You know when you’re falling asleep and your mind starts wildly creating imagery and characters?
Lately my mind came up with one that creeps me out - A boy of about 10. Ordinary looking, except that his eyes and mouth have blood around them, his teeth are sharpened, and his overall expression is evil. His face is a bit like the one Bilbo puts on when he grabs for his precious around frodo’s neck at rivendel. Remember?
When I’m sleeping in an unfamiliar bed I don’t feel totally at ease. That combined with the freak-boy meant I kept having to check the room before resting my head on the pillow. Checking freak-boy wasn’t there. And if the room was clear I’d still feel uneasy, like when you look away, then look back and suddenly someone’s there, as if they teleported in.
You see my ordinary sceptic logical mind is switched off at night when all is quiet and I’m not in my own bed.
Banana worms (I’ve mentioned them before).
These are the large (up to 12cm long) larvae of a large subtropical beetle - cases of infestation are incredibly common - perhaps as many as 60% of the bananas in a typical supermarket will contain a banana worm, yet they are almost never detected; the reason for this is that, when disturbed, they stop moving entirely, oh and because their flesh has a texture and taste that very closely matches that of a normal ripe banana.
If you’ve eaten bananas, you’ve eaten banana worms and enjoyed the experience.
Well, you would have, if they weren’t just a figment of my imagination.
Yoda.
Only my Yoda’s bones suddenly fall out of his body through his skin, leaving a green, wrinkley sack of flesh on top of a pile of bones. In his words, “This happens sometimes”.
Once, and only once as I was falling asleep have I had a fleeting mental image so vivid and lifelike it was scary, and made me wonder if somehow it did not come from my own brain.
But that’s silly…
Anyway, the vision was from floor perspective, about five feet behind and to the right of a man tied to a straight back chair. His chair tipped over backwards and his head hit the floor and split open like a ripe melon, spraying blood and brains everywhere.
End of vision.
That is really creepy.
Only wouldn’t Yoda say instead: “Happens sometimes this does…”? 
[/nitpick]
You’d think so. But this Yoda actually did say “This happens sometimes”, and not “Happens somtimes it does”.
Mangetout, I remember you posting about these banana worms on the board a while back when I was lurking. I have eaten countless bananas since then, and thought of your creation every time.
Still didn’t deter me. I loves me some bananas. 
I turn on the TV on November 2nd and someone says, “George W. Bush has been re-elected president…”
I don’t know how horrifying this is, but I rarely remember dreams and I had the most vivid dream the other day. It was a dream in a semi-counscious state. I remember being vaguely aware that I was in a dream and I felt on the edge between consciousness and dreaming. I was at some kind of a carnival and there were a bunch of creepy Doug Henning type magicians and all of the tricks were really, really weird and there was this 70’s type feeling to everything (if you grew up in the seventies you’ll know what I mean). I saw a friend of mine and was talking to her and then lost her in the crowd. I kept looking for her and callng her name but kept meeting weird people at booths and counters (this part is hazy). Finally, I ended up sitting down at a table and some guy offered me a donut. In the dream they smelled wonderful!! Alll deep fried sweet starchy smelling…mmmmm…donuts! I took it and bit into it…I swear this was the most incredible donut I ever ate…it was lemon poppyseed (I have never tasted anything so vividly in a dream before.).So I started to walk away eating the donut when somebody yells, “They’re laced with acid mannnnn!!!” And the next thing I know a cop tackles me by my ankles in the dream, I remember trying to move my legs in the dream, but nothing happened. I hit the ground in the dream and woke up startled. Turns out my legs were crossed at the ankles.
I was kind of disappointed to wake up, it was such a vivid dream.
Weird, though.
This isn’t mine… just an offhand comment by a friend of my brother’s.
“So I was taking a crap the other day and as I looked around to flush I thought ‘Hmmm. That’s about the size of a cock, and if that didn’t hurt…’”
I have a feeling the Banana Worms will leave me similarly scarred for life.
Recently I dreamed that Thomas Jefferson was living in a cage in my basement, and he was only three feet tall. What really got me was when I realized, in a semi-lucid state, that the most surprising thing to me was that in real life he was so small.
In that same dream I had a suitcase made of frozen waffles. The square kind, 'cause the round ones wouldn’t form good corners and things could fall out. I kept it in the basement too.
TMI? Probably not. Bizzare? Oh yeah. Psychoanalyze that one, I dare ya.
I had a short dream the other night. I was standing alone in a cold living room and heard something so I turned around.
There was a large teddy bear on a chair. Unnerved, not wanting to believe, I stared. My brain had almost convinced itself that it wasn’t true, couldn’t be true, couldn’t - and then it moved.
Just typing this would have freaked me out if I hadn’t been still laughing about picker’s frozen waffle suitcase.
You Bastard!!!
I am never going to be able to forget that!!!
Thank you very bloody much!!!
Weird, isn’t it? I know I know there’s no such thing as an undetectable banana worm, I know I made the whole ridiculous thing up myself; even if it were true, it didn’t even ought to be all that disturbing, objectively.
But I still find myself examining bananas very, very closely as I eat them.
Well, I don’t like bananas anyway so I’m safe.
I had a friend though, at Uni, who if you told him about banana worms would probably stop eating, full stop.
He was the kind of person who feared eating from plastic containers because of fear of some chemicals from the plastic entering the liquid.
My childhood mental creation of dread - vampire duck. And I wasn’t asleep for that one. My brain interpreted a shape in my brother’s duvet as an evil vampire duck. My face was :eek: until morning.
For me it’s puzzle girl. She appears in some of my dreams, usually in one of those dramatic, foggy night type deals. She’s beautiful, with long hair and piercing eyes. She glides across the ground with the grace of a dancer, her body is lithe and healthy. She’s pleasant enough until …
her entire body splits into pieces and start rearranging themselves like some cracked-out rubik’s cube. Flesh, muscle, organs and tissue all slide over each other, when one part shifts you can see beneath it into the underlying structures. Pieces of the puzzle undulating and shifting, and before your brain even fully recognizes what you’ve seen, she’s back together again and smiling at you beatifically.
I have nothing that will stand up to banana worms shudder…
I once drempt I was talking with an ex in our bedroom. Flash of light, and we’re sitting in the same positions on a beautiful hill covered with yellow flowers, under the most clear-blue sky and bright warm sunshine you can image.
Except now my ex has all his skin flayed off. He’s staring at me with ice blue eyes and absolutely no skin, under bright sunlight with flowers behind him.
Another flash, and we’re back in the bedroom, and he has his skin back. (At this point the freak out began, but only because it was one of those I-know-I’m-dreaming-but-if-I-really-was-wouldn’t-I-be-able-to-wake-myself-up? dreams.)
I won’t even try to describe the dream I had one night about Pure Evil. That one disturbed me so much I tried waking up 5 times (but couldn’t) before I finally really woke up screaming, scared the bejezus out of my roommate, and sat up smoking cigarettes until dawn.
To counteract the creepy: I once drempt about little neon kittens - with flippers! They were water cats and you kept them in a bowl just like goldfish!
A nightmare so ugly that even while I was asleep and in the process of dreaming it, I said “That’s GROSS!”.
It was sort of like a science-fiction movie. Some people in a starship out in space encountered an alien spaceship/machine. They initiated a first contact procedure, only to discover that the alien ship was a single computer entity. It was not friendly. Metal tentacles shot out from the alien machine and burrowed into the starship, destroying and neutralizing the ship’s defenses as they went. Finally one of the tentacles burrowed into a control center manned by someone- the ship’s captain or pilot or chief engineer or security officer. The tentacle sawed off the top of his skull and sank electrodes into his brain. As the man sat there at his control panel with a lobotomized imbecilc grin on his face, he obeyed the machine’s commands to kill his crew by overriding the ship’s systems, electrocuting them, voiding compartments’ atmosphere, turning the ship’s own internal defense systems on them. The whole while with an erection tenting his pants as the alien machine rewarded his obedience by stimulating his brain’s pleasure centers. When it was finally done, the tentacle simply yanked loose, pulping what was left of his brain and leaving a corpse on the floor.
Oh come on! You have to tell us about Pure Evil! I’m seriously intrigued.
I can only think of one creepy mental creation of my own. When I was probably 12 or 13 my friends and I slept out in a tent in the backyard. As I was drifting asleep I started seeing this thing in the backyard walking around the tents. It was like a VERY hunchbacked man, about 2 feet high, but so hunched over he was kind of beetle-like in shape. I’m not even sure if he was human. He had creepy bulging eyes and dirty torn shards for clothes. As he walked he kind of rubbed his hands together and shuffled about the backyard. I always think about that dude whenever I sleep in a tent. I mean, how creepy would it be to walk outside of your tent to go to the bathroom or something and see that thing just walking around!