Does anyone have this sort of experience? Sometimes I have an extremely vivid dream that in the past, I killed someone accidentally (or in heat of anger), hid the body, and spent the rest of my life worrying about being discovered. When I wake up, I’m searching my memory for an hour or two just to make sure it really was a dream and that I don’t have any literal skeletons in the closet.
There’s no rhyme or reason - last week it was Johnny Cash, and today it was a random guy from 6th grade who I actually Googled to make sure he was still out there.
Anybody else have these awful dreams that follow them into the waking world?
I have a version of that dream frequently and it is terrifying. My dreams aren’t about the murders themselves. There isn’t even an identifiable victim or victims that correspond to a real person. I just know that I killed someone for some reason, buried them well, and now it is likely that people are going to discover them (usually because of new construction). I spend the whole dream trying to dig up the bodies without getting caught and then trying to find a place to rebury them where they will never be found. I keep being reminded that the statute of limitations never expires for murder so I may have to keep repeating the same thing indefinitely.
The only good thing about that dream is when I wake up and realize that I have never, in fact, murdered anyone.
Not of killing somebody, but of my own death. It almost always involves water, I drown because I finally breathe in and the water doesn’t hurt or make me choke—it’s fulfilling. So I breathe it in some more and it’s a very peaceful, satisfying “place” I go.
I dunno. I think my death will be from some fluid/pulmonary thing ALTHOUGH not too long ago I dreamed I jumped off the side of a cruise ship, just because I never have before. I took a deep breath and…it was taking forever to fall through the air and hit the water. So I took another deep breath and…still didn’t hit. I started thinking “No sense in trying to take deep breaths so it’ll save me” and I eventually settled into a small boat like a feather and thought “Maybe next time I’ll see what it feels like.”
I’m cutting your post off there because that describes my dreams exactly, but then mine don’t follow the same plot line as yours afterwards. I don’t usually get too far past that point before I wake up.
It is, indeed, terrifying, and I keep wondering in the dream why I killed that person (or persons). It’s never anyone I know, just some random person or persons, and I can’t for the life of me figure out what motivated me to kill them, long ago.
I’ve had this kind of dream on occasion, and it includes a body/bodies/parts that someone is going to dig up, and it will not go well for me. A couple of times the body(ies) were buried in the basement of the house I grew up in (a spooky basement with dark out-of-the-way nooks and crannies, plus an ancient malevolent-looking oil burner).
In my case the dread fades within a few seconds after awakening. If it takes an hour or two for the OP to reassure himself, one wonders what sort of past true-life experiences he’s had. :dubious::eek:
Only once, that I can recall, in my early 20’s (so over 40 years ago). I was running from someone up and across a wide and somewhat skewed staircase outdoors (like outside a big public monument), and for some reason I couldn’t go further, so I turned back and stabbed whoever it was in the stomach with a pair of scissors that I happened to have handy in my right hand.
It was very traumatic to my dream self which caused me to wake up and not want to go back to sleep for a while. But I haven’t had a dream anything like that since then.
Well… nothing serious. Like many people, I’ve felt murderous anger that I’ve never acted on, I’ve taken reckless chances that could have caused serious injury or death, I’ve done things that harmed nobody but I’ve buried deep and wouldn’t want known. It seems my unconscious mind decides it’s fun to combine those feelings with a buried-body storyline, the result seeming real enough to make me doubt myself long after awakening.
I haven’t dreamed that I killed someone, but I did once have a very vivid dream that I was present when someone else was killed. I knew the “dead man” well. I dreamed I was having a conversation with him, in his office. Black clad intruders in ski masks burst in and shot him, blowing him back in his chair, and tipping it over. They didn’t target me, maybe because I couldn’t identify them. The guy was a wonderful person, why would I dream of him being killed?
I have a recurring dream involving infantry combat during WWII in france. It started when I was 16 (1986) so it wasnt too many watches of “saving private ryan” and I definitely was not fighting my way through a small town in France during 1944. I sometimes have variations on this dream several nights back to back (sometimes not for months) and I VERY clearly remember shooting German soldiers on several occasions. I always wake up from being shot in the dream.
When I wake up I am disoriented for a few minutes, I have never had a lucid version of this dream and I am always totally immersed, the timeline in the dream often runs for what feels like several hours. Right after the dream I have this nagging feeling that there is something too real about it. It feels more like a memory to me especially after having it hundreds of times over 30 years.
This dream was so traumatic that you remember it still from childhood. Fascinating. I have two dreams I remember from my childhood. One is of the “oh-no-I-killed-someone-sometime…” type being described.
(The other one has an Eastern type of setting with props like a talking statue of Buddha, and a magical little white seal who was really a boy. No killing.)
Nope never, but I had a friend who regularly did. Totally nice well adjusted and all that, but once in a while he’d tell me that he’d have ‘weird dreams’, when I’d ask him what he meant, he’d say something like ‘I went outside to get something from my car and then I’d kill the mailman’ or ‘instead of going to school I’d set my house on fire’. I think it was just his version of a really vivid dream.
Normal kid if you knew him, but most of the school considered him kinda odd.
I was in my early 30s when I first dreamed about having killed someone. Didn’t know who, knew where, knew when – I was a kid – and knew I was about to be arrested.
The dreams continued for weeks. I was afraid to go to sleep. Then the dreams stopped.
Other dreams of running and hiding from pursuers continued for years.
Antidepressants stopped the nightmares, which is ironic as taking them has been a whole 'nuther nightmare.
I have a dream where I’ve shown up to high school without pants on. I have boxers on, just no pants. And I spend all the time explaining to people that my boxers are totally fine as pants and expose less than many of the outfits that the girls at school wear on a daily basis.
Yes. Fortunately it is rare; maybe once or twice a decade. For me, I am not sure who the victims are or why I killed them, but I know that I did, and the grief and remorse are almost unbearable. It is always a relief to wake up and know that actually I didn’t kill anyone.
I’m a very no-nonsense person, not subject to “woo,” but these intense dreams have actually given me pause about whether in a past life, I did something awful …
That’s one that I’ve had as well but thankfully not for years, in fact, I think it was a one-off.
The reason for my uncertainty being that I reckon the dream actually made me think that I had been having that dream for years. Somehow it implanted a record of past trauma from having that dream previously. Strange, because I asked my wife if I’d ever mentioned anything like it before, she said no and because I rarely have any dreams that I recall I am sure that I would have remarked on such a scary one.
So either I really had been having these dreams and mostly forgot them or this one-off dream was pulling some fancy psycho-double-bullshit on me.
I have also had this feeling too on other kinds of dreams. The feeling of “oh, this horrible one again… wait… I’ve never had this one before.” Do they call that ‘jamais vu’?
not too long ago I dreamed I jumped off the side of a cruise ship, just because I never have before. I took a deep breath and…it was taking forever to fall through the air and hit the water. So I took another deep breath and…still didn’t hit. I started thinking “No sense in trying to take deep breaths so it’ll save me” and I eventually settled into a small boat like a feather and thought “Maybe next time I’ll see what it feels like.”