What was your most frightening or disturbing nightmare? The one that still gives you a little shiver when you think of it? That you hope you never, ever have again?
We’ve been househunting recently and my worst nightmare was triggered by one house we put an offer on.
In my nightmare, we were at the house, thinking to buy it or maybe had just bought it. My husband was walking around in the backyard, and suddenly all these sinkholes started opening up under his feet. The ground just crumbled away, and I knew it was going to go right underneath him, but he didn’t notice and I couldn’t warn him.
The ground did fall away under his feet and he fell down into a dungeon or basement. I thought he’d be able to crawl out through the sewer pipes but his legs were broken. I knew I had to rescue him but there were sinkholes all around me too. I kinda of hopped from spot to spot over to a chain link fence and started to climb over it, and I could see my kids ont he other side, but then the sinkhole started to grow under the fence and I couldn’t get across it in time. That is when I woke up.
The feeling of the fence melting away beneath me was horrifying.
It involved my autistic sister being sent to an abusive institution where people were left lying in huge heaps of filth and didn’t see sunlight for years. I woke up crying, and it disturbed me for the next month.
No idea what prompted the dream. Sister lives at home with her caretakers, and I was on a month-long vacation in Israel at the time.
I have very realistic dreams in which I do not know that I am dreaming. Makes for really freaky nightmares.
One night, I was sleeping on the couch (my husband was snoring up a storm) and I had a dream that my parents had died in a car crash on the way home from our house. It was very detailed and the next day I was trying to find all the burial arrangements (they have already purchased plots and put together their additional wishes at a funeral home) when it hit me that they were dead. I started crying and screaming and generally freaking out.
My husband heard me all the way upstairs and came down and woke me up. I had completely soaked the pillow with tears and my voice was raw. I had to phone my parents to be sure everything was okay.
Another goodie was when I was dreaming that I was camping with myself my two children and my best friend’s two children. The adults had all gone off to an adjacent campsite for some beers/general merriment and I stayed behind in the kids’ tent. I heard a noise in the forest outside and went to gather the four kids. Got three of them conscious enough to start moving and then put my hand on the fourth…she were dead and covered in a plastic tarp. I could feel the dead flesh in my hands and woke up with that sensation. Had me freaked for days.
I once dreamed that I was at home with my then three year old son. We were in room looking out at our back yard. In the dream, there was an old car back there and it was covered by cheetahs; there must have been twenty of them. One of them made eye contact with me and instantly charged the window, followed by ever damn one of them. I was almost surrounded by them but I managed to maneuver my son into a corner and stand in front of him, hoping I could fight off a band of cheetahs with my bare hands. I couldn’t but they didn’t hurt me too badly; they were after my son and they got him. I woke up all but screaming, crying and sobbing; i eventually spent the night in bed with him. I hugged him a lot for a long time after that dream.
Not a single dream but a recurring theme. It takes place in the house I grew up in. It’s almost always at night and sometimes I’m all alone but often times one or both of my parents or maybe even my brother are home but not where I can see them. It starts out with everything being normal, or if not totally normal, cerainly nothing sinister. Then at some point I’ll convince my dreaming mind that this *should *be a very scary dream and bang! it suddenly is. Some form of of lucid dreaming I guess(or that’s what it feels like)where I suddenly plant things in my own mind and end up terrifying myself.
Coincidentally, I had one last night. For some reason I was taking customer service calls in the kitchen and a man with a funny(amusing funny, not creepy funny) voice was complaining about what, I can’t remember now, but in the dream it was a very silly problem for which I had a logical answer that I calmly related to him. My brother was there and we’re cracking up and there’s nothing menacing about the situation at all, and then out of the blue I feel panic stricken and it occurs to me to check the front door and the top lock is undone and as I reach up to turn it I feel his hand(the caller’s, not my brother’s)grab mine. And I start screaming for my brother to help me which leadsto the boyfriend waking my screaming self up and asking who the hell Kevin is
I have two most horrible nightmares ever. The first is the worse of the two but they are both pretty bad. The first is from when I was much younger. When I was a kid my mom gave birth to my younger brother prematurely and he died a few months later. I had a dream for weeks afterwards that we were at his funeral and he was being buried and I could hear him screaming in the coffin. I begged and pleaded with my family to open the coffin and stop them from filling in his grave but no one would believe me because I was just a kid so I got to listen to them bury my little brother alive.
My second and much more recent worst nightmare ever is that I find a set of identical twin babies abandoned on the side of the road. I pick them up and take them to the police, the hospital, and the fire department and none of them believe that I just found these babies. They all tell me that they are my kids and that I have to keep them and raise them all by myself. Then I try to explain it to my mom but she is really dissapointed in me for having children out of wedlock and won’t listen when I tell her they aren’t mine. The fear I felt in holding these children who need help but no one will listen to me to help them was incredibly intense.
This was a recurring dream I used to have, from childhood through around my 20s:
I am flying . . . but it’s more like swimming in air. I have to stroke with my arms and kick with my feet, and move slowly, the way a person moves in water. I am ascending very slowly but steadily, watching things on the ground getting smaller and smaller. Suddenly I realize that I have no control over any of this, that I’m getting higher and higher and I can’t stop. I’m getting really dizzy from the height . . . the ground now looks more like a map, and I’m afraid that if I stop I’ll plummet to my death. Total fear. Total panic. And I keep getting higher and higher . . . until I wake up screaming.
I had a very realistic dream in which I won some sorta MegaMillions Lottery. I got a check for something like 100 million dollars. The dream then involved all the things I was doing with the money. Gifts for friends, renting a cruise ship for a private cruise party, etc.
Then I woke up. When I realized it was a dream, I almost started crying. The dream was so realistic that I felt a sense of loss. I was depressed for the next few days. Maybe not a classic nightmare, but I hope it never repeats.
The worst one I can remember: In it, my husband had died, and the dream was just me dragging myself through my life, mourning him, feeling terrible and empty and lonely. It felt like it was my real life. It was weeks after his death, and some days I would wake up forgetting that he was dead, and then have that horrible realization, and miss him all over again. And so on yet another morning I woke up, and he was in bed next to me, and I was mentally beating myself up because of course I was still dreaming, my dreams were tormenting me with visions of him real and alive.
Except I really was awake this time, and he really was there, and I was confused and upset, and just sat there quietly processing exactly what was going on. Eventually I came to the realization that no, that was just an ultra-realistic dream, I had not gone through weeks of mourning him, he hadn’t died, this was my real waking life. And from there it was all I could do to not throw my arms around his sleeping self, because it still felt like I had gone through mourning.
I didn’t tell him for a very long time after that, I didn’t want to freak him out. When I finally did, he shared a kind of similar nightmare he had - for some reason it was vitally important that he pretend he was dead, and I was there screaming and crying over him, and it was crushing him that he couldn’t let on what was actually happening.
I’ll give you my other worst dream that was so bad I don’t even remember it. Woke straight up a couple of years ago, screaming, “THEY’RE COMING!” I scared the shit out of my husband, and even though he is significantly bigger and stronger than I, he couldn’t pry me out from under the covers. I can’t remember anything about it, but I remember how scared I was.
For the last couple of years, I have been having nightmares involving spiders. I cannot remember any details, but one of three things happens: I either fall out of bed (taking the dog next to me with me); I shove the dog out of bed; or I wake up everyone flailing both arms and legs. I don’t generally (according to the husband) say or scream much of anything, but in every case, I mumbled something about spiders right before dropping back to sleep. Apparently, the mumbling of spiders then freaks out husband and he stays awake for a good hour wondering if I was dreaming or if there was really a spider.
Besides one where I helplessly watched as a gendel-like monster stalked and killed a bunch of people, one of the most upsetting involved me purposely injuring a kitten that was annoying me so badly that it died. In real life I generally like kittens and have never purposely hurt an animal, so I woke up completely horrified even though there were no kittens in my life at the time. (my best friend fosters kittens, but hadn’t been just then)
Another terribly upsetting dream I had involved another animal I like: elephants. Somehow my grandfather bought an elephant, and when I went to check it out, it picked me up with its trunk and squeezed and shook me. I got away right before I blacked out, and when I lifted my shirt my entire torso was darkly bruised.
One of the more disturbing ones that was actually coherent and describable took place a couple years ago. I dreamed I could no longer walk; my legs had turned into a pair of rotten logs of the sort you come across in the forest, with ants crawing in and out of holes and digging deeper and presumably extending the damage upward.
I still remember a recurring nightmare that I began experiencing when I was about 3 years old.
At the time we were living in a house with a hurricane fence bordering the property and a long walk down to the gate.
In the dream it is a lovely Spring Day, deep blue sky, small puffy clouds.
I walk down to the gate reach way up and place both hands on the top bar to pull the gate open. Suddenly a monster appears. The monster is a very tall transparent but out-lined form floating on the street side of the gate facing me. He has evil looking eyes and his “hands” have really long finger nails. I am frozen in fear but finally start to back away but the monster stabs my fingers with his nails and pins me to the fence.
I had this same dream at least once a week for a few years.
Some of my worst nightmares probably wouldn’t seem all that frightening to someone who didn’t experience them directly. One dream I had over a decade ago involved standing in my grandparents’ hallway trying to protect a small child from a goat. The goat was throwing itself against me and biting my flesh, and when I turned to look at the little girl her head did a 360 degree spin not unlike The Exorcist. I’ve had nightmares of being locked in torture chambers, and yet this goat dream is still one of the scariest dreams I’ve ever had.
My most recent nightmares, which occurred yesterday morning, were kind of ‘‘Fuck you’’ dreams. In the first I had moved into an apartment building on the 25th floor of a skyscraper, and I was frightened of heights so I decided to ride the elevator up and down ad nauseum in order to cure myself via prolonged exposure. We were up to the 24th floor when the building collapsed and I died. :smack:
The second was much more disturbing. It started out like an ordinary cop drama where the protagonists realize who the killer is and he’s in the middle of luring some innocent victim into his lair. So the whole thing becomes a race against time to try to stop the killer from claiming his next victim. This dream was some what lucid in that I was mentally able to dispatch a rescue team, but when I walked through the hotel room door (the killer’s ‘‘lair’’) my brain actually surprised itself by the level of depravity of the killer. I had planned for her to be shackled to the bed at gunpoint or something. Instead, the victim was strapped to a hospital gurney with a bunch of electrodes on her forehead and the killer was forcing her to torture herself. When I walked in he was making her jab a sharp needle into her flesh. Two weird things: Steve Carrell was there, standing at the foot of the hospital gurney and whimpering pathetically. And the woman, when she jabbed her flesh with the needle, stopped crying and got an ethereal, revelatory, perhaps even peaceful expression on her face.
Then I woke up.
My worst nightmares of all are based on actual experiences. I don’t even share them with my husband, so obviously I’m not going to share them here.
I had a dream like that once. I accidentally stepped on and broke both of a cat’s hind legs. It made sense in the dream, but I had to put it out of its misery. Since only had my bare hands, I couldn’t make myself use enough force, so I only ended up making the cat feel more pain. It was crying out and looking at me helplessly with an expression that said, “Why are you trying to hurt me more? Why aren’t you trying to help me?” It was even crying tears. I don’t remember exactly what happened, but I think I ended up leaving the cat and running away.
I felt horrible in the dream and I even feel guilty about it now. It was a really cute cat with cream-colored fur and patches of gray tabby. I’ve had plenty of scary dreams, but this one was by far the most disturbing.
Mine also involves a cat. Usually the terrifying things that happen in my dreams (nuclear war, a family member dying, some threat to my life) lose their horror when I wake up. But still stuck in my head is the image from a dream where I had accidentally locked a cat in my bedroom, and when I went in to check on it, it was lying listlessly in a puddle of its own urine. That image is just so pathetic and sad that I still get a little upset when I think of it.
A gypsy fortune teller got drunk and cut off her own arms, which then started flying around the city, strangling random victims. AND THERE THEY ARE, FLYING OVER OUR YARD!
Two stand out in my mind. One, I had about twenty-five years ago, but the emotional impact of it remains with me. I was in front of my house. There was a sand-pit in front of my house (there wasn’t really, just in my dream) and a sort of figure rose out of the sand pit and began chasing me around the side of the house to the back yard. I understood, in my dream, that if the sand-figure caught me, it would kill me. I also understood my Uncle John was in the back yard, and thought “If I can get to him, he’ll protect me”. When I got to the back yard, there was Uncle John, standing there, with a gun in his hand. I understood instinctively that the gun was not to kill the sand-figure with, but to kill me. . .Then I woke up.
About thirteen or fourteen years ago, I had a dream that my husband was dying. We both knew he was dying, and he only had 24 hours to live. We spent the entire dream figuring out how he was going to spend the last 24 hours of his life. . .how we were going to spend the last 24 hours of our love.
Even as I type it, I get teary-eyed, even all these years later.
Oh, geez, do I ever have a list. I have very vivid nightmares. In the most recent one, I was driving to Corona del Mar (a small beach town in Orange County), but as I crested the hill, I could see that the ocean was much closer than it should have been. The water had risen above the cliffs and drowned the town. I got out of my car and walked into the water. I found myself perched on top of a chain link fence that was completely submerged. Bloated bodies washed against the fence with the rhythm of the waves. No one was left alive.
I had a series of recurring nightmares as a child. I was at daycare and it was getting dark. The director explained to me that it was late and she had to go home, so I should wait here for my parents. I wandered out to the front of the school to watch for my parents in the dark, when I saw a group of children playing jump rope in the parking lot. They slowly turned toward me and they all had skulls for faces. The skull face children made several subsequent appearances in my nightmares.
My oldest nightmare was also recurring and dated back to when I was less than three, because I remember frequently having it at our old house. There was a nuclear missile aimed at a planet of happy, innocent mushroom people such as those found in the Super Mario games. I climbed onto the missile, trying to stop it, but I failed and it destroyed the planet and me with it. I don’t know where I got such sophisticated ideas at age two. I can only guess that perhaps I saw the scene involving the destruction of Alderaan in Star Wars.
I also have nightmares where I am torturing or neglecting animals, resulting in their deaths. Very upsetting.
