Nightmares of Old

[esper]

 I was just thinking the other day about the worst nightmare I ever had. When I was younger, my older brother used to read me The Hobbit and the Chronicles of Narnia (which, by the way, are so unrelated to this nightmare that it makes little sense as to why I'd even mention it). One night, after the council of Thorin and the seige of the elven armies of Mirkwood and the men of the Lake on Lonely Mountain, I fell asleep, and my brother fell asleep in a chair beside me with the book over his face.

Ã,  Ã, I dreamed that night that a giant mouth... No physical form outside of just the lips, teeth, etc. (in other words, it wasn't a monster with a big mouth, it was simply a giant, disembodied mouth, which if you think about it violates so many laws of nature it isn't funny) came floating through the night sky, backed by the biggest and most threatening Sanguine moon I've ever beheld. We lived in the second floor of a duplex in Newport, Rhode Island, which is an old colonial town, so the architecture in the background created a kind of Peter-Pan meets Lovecraft feel to the dream.

Ã,  In this dream, the mouth bit through the wall, digesting the matter it collected in it's rather ordinary, un-fanged teeth through an esophagus and into a stomach which existed in some displaced alternate dimension. It then proceded to devour my brother (who was completely oblivious due to the Hobbit remaining perched on his face) in two hellaciously painful-looking bites. Chasing me around the room, it finally enveloped me in its jaws, and when the lips had closed around me, locking me in a shadowy enclave which seemed to exist outside of space and time, I awoke.

Ã,  Ã, Looking back on this, it is actually rather humorous, especially when I put the added flair of my creative writing skills to it... However, I remember it was, at the time, one of the most horrendous nightmares I've had in my life. While the purpose of this little bit of blatherschytation was to amuse and entertain, since such a story could hardly frighten anyone NOT actually experiencing it, I was wondering if anyone else here had similar childhood terrors... amusing now but horrible at the time.

[Nikolas]

First of all, I know understand where you got your wirtting talent: It's your dreams man!

WOW!

Well my nightmares was nothing out of the oridnary. There were no monsters, no paranormal, no nothing. But it was firghtenning as hell, cause they were based on real life, a fact I found out very much later in my life, when I met my wife.

The dream always started with me flying. Classic dream. Well and after a point I've reached a very slopy, something like 30-50% hill on which I couldn't fly, so I had to walk. And after a while I would fall and fall and fall and then wake up. I was terrified by any hill (urban not some green hill).

Anyway this is not of a nightmare unless you have developed a fear of falling. Now the key point to this dream is the explanation.

I have an aunt whom (<-this is correct?) I hate. I detest her. All she wanted to do is kiss me, and play with my chicks (), and touch my face. She was being nice, but she always had some kind of cream or awfull make up on, which made it so gros that I never knew how to get away. At the time when we used to visit her more often, my mother had a small (really small and old) FIAT. Which of course had trouble going up hills. I couldn't remember any of this until I met my wife who leaves near my aunt. Well, they live after a huge hill, with awfull roads 10% slope that are always full of traffic. Adding the fact that my mother was hysterical when it came to driving, I immediately understood where all the dreams were coming from, stoped fearing of falling (cause I went to the same hill and walked, up and down the hill. Courageous me, right?), but never stoped hating my aunt.

Well, that's the little nightmare I had when I was young and the bigger explanation of it.

But I'm proud of being able to overcome my fear and be able to analyse this dream (although by sheer chance, that is).

[Haddas]

ONE of my worst, but simultaneously most interesting nightmare happened not too long ago. I dreamt that I was in prison for an unknown reason, and was to stay there for 10 years. And after the time had passed I was sent to the prison warden. Seems he didn't like me so I had to stay for 20 more years. Anyway, seems that for some unknown reason I was chryogenically frozen in my sleep. I don't know why, but that film where it happens, i have not seen for 10 years. Anyway, I was then released and began to roam the streets. Everything looked different. I asked someone what year it was and they said 2064. I was shocked. My first thought was "Oh my god! Everyone I know is very old or dead by now, Including my mother, father and sister. My second thought was "All right, I'm old enough to buy cigarettes!". I laughed for like an hour at that comment after I woke up. Anyway. I began to roam the shops, seeing things like talking pumpkins and people with sandals on in the middle of the winter. I went to buy cigarettes and was shocked to see nobody smoked anymore and they only had a few old cigarettes at the bottom of the freezer. The one with the icecream in it too. I took them and didn't pay for them. However I did lose some of my money in a gambling machine. It was so complicated that I couldn't figure it out. This got me thinking about the old people who can't program a VCR. Later on I was at someones house, and they showed me their computer. It was running Microsoft Windows 2060. And it looked weird. If I remember correctly it had a AMD 256 3TB processor. Then I was told it had 1 tb of harddrive space. This is when I realized I was dreaming and woke up. There's no way the HDDs would be that small in 2064!

It doesn't seem like a nightmare in this form, but it was really emotionally heavy at the beginning when I had to stay in jail and life went on without me.

[fred]

I like the floating mouth thing - wish I had dreams like that, eveb if they ARE nightmares.

The most scary dream I had is a recurring one that I only have when I have fever (when I'm most defenseless), but I've been having it since childhood.

The scary thing is that it is completetly abstract, there are no recognizable figures or sentiments whatsoever: black and white dots , like on a TV-screen, fill up my entire perceptive field, and almost like in a fractal chaos, I must descend deeper and deeper into this madness, which turns out to be made up from large grinding blocks of black and white, with even smaller dots of black and white in between them that I can descend further into. The whole thing is accompanied by a grinding sound that gets louder and louder as I descend, and I usually wake up feeling totally wasted or grinded beyond belief.

The scary thing is that there's no sense to be made from it - it just seems that some hidden and horrible dimension of existence is revealed to me and leves me clueless. I'm thinking maybe it's a dream of not dreaming, just the raw mechanics of sleeping revealed becase maybe the mind can't filter it when I have a fever, like the noisy signal of my own mind showing up vividly as in a dream. And it scares the shit out of me. Hm... does anyone have a similar experience?

[vict0r]

I had a similar experience some years ago. I hade a really high fever, and even though i werent sleeping it felt like my bed was spinning really fast around while a horde of furious colours attacked me. And i had no chance of getting out of the bed, being too dizzy. Not a pleasant episode! Especially since i was wide awake

[esper]

H.P. Lovecraft: "The Colour Out of Space..."

I haven't actually had anything like that, but in some cases I have had dreams that seemed very real because of motion. One I have frequently when in the grip of a fever is that my bed lifts up and flies through a strange space-like scene. This is accompanied by the feeling of motion and rushing wind.

On the flip side, one of the best dreams I've ever had came a week after my father died. I was always used to him being of sound mind and body, and when he got cancer I shied away from him, not wanting to see him in that condition. I missed his death, and subsequently was absent from the viewing and the funeral.

A week later, I dreamt he came to me and kissed me on the forehead (my father, although loving, never ever hugged or kissed anyone in his life...) The thing was, I felt it, as though it really had hapened.

[Babar]

I thankfully have nightmares very rarely. However, when I do, they are generally extremely weird, like most of my dreams. Once I fell asleep staring at the carpet, then had a dream of an extreme close-up of the carpet accompanied by an inexplicable feeling of fear. The same happened with the top of my bunkbed. Another time, I fell asleep in class, and had a nightmare of a tree falling on me. When I opened my eyes and saw my wooden desk rushing at my face, it wasn't so inexplicable.

[[Cameron]]

When I was younger whenever I was at my Grans I'd walk to the corner store and get myself a hamburger and a drink. And there was always this guy clipping his hedges. Real old guy. Never saw him do anything but clip his hedges. With really big hedge trimmers. And he's dog would bark a little, but really vicious when I went by. I remember that I was staying at Grans one night. And In my dream I was walking to the corner store. When I got to the old man he didnt just keep trimming. He turned around real slow and his hedge trimmers were stained with blood. As were his clothes. And for the first time I could see into his garage (Which was difficult to see because the gate was usually closed). Little bodies strewn across the floor. He saw me and laughed. Started walking towards me. I wanted to run but I couldnt. I was frozen on the spot. His dog barked more savagley than it ever had before. Just as he got near me I woke up. Scared the absolute hell out of me. Oddly, after that incident I never saw him again. The dog would just stare at me but the old man wouldnt be there.

[The Book]

   I still remember a nightmare I dreamt when I was still a child. It had me - and someone else at the same time, for it seemed as if I was watching a movie - descending into some kind of underworld. The lower we (them) descended the older everything became - for example, I remember me (him) fighting a dinosaur - almost as if descending into the depths of earth was akin to descending into the past. Note - simmiliar theme shows in Jung's dream of the abadoned house! End digression.  At the bottom there was a city, inhabited by rats - ordinary sized rats bestowed with incredible intelligence. They had some kind of spacecrafts - though they didn't take off into the sky, but into stellar space that stretched beneath the underground city instead. The protagonist (me) boarded one of them and took off (down?).

     The space appeared infinite, and there was a quality of decay to everything inside the alien craft - as if decay, rust and insanity permeated everything, permeated the universe.

      The end of dream had me (him) telling the story to disbelieving psychiatrist, a girl whom I didn't know was sitting beside me (it seemed as if in the dream she was mine - his - spouse). As soon as he (this time it was him) finished his story, the wall behind the psychiatrist darkened, opening into another dimension, orthogonal to the three dimensions we know. A figure with no recognisable features, eerily white, and looking barely human, walked along this dimension (I still vividly recall the other-dimensional quality of this vision!) towards the man and the girl - then it seemed as if the girl became surrounded by thick, webby substance, only to dissapear in the next instance. The figure then walked back, and the other dimension once again became invisible.

       The closing scene had comic-book like quality, as opposed to movie-like quality of the rest of the dream. It ended with words that went like "Whoever stole secrets of the underwold, he'll have to pay the price." The words ended the dream.

         For years I was afraid to tell it to anyone.

[Akumayo]

I, when I dream, dream either of very unpleasant things (getting in trouble at school and then at home, getting in trouble at home for stuff I didn't do, etc) or the things that are very pleasant.  I will tell you the truth about my dreams now, the ones I truly fear, are the very pleasant ones.  Do you know why?  Maybe you can relate, and maybe you cannot.  Either way, I will describe my feelings about them.  Do you know what it's like?  Waking up after something so wonderful that you can hardly stand the fact that it was not real.  Have you ever woken and wanted to go back to sleep not because of your weariness, but because you want to return to the beauty of the dream?  I have.  The greatest nightmares are those that don't bother you until after you wake... yes... those are the bad ones...

[Pelican]

I know exactly what you mean Akumayo. I've lost count of how many times I've woken up crying from a wonderful dream, because I realise its not real. They're usually about spending time with relatives that have passed away, or dreaming I've found my soulmate. Then I wake up, and feel so unbearably lonely.

[CaptainPancake]

I vaguely recall a dream a had a couple nights ago that was rather disturbing in and of itself.  It played out much like a videogame, and I was "controlling" a single armed soldier along a winding corridor.  It wasn't just a plain corridor, but a very diverse and interesting one, rife with such features as a break in it's enclosed area, where I had to cross a rickety rope and plank bridge.  The open space was set on a beautiful backdrop of a waterfall.

I wasn't alone as I ran along.  With me were two other soldier types carrying similar weapons but each one at least mostly unique.  Also moving along with my group was what appeared to be a rotting corpse, disembodied from the ribcage down.  He was mostly skeleton at this point, and he was an odd green color.  The strange thing is that this guy could MOVE.  He easily outmaneuvered any of us soldier types, and he would often perform incredible acrobatic feats.

The whole thing wasn't unlike a multiplayer game, where three players were soldiers, and one was the corpse dude.  We were all running from what appeared to be something similar to the sandworms from Betelgeuse.  The worms would "break" before they submerged themselves again, and the broken piece would fold over and back into itself, forming a complete worm again.  It broke the laws of physics, but that's how it was.