconds, but they refuse to stay open, so I can’t safely pull over or anything. It’s a semi-recurring anxiety dream, and I end up driving for what feels like hours.
– Teddy Kennedy is my friendly neighborhood creep. He creeps on me and offers me Dr. Pepper. No one believes me because it’s Teddy Kennedy. One day we are at the same basement-level pool in a rec center or something, and he offers me a Dr. Pepper that is drugged. I spend the rest of the dream groggily running around the rec center trying to avoid Teddy Kennedy but also trying not to alert anyone to the fact that YET AGAIN, Ted Kennedy is trying to kill me
– I’m watching an anthropomorphized wolf have sex with a dead body and because like half the bones are exposed there are a lot more orifices than I’d anticipated (this is an SSRI dream, it’s 80% why I don’t take SSRIs anymore)
I very very seldomly remember my dreams, which is fine by me. My best-worst one was about a month after my grandmother died. I dreamed that my family and I were living in a bunch of cabins on this tiny wooded island I camped at once as a teenager. For reasons I can’t remember, my parents had purchased a robot version of my grandmother to sit in a chair and just kind of vaguely nod at us (which was basically what she did in life, too). My two younger siblings had for some reasons become semi-feral Lost Boy types and spent the whole dream sneaking about in the underbrush and popping out into the camp without warning. At one point my little brother came and got me and I snuck with him through the bushes to where he and my sister were watching camp. While we were watching, the Granny-robot got up off her chair and started lurching towards us. I started saying “Wait, they’re not supposed to walk. She’s not supposed to be able to walk!” then as we scurried back I tripped and those feral brats left me to be eaten by the robot. Then I woke up and called my sister and bitched her out for leaving me, and she laughed and laughed.
I also recently had a dream about being chased by a zombie bear. My boss has warned me if I start having reoccurring dreams of bears it means a witch is targeting me, but so far it’s just been the one and I had ran into a few real bears that week so I think I’m still safe.
When I was a teenager, I had a dream that I was lying in a tub full of kidney beans, and I started eating them. They were fantastically great — seriously the most delicious beans in the whole world, ever — and I was really savoring them. Then I looked at them more closely and realized that they were actually tiny fetuses. I woke up very disturbed.
More recently, I had a dream that I was walking with my father-in-law (who passed away last year) through this beautiful old house that was built on the threshold between the worlds of the living and the dead. It was actually a very pleasant dream for a while, as I was really happy to see and spend time with him again. Then he warned me not to look in this one mirror because anyone who looked in it would see their own death, and that was forbidden for the living. So of course I looked. I saw myself all bloody and mangled and somehow knew that I had been in a horrible car accident. And the part that really creeped me out was that I didn’t look any older than I am now.
I used to have terrible zombie dreams on the regular, waking up after my whole group had been picked off and I was surrounded by zombies about to eat me, but I feel like The Walking Dead has helped desensitize me a bit.
Scary one several years ago now, I was in bed with my now husband in real life and in the dream, but in the dream there was an arched doorway in the room, with a spiral staircase lit with terrible red light. For some reason I was filled with dread by this light-staircase-doorway, but I couldn’t speak or yell to wake up my husband, so I decided that I would just breathe/exhale really hard and he would hear it. I managed to get out a few ragged groan-breaths, and then my husband was nudging me asking if I was okay in real life because of the breathing thing. Even thinking about it still creeps me out!
I get home invasion night terrors, and normally I just wake up screaming, but every now and then I get out of bed and try to run away while still asleep. Once I tripped in the midst of one of these sleeprunning incidents and I woke up on the hall floor, confused and bleeding. Not fun at all.
Hold up, am I the only teacher who’s always having dreams about teaching a class I haven’t prepared for at all? I came to this thread hoping to see dozens of people with the same problem and this is very disappointing.
Why yes welcome friend! I only taught for one year, more than 5 years ago, and I still have that dream. Mine is often not too bad though–in the dream I’m like, “eh, I’ll just fake it,” and it goes fine, which is pretty much what would happen in real life.
I had sleep paralysis very frequently as a child. It was a bit worse than this though, as I rarely regained voluntary muscle control. I would just suffocate until I passed out and my autonomic nervous system could take over my breathing again. I had terrible allergies as a child of that age (<10) so I assumed I just couldn’t breathe because I was so congested and if I couldn’t breathe before I passed out I would probably die.
Oh, and I had horrible nightmares about infinite space, sleepwalking, etc.
Is this outpouring of mutual terror and trauma really making you feel better, or just more existentially consumed? Not a criticism, just curious.
Personally I feel so much better reading all of these right before bed. It sounds like it should be sarcasm but it’s not at all.
Oh! Also, post-apocalyptic dream where Frappucinos were like $25. (Don’t know why Starbucks was still open in my post-apocalyptic city, and tons of people were in line.)
My beloved dead younger brother is back, and we’re supposed to meet up in a mall or on a crowded ski hill or in an airport but either I don’t have the right cellphone number, or I can’t remember it, or my batteries are dead and I CAN”T GET IN TOUCH WITH HIM. Panic ensues. Multiplied by him being dead.
The others are pretty generic chase-and-kill nightmares I’ve had since I was small.
What a ghastly thread! And I mean that in the best way.
More horrifying than my frequent nightmares of zombies/murderers/endless flights of stairs is one I had a few years ago: I am peeling an egg. The insides are rotten, and have the texture of a yellow plum. That nightmare still fills me with overwhelming horror on a regular basis; I shuddered just typing it.
Man, lots of fetus- and teeth-related nightmares on here! I, too, suffer from periodic sleep paralysis–although thankfully there haven’t been any hallucinations associated with them yet–and also the thing where you hear VERY realistic sounds right before you drift off to sleep. So unnerving.
Here are some of my scariest dreams:
– I’m at my childhood home, which was out in the country and was mostly surrounded by woods. For some reason, my home had been turned into a mausoleum, and small, reverent tour groups were led through. I walked outside into the woods, which seemed darker than usual, and suddenly I heard the sound of heavy chains being drug across the ground, and an animal-like groaning. I look up and see some robed creature with a long face that’s grasping a huge Keyblade (holla at Kingdom Hearts), which is covered in chains and bound to him, that he’s dragging behind him. He’s watching me, and then I suddenly realize he (and several other creatures like him that are also dragging Keyblades and moaning in the shadows) is guarding this “sacred” place, and the dream ends when he suddenly charges toward me.
– This one actually felt like it happened IRL, honestly. [Real part] I was asleep in my bed at my old apartment, and my bed was oriented in such a way that it faced the opening to my bathroom and closet (once you walked through the doorway, the closet was to the left and the toilet was straight ahead). A female friend of mine from out of town had come to stay with me, but was out at a party to see other friends and told me she might not be back until very late. SO, [Dream part] I have a dream where I suddenly sat up in bed, and there, in the open doorway that’s facing me, is an old man with pale green/grey skin and yellow eyes, and he’s just looking at me so lecherously and grinning. I immediately feel like he’s undressing me with his eyes, so I try to “diffuse” the scary tension by asking, “Do you know what time it is?” He just grins even bigger, then walks into my closet and disappears.
[Real part] The next morning, my friend called me and said she had been drugged at the party the night before, and was terrified she had been sexually assaulted. >Thankfully<, after taking her to the hospital, we discovered she hadn’t been. So, so scary.
– Since that was upsetting and sad, how about a funny one? In my dream, I went to an outdoor Ke$ha concert (don’t judge, I don’t know why, either), where Morgan Freeman heard my “excellent and fascinating” scientific explanation about something to do with stars, and offered me a high-five, then a low-five, then a double-high-five, then a high-five behind the back, then a high-five under the thigh—Morgan Freeman and I did so many high-fives. After the concert, Morgan Freeman gave me a ride home, but along the way we encountered some guy who was doing something really bad in his personal life (can’t remember), so Morgan Freeman and I proceeded to strongly admonish him for his wrongdoings. In the middle of our lecture, the guy got really antsy and weird, then suddenly disappeared and left a trio of pugs in his stead, who looked very upset and confused as to why they were being scolded.
Then I woke up.
I didn’t absorb the word ‘funny’ on the last one at first and thought, “well I suppose the frequency and variety of those high-fives would be super uncanny…”
My best friend’s family had a communicable bad dream: one child had it and told the others, and then the others had it one by one. When she told me about it, I had it too.
As a child (age 4 or 5) I dreamed I was in some kind of natural history museum where one entire wall was made up of aquariums. The room was dark except for the aquarium lights. In one of the aquariums was an enormous fish swimming slowly back and forth, and as I looked at it, it looked right at me, opened its mouth, and screamed. I woke up utterly terrified.
When I taught college writing I had just about every possible variation on the teaching anxiety dream (can’t find the classroom, students being hostile, notes in a mess, showed up to class half-dressed, signed up to TA a Physics 101 class and completely forgot to show up, etc. etc. etc.). I had them all the time. The moment I switched careers, my anxiety dreams reverted back to being about wandering through mazelike airports trying not to miss my flight, and they got much less frequent.
I once had a dream where I was like, taken hostage or something, and to protect my sister I wound up getting shot in the back. It was so vivid that I could like, feel where the bullet went through me. It didn’t hurt, but I felt it. Then I woke up. I still think about it sometimes, I’ve never had anything like that happen before.
Does anyone remember that episode of star trek voyager where they’re all collectively lucid dreaming and also aliens are attacking them in their dreams? And every time they thought they were awake chakotay would look out the window and see the moon and realize nope still dreaming/being attacked by aliens? I forgot why the aliens were even bothering because it seems like a pretty pointless thing to do, to dream attack people. What where they going to get out of it, kicks? I’m sure it was explained and that the explanation was as flimsy as the concept itself. Anyway – just something to think about next time you’re sleep paralyzed – maybe its aliens, we don’t know.
This hasn’t happened in years, but I used to occasionally dream that my mom died in some horrible way and I would be so convinced when I woke up that it had actually happened that the only way I could go back to sleep was if I called her first and heard her voice. She was always very soothing about it, even if it was 3 or 4 AM.
(I live in fear of the inevitable day that my mom actually dies, and I wake up in the middle of the night convinced it was a dream, and then realize I can’t call her because it’s real.)
My worst dreams involve me trying to escape but there’s nothing to escape to. The Earth is so small that I can run over all of it and I know that there’s not a single safe place. Also, the people in my dreams are almost always hostile. They won’t help me or they’re actively trying to hurt me.
The most bizarre nightmare I had recently was that my dad (who IRL has some health problems) had had to have his penis cut off for medical reasons. No one told me until some event later when I had to see him naked. I was horrified that I was required to see him naked and that his body was mutilated.
I have the feeling that this dream is tied to the time when I was sexually assaulted IRL and my dad wasn’t particularly sympathetic or interested in supporting me. I’m a hetero woman, but I’ve been terrified of and disgusted by dicks for pretty much my whole life. Even more so since the assault.
Not precisely a nightmare but last night I had a dream that I was definitely going to put on the ‘too embarrassing to share’ list, until the power of Mallory’s strange internet prescience persuaded me to divulge for the amusement of internet strangers.
There was a sort of medieval fantasy setting, in which I had fallen in love with Fili from the Hobbit. Then I was yanked out of it into a futuristic setting where I was told that I had actually been in a simulation and that there had been some kind of mistake as I should have been aware that it was. Dream me is furious and makes a great speech about how ‘It doesn’t matter what’s real, I just want to be happy’. I get plugged back in and just have time to see Fili and the kid we apparently now have before waking up.
Today has been entirely disappointing as a result. What the fuck brain, why would you do this?
Ugh, ugh the sleep paralysis. Always accompanied by hearing someone wearing a raincoat RUSH into my house then into my room and right up to my bed where they stare at me. I have to tear myself awake by trying to scream or speak to them. (Once I woke up trying to shout, “Hello! How are you!” – I am polite even in terror)
Once I dreamed I had to kill my best friend by chopping off the top of her head like an egg. We were all medieval tapestry figures and I had a big long sword.
Last night I dreamed someone tried to smother me with our shower curtain. I was relieved to remember mid dream that we have shower doors instead.
I’ve had a dream—roughly the same dream—every time someone close to me has died, and occasionally for years afterward: they return, and I’m delighted but confused.
“Why did you abandon me?” they ask, or “Why didn’t you come for me?” or “You didn’t help me” or “How could you leave me alone?”
“But…” I hesitate, because it seems a little bald to say you died, you were dead to them as they stand there before me, stricken and beseeching. But I say it. I tell them how sorry I am, but they were dead, there was nothing I could do but grieve.
“No, I wasn’t,” they say, and then they explain that they’ve been alive all this time and I’ve just been ignoring them, abandoning them, not answering their calls and cries and letters and knocks on the door. I’ve turned away from them, forsaken them, for years. And it hurt them, and they can’t believe that if I’d known, if I’d heard, if there was anything I could do, I would have been by their side, that I too am pained by so many years of connection and love lost to a stupid, stupid error.
It’s not a nightmare, but it’s easily my worst dream, because even years after a loved one dies, I wake up with my grief stirred up, crying and mourning just like I did when they died.
I had SO MANY dreams about oversleeping or forgetting about important exams I can’t even count. See also: stupid mistakes thanks to which my life takes horrific turns (specifics vary, the basic plot is the same).
Once I had a nightmare that involved a …thing just staring at me malevolently from the corner of my room while I was lying on my bed and couldn’t move. It was a thousand times more horrifying than all the graphic nightmares with Freudian stuff I have all the time. Also: to this day I am not 100% sure it was really just a dream.
I often dream I’m driving a car from the back seat and the brakes aren’t working (thanks, subconscious, I already knew about my deficient sense of agency).
The worst nightmare I ever had was when I was about ten. I dreamt that soldiers were invading my house and my mum and baby brother and I were huddling together in my closet. As the soldiers got closer to finding us, my mother said “they’re going to kill us anyway, so we should kill ourselves first”. She handed me a knife and I stabbed myself in the chest… And woke up with a stabbing pain in my chest.
I have that ‘driving from the back seat with no brakes’ dream all the freaking time. I’m still not convinced it isn’t real.
I’ve dreamt about nearly everything terrible under the sun.
In no particular order:
-Everything is normal but my eyeball is decaying and peeling off in layers, like a rotting onion.
-I was facing depression and an eating disorder, and they started manifesting an odd and terrifying physical symptom- as I got worse and worse, my skin would burn in patches of red and eventually black until holes had been burnt through my body and I was essentially crumbling and shriveling up.
-Every apocalypse scenario possible, I have dreamt: earthquake, aliens, hurricane, tornados, flood, virus, zombies. It’s very cinematic, with heightened existential dread.
-Multiple, multiple dreams in which I am forced by some invisible evil to kill my parents and family members. In really gruesome ways, by gun and sword…I am screaming and resisting the whole time but my loved ones always end up dead.
-I am 6 years old and I dream that my big sister is turned into the Chesire cat and has to be taken away from our family, forever. I wake up BAWLING. A few nights later I dream that I am riding a roller coaster and at the top I look up to find an old woman dead hanging from a noose. It is difficult to say which one I reacted to worse.
A friend told me possibly the most frightening dream a person could have: his bed was inset in a nook by the door, and he dreamed that he was, as usual, texting late at night with his phone under the covers. He hears something shuffling outside the door, he knows it’s evil and bad and coming for him so he presses his phone to his chest to block the light and tries to breath slowly. He wakes up as his door creaks open, sweating profusely in the dark. He reaches for the door handle to make sure it’s locked and something cold grabs his hand.
I don’t have a ton of nightmares anymore, but I used to be ~nightmares always~ as a kid.
1. Freddy Krueger is crawling under my blankets and is going to rip out my intestines and hang me from the ceiling by them
2. There is a doll. It is evil. It is chasing me. I get to people, but no one listens to me. I try to secure a hideout but people keep thwarting me. The more frantic I get, the more impossibly slow I move and the more painfully quiet I speak. If I need to see things clearly in detail, my vision will get worse and worse until it’s all blurs. (I do wear glasses, and when these dreams started I didn’t know I needed them)
3. One particular doll dream – there was this freaky me-sized doll my grandma had that PETRIFIED me. The dream always started the same. I was going down to the basement for something. The doll is where it usually is. I am scared but tell myself it’s only a doll and it can’t do anything. Realize that when I saw it, it had an expression that it didn’t usually have. Realize that it is not just a doll. Turn around to watch it approach me grinning widely, wielding a knife.
Sleep paralysis, but also someone is sitting on the bed next to me, their face close to mine. I can’t turn my head either to look directly at them or to look away from their leer.
I’m playing Dark Souls, I’m terrible at it, and the game is a metaphor for my life. “This is you fluffing a social encounter,” I realise as I mis-time a dodge. “This is you failing to get a proper grown up job. This is not being able to do eyeliner. This is your divorce.” Ah ha ha ha. Ah ha.
I don’t have nightmares very often, but one from 15ish years ago has stuck with me. I only dreamt it once but I REMEMBER EVERY DETAIL.
I’m in my room at my parents’ house (where I actually was sleeping). It’s bright, like mid-afternoon; I’m lying on my bed and my cousin is sitting cross-legged on the floor beside the bed. We’re talking and laughing, like we do.
Still talking and smiling, he starts to stand up. As he stands he morphs into a misty-white ghost/ghoul creature whose smile is now an evil grin. This ghoul proceeds to sit on my chest. It’s transparent but weighs a fuckton because it feels like my chest is being crushed.
Now dream and reality start to become indisinguishable because while my chest is still being crushed by a now-invisible ghoul, I can see that I’m in bed under the covers and it’s the grey light of early morning. AND I CAN’T MOVE, CAN’T SPEAK, CAN’T DO ANYTHING. Panic is starting to close in on me, I’m GOING TO DIE.
I push back at the panic and think, there’s only one chance to escape. I gather every bit of my strength and push out as hard as I can with my chest muscles. And the ghoul is gone, and I can breathe again, and it’s grey early morning in my room.
I still shudder to think what might have happened if panic had got the better of me.
I went to an interview that I should be hearing back about any day now. I dreamt two nights ago that the recruiter followed up to tell me it was between me and one other person, and that their main concern was that I seemed too bossy. I am a terribly un-bossy person and dream-me was so confused she didn’t know how to respond.
I’ve since reached full-on anxiety mode about possibly hearing back and have been seriously rehashing the interview feedback I got FROM A DREAM with my friends.
Also as a part of that same dream, my SO was a serial killer and when I tried to tell him he needed to stop killing people he got really annoyed at me for trying to control him.
I didn’t mean to but I actually laughed out loud at your last comment about your SO the serial killer. All I could picture was him as a dude bro drawling ‘well, that’s just like your opinion man’.
I always dream that people I love have stomach viruses. I’m really afraid of stomach viruses in real life and I guess that manifests itself pretty non-symbolically in my dreams.
And two that come with about the same level of frequency: one, that I’ve just given birth to a baby I wasn’t prepared for, and am walking around with it, like, without baby equipment or a partner or anything; and, two, that I’ve planned a wedding to a guy I DON’T want to marry and the wedding’s in a couple hours and I realize I have to break it off.
Oh, AND! that I’m running a half marathon that goes through buildings, and I have to go up stairs, stop and have lunch, talk with strangers, etc. There are never any other runners around and I’m worried about being, at this point, hours behind the rest and unable to find my way.
I used to have a recurring dream when I was little of a moving fire or lava that would burn holes in the ground & my family would fall into the fire holes. I’d try to reach them to pull them out but the holes would crumble more & more & they’d fall deeper & deeper (I was ~7, they were all >16 so I couldn’t have pulled them up anyway & I knew it). I’d watch them burn & fall away from me.
I also had about 2 weeks in college where I died or woke up as I almost died. One was me sitting on the roof of a high rise in a very tall chair. There was an earthquake & the chair tipped & I fell off the building. Then the building fell on me. It was all dark & I knew I was dead. Woke up wondering if I was stuck there or if there was anything after death.
Another involved me cutting bugs out of my arms then realizing too late that I bled myself out & fading out to death. (I think that one was influenced by an episode of X-files)
I dreamed that faceless World War I combatants were crawling toward and over and around me, moaning. I was absolutely terrified. Then I realized what was happening and said, “Oh, you poor boys! It’s been a hundred years, no wonder you’re upset. We will remember. WE WILL REMEMBER.” And then they went peacefully away.
I used to have a kind of sleep paralysis in college. If I fell asleep on my stomach, I’d wake up not long after with this sense of some entity holding me down, pressing menacingly down on me with some kind of force beam. I was totally awake, as far as I could tell, but I couldn’t move, and when I’d try to call to my sleeping roommate for help all that would come out was a vague groan. Eventually, I discovered that while I couldn’t get up under that pressure, I could move sideways until I fell out of my bed, and then it would be broken.
After half a dozen of these incidents, I woke up under that pressure one night and I was suddenly furious. I went charging up that force beam looking for the entity at the other end, yelling that I was going to “get him”, and he fled, with me crying after him, “Come back here, you bastard!” I never had the problem again, and I’ve always remembered it as a huge victory. (But I still regret that I couldn’t catch him. It. Whatever.)
I’ve had this dream sometimes that the ball of my heel is crumbling and falling away, but it’s worse than that, it’s made of teeth. It’s made of teeth and they’re crumbling away from one another. And half the time it’s my fault because my heel was itchy and so I dug in and felt the teeth and started pulling and now they’re all falling out.
Gah. I’ve thought about this while awake a couple times too, because it’s the kind of dream terror that just sticks with you. (sorry for sharing)
I regularly have action-movie-style dreams where I am under attack by Bad People and have to kill them, all by myself, up close, with a knife or a gun. They aren’t exactly nightmares, because I usually wake up psyched at successfully defending myself, and I’m never particularly scared during the process?
I also wake up convinced that I could actually operate a gun or knife with lethal efficiency, which, untrue.
Yes! My fleeing dreams are always successful. If I try really really hard, I shift into some kind of overdrive and can outrun anything – not by much but always enough to escape or wake up. I wake up with a huge confidence boost.
In real life I’m super clumsy and slow.
Chased by a rampaging hippo through a series of garagelike bunkers. I started out the dream fleeing with friends, but the hippo caught and ate them. After they were gone, I tried to assimilate into a community living inside one of the bunkers and hide out there. But the hippo found me.
I don’t remember what happened after that.
All I can remember is that I couldn’t staunch the blood.
I am out in my backyard and there are tigers/lions that are going to eat me.
I have a giant wad of gum stuck in my mouth. It takes up the entire space in my mouth and I can’t chew it and can’t open my mouth and I cant’ breathe.
I am being chased by someone who wants to kill me. I shoot and kill them, or I stab them.
I am surfing (can’t surf) or swimming in open water. There are sharks. This one happens with alligators too, and last night giant snakes.
I think these are the more recurring ones. They happen several times a month.
The first nightmare I ever remember was when I was 8 years old: there was a giant bear made of fire (because we were in hell) and he was eating all my classmates one by one.
I was being chased by a bear and my linguistics professor came to rescue me. I'm not sure if her presence actually had any effect on the bear, but the bear did leave without injuring anyone, though perhaps coincidentally. I was touched that my professor tried to help, in any case.
My least favorite nightmares are the ones about people I know. Friends, bosses. I had a dream about my boss where he was essentially saying that unless I shaped up, he was going to fire me, and he then proceeded to emotionally destroy me in my dream. And I spent the next week or so unable to look at him, and kind of afraid. I still don’t talk to him much about anything outside of work. Another one was worse- I had a dream about this guy I would love to be with and would have asked out, except for his girlfriend. In my dream she was chastising me for hitting on her man and trying to take him away, and I was frantically trying to explain to her, and him, and my close friend who works with him, that I would never actually do anything, never had done anything, nothing was ever going to happen. And the response from all of them was just, “you must stop seeing him at all ever even on accident or for business purposes”. That was uncomfortable for quite a while, because I just wanted to tell my friend about my weird dream, but she doesn’t know how I feel and it would have just been a bizarre situation.
And then there’s the screaming, things being tortured in the distance, murder and blood everywhere dreams. And the ones where I’m trying to defend myself, but all of my punches land like rubbery butterflies and my attacker laughs.
I grew up on a beautiful farm in Tasmania. It looks like this:
http://i.imgur.com/p811O1R.jpg
Once I dreamed that I was walking in the exact spot above. I met two people, a couple, walking in the other direction. They were lovely, in their mid-twenties (I was about 10 at the time). We had a pleasant chat, which was odd in itself as I was very shy at that age around adults, then I remembered: “I’m not in Tasmania at the moment. I’m over on mainland Australia on a holiday.”
(This was true)
I then thought, for the first time ever or since: “This is not real. I am dreaming this”. The instant I thought this (I didn’t say it, just thought it) their faces *changed* to something inhuman, filled with rage. One shrieked: “He knows he’s dreaming – get him before he wakes up.” The sky turned black, and they stepped towards me in unison.
I woke up.
Naked in NYC – I have to walk a block, and then they, whoever the fuck they are (and why why why have they taken my clothes??) will give me back my clothes.
In one dream I had to eat a baby. That was hideous.
Sometimes I get a dream where I’m being chased by a horrible, formless monster. It always tells me I’m dreaming, and it always tells me that if I let myself wake up it will be released into the real world.
often get sleep paralysis, but now they’re lucid and I fly around the room. Back when i was a kid though, i once seriously thought a burgler was in the room and pinned me down and then left through the window. Took me days to believe it wasn’t real.
I have recurring dreams that are always of the same variety: some sort of menace, usually supernatural (ghosts, an evil shadow army, someone possessed, etc., but also sometimes the government or a murderer or whoever) is threatening my family and/or my friends, and I am in charge of saving everyone. Usually, we’re trapped in a house, and the presence is coming from outside.
I’m not stronger or braver or more clever than I am in real life (which is…not very, for all three), but for some reason it is always my job to come up with the plan to save everyone. I have to figure out a way to fight them off, to keep everyone safe (from flying knives, from breaking panes of glass, from roots that rise out of the ground as we run through a forest, etc.). I can never dial a phone to call for help; my hands are shaking, the lines are cut, etc. Everyone is in danger. I’m the last to run out of the house as it catches on fire, or to trip as we flee the town, or to be stuck in the room as I push my last family member to safety. I can’t scream as things close in on me. Then, I wake up breathless. I’ve had a variation on this dream at least once a month for the last 10 years.
I have a recurring dream that I’ve been entrusted with the care of a baby, or a small animal, or something that goes back and forth between being a baby and a small animal, and I inevitably somehow manage to lose or kill it.
Backstory: this year my grandmother died. She was 98, had a bad fall, and then about 7 weeks of horrible decline in the hospital and the care home. It was pretty standard for that kind of thing I think, but “pretty standard” means horrific in reality. Delirium, panic, that kind of thing. Plus she got horrible bed sores and fell out of bed and was left on the floor at a care home that cost $600/day DON’T GET ME STARTED. The whole thing was pretty tough for everyone involved, her especially I imagine.
My grandmother was a very glamourous and vain lady, and to the end the best thing I could do for her was to pluck her chin hairs and eyebrows and put makeup on her. She would be half delirious, and very confused, and would still be able to direct me around her makeup box like, “the green eyeshadow that says “LA” on it, top left hand corner”.
Anyway, I dreamt recently that she was alive again, and we were at some kind of party, and she needed help – her diaper needed to be changed I think. I took her in a room to help her. She was very small, more like a baby then a grown-up sized person. I was trying to clean her, but when I took off her clothes, her limbs had grown all these kind of extra limbs or growths, and were covered in hair. She was horribly deformed. I cleaned her as best I could. She was half covered in shit. When I got to her face, I realized that she was wearing a mask, and I went to take it off so I could clean her face. She started weeping and begging me not to, and in that moment I realized that there were people from the party watching us. I didn’t take off her mask. Her mask was wearing the same kind of makeup she liked – bright blue eyeshadow and red lipstick. I somehow knew that underneath it her face was a horror.
And somehow (dream events) she started to be a baby and also my grandmother, and in one moment she was this tiny perfect smooth-faced baby, and in the next she was this twisted, agonized creature.
I woke up hysterical, and remembering this still makes me so sad. Today I’m wearing a ring and a jacket of hers, and thinking of her.
I’ve also had several dreams where I’m getting married, but have had no time to plan it, and I have to wear a dress that is terrible. Like, the long powder blue horror from when I was a maid of honour. DO NOT WANT.
Rodents chasing me– that’s the recurring theme in most of my nightmares. The worst one was when I was in elementary school and I dreamed a possum and a chipmunk followed me home from the bus stop, and I couldn’t get into my house and they were coming closer, gnashing their teeth and I knew they were going to bite me so many times, I would probably die.
But my favorite (?) nightmare was when I was about 18. In the dream, my then-boyfriend and I are at Seaside Heights (NJ) and we go on a rickety old funhouse ride. But once we get inside the ride, the straps are way too tight, and as the train tracks take our little car down a steep drop. I hear people screaming and see piles of dead bodies off to the side, all with no hair. We are forced to ride through an acid mist and I feel my hair burning off my scalp. Then a bunch of Nazis come out, and grab my BF and drag him away for “hair conditioner experiments” and then another Nazi laughs at me and says I am going into the room labeled BRAIN SURGERY.
Nazis. I hate those guys.
The sleep paralysis. The worst terror.
It’s important not to struggle when it happens. It goes better if you just flop, like a wet noodle. That’s hard to do when every time feels like the first time, but you can mentally condition yourself to remember.
Recently, and within two days of each other, I had dreams about demons possessing and evil spirits going after my new baby. Woke up screaming from both and scaring the pants off my husband and child. I win at co-sleeping.
Recently, and within two days of each other, I had dreams about demons possessing and evil spirits going after my new baby. Woke up screaming from both and scaring the pants off my husband and child. I win at co-sleeping.
warning: rape, pretty traumatic and generally awful-
i sleep with my rapist/abusive ex again because i’m trying to get him to love me, and it’s awful. he tells me he has intimacy problems and i tell him i made love with someone for the first time.
WHY
Always baby dreams! I have a tiny baby that I misplace/sit on/squash in my hand. Or I have a baby that I forgot entirely about and realize eventually is probably still in its crib in the bedroom all starved to death, and I just go about my life walking by that closed door like it doesn’t exist, refusing to ever open it again or think about what’s beyond it. Or somebody gives me their baby to take care of for a while and through strange dream shenanigans and logic I end up accidentally boiling it alive and am just trying to hide this jar of baby skeleton from everybody. Or I have a perfectly normal baby except that its skin isn’t quite attached yet so it slips and slides around all the time and might mysteriously come off if I’m not careful but I’m not sure what “careful” means (this is a dream about my anxieties over what the hell a “soft spot” is). Or the baby somehow got on the roof and it’s raining and they’re going to slip off soon and I have to stand here ready to catch them while trying not to think about what it will look like if I don’t catch them, because I am vaguely aware that this is a dream and thinking about something too hard will definitely make it happen.
I have never been pregnant or had a baby and am not overly interested in having a baby in my lifetime so I don’t know where this nightmare fixation on everything-going-wrong-with-babies comes from, but aside from falling dreams, baby dreams are the only nightmares that can reliably unsettle me.
Is it weird that I’m really encouraged by all the other people who experience sleep paralysis? I mean, I’m not happy that we all do, because it sucks, but just a little comforted that I’m not alone in that. On an intellectual level, I know that it’s all physiological, but there’s always something that feels really malevolent about the intruder during an episode. Ugh, these are just the worst.
Beyond that, I only have one nightmare that recurs once every other month or so, and it is that I am getting married. It’s the morning of my wedding, and I suddenly realize that I do not want to marry [insert new person every time]. I can never figure out how I have gone for an entire engagement with this person that I don’t want to be married to, but all of a sudden it’s the day of, and I want nothing more than to be single forever and ever. It always feels like a huge whirlwind rush to get ready and there’s never any time for me to tell anyone how scared I am, and how much I don’t want to do this. And it’s never like I’m marrying some cringeworthy evil person – it’s always a person that I know, just that I don’t want to marry and be married to forever, but it happens really fast and I feel like I’m just being propelled forward into this eternal trap.
It probably explains a lot about me actually.
My boyfriend gets the sleep paralysis/night hag thing. He can’t move or wake himself up, but literally any external change in his environment will snap him out of it. So he changes his breathing pattern to be really irregular, and lucky for him, I’m an extraordinary light sleeper, so that wakes me up every time, and I reach over and touch him, and then he snaps out of it.
EXCEPT OF COURSE his brain caught onto that trick, so last time he had a sleep paralysis dream, he woke up, realized he was paralyzed, and tried the breathing trick. I woke up, got out of bed and started to head to the bathroom, and then stopped and turned around because I had noticed his breathing. So I started to reach down to touch him, and then my skin turned into rough scales and my eyes turned jet black and I sneered a leering mouth full of razor sharp teeth at him and he was like oh COME ON. Back in the waking world, I mistook his little gasps of terror for snoring and had started shoving him and calling him an asshole, so he woke up and all was well.
i have the sleep paralysis dreams (? experiences? happenings?) as well and they’re always accompanied by auditory and/or visual hallucinations. They don’t happen so often that I expect them, but they happen frequently enough that I’ve had nightmares where I think I’ve woken up, but I’m still dreaming, and then when I think I’ve woken up, I’m still actually asleep and dreaming, rinse, repeat, and basically I am having a very rough time of distinguishing things that have happened to me in real life and things that only happened in dreams.
Best of Sophie’s horror cabinet:
i’m a maid in Tsarist Russia to a very noble and wealthy family who treat me badly despite me being virtuous and kind. Especially the daughter is cruel and mean to any living soul. So, one day I ask the cold mother why there is a freaking giant cave in their garden and she replies that’s none of my business. At that night, I open the giant wooden door to the cave and go in. It’s hot and dimly light in there. A path on the right leads, according to a sign, to heaven, whereas the left leads to hell. I’m horrified and leave. In the morning, I tell the daughter about the cave and she demands that I show her the way (it’s a freaking cave at the end of your tiny garden?!?!). I do so, and she takes the path to hell because it’s more fun (???). So, she goes down to hell, a big golden room where she sits down in a big bath tub. Suddenly, a little black devil comes and starts scrubbing her with a giant brush until it breaks her skin. There’s blood and shadows and lots of screaming. In my panic I run towards heaven. It turns out to be a tiny wooden room where it smells like bacon and beer. A tiny fat Santa Claus is dancing the Cosac dance. The end.
Currently, my dreams prominently feature my parents and my brother accusing me of the end of the world, eating my guts out of my stomach while I’m concious … (Can you tell I’m having lots of issues with them?) Freud would have a field day.