Just woke up at 4:30 am SCREAMING from a horrible nightmare

Once I was got my head screwed back on straight, I grabbed my phone and tried to compose a summary of the dream (I’m a believer in dream journals.) While a bit scattered, here it is, below, copied from the “Note” pad in the iPhone:

Nightmare of technology. Arguments are predicted in advance. A horrible military simulator where a loop of getting shot by Russian soldiers plays over and over again. A plane shaped like a dog’s head with a damaged ear. Google maps will keep zooming in whenever you think of a location in your mind. Physical features will be filled in whenever you imagine an area (flowers, gardens etc.) you will have no original thoughts whatsoever, everything will be predicted. Some fucked up never ending loop thing where you pull a cloth or towel out of a hole in the wall and it keeps coming out and you keep pulling it. Eventually it turns into loops of other things like obnoxious late 90s girl band pop lyrics.

[The bolded part was when the dream was most ‘raw’ in my head, like 4 minutes after waking up. The section below this is when I had regained my composure a bit, vaped some nicotine and drank some water, and tried to be more specific and descriptive.]

Google maps came out with some kind of new update that was supposed to improve everyone’s lives, but it predicts everything in advance and it’s totally impossible to be surprised or have any original idea. You zoom into any area in your mind and it shows exactly where traffic is going to be, in real time. You keep zooming and it just keeps getting more and more detailed, and shows you ideas for landscaping projects and gardens etc , like it’s replacing your own creativity.

The whole military simulator was absolutely horrific, someone was stuck in a loop of a vehicle getting shot and something exploding, and there was no way out of it. A succession of character actors with very deep voices would recite a certain line (can’t remember). A related part of the simulation involved being trapped in a shootout with Russian soldiers, low end guerillas with old and rickety equipment and outdated guns - not a high tech Armageddon scenario with bombs and planes, more like WWI combat. It wasn’t like a video game where you could take a million shots and still survive. One shot would kill you and then you would revive somewhere else in the battle and be killed again instantly. No hope of escaping at all.

[editor’s note, as of this posting - the following passage relates to my job. I work for a GREAT construction company, a tight crew of seven skilled specialists. I am their trucker - I drive their dump trucks and haul their materials and excavators around. Now that the major demo and excavation jobs are complete for the summer, and necessarily materials mostly delivered, they have very generously put me to work doing other things, inlcuding teaching me how to weld, and helping out on the sites. I truly am not complaining about my job, as I take pains to point out within the note that follows, and because i know my work friends are going to see my dream journal and we’re all going to laugh our asses off at it.]

Was at a construction site for bland suburban development, carrying boards and placing them at either end of rectangular pits that had been dug for foundations. I was arguing with Brandon over something , not a real argument, just jokingly, but as I places the wood around I feel like I am doing it not of my own free will, but like I’m being controlled by a program. I try placing the wood in the wrong place just to see if it’s possible, and I can’t. I get very frustrated with my lack of ability to “override” the programming. Programming might be the wrong word, it’s more like I can see my own future - not long term, just like the immediate next few minutes. I know exactly what I am going to do and I don’t feel like it’s a choice that I’m making. This is not a complaint about my job, just for the record and because my head is now more lucid as I’m writing this down and I know I’m probably going to show it to people that I work with, so here it is on the record, I LIKE MY JOB, I have no conscious dislike of any of the work that I have to do, not even the most menial tasks. I enjoy having something to do and being productive. If there is a SUBconscious dislike of something, well, that isn’t a situation I have any control over. The frustration in this dream was NOT about the actual work on the job per se. it was about my bizarre ability to predict what I was going to do before I did it, like I had a sneak peek of the next page of my “script” running through my mind at all times and I hated it because I felt like it completely robbed me of my self determination. Note that this applied to other things in the dream besides work, like the google maps bullshit that showed me things that I could do to “improve” my garden or the garden of any conceivable place I could zoom into. And the worst part was that I KNEW THEY WERe RIGHT, the suggestions were totally the best possible ideas, I was just very pissed that they were googles’ ideas and not MY ideals.

The dream culminated in a horrific argument with Amy over some petty bullshit, but it took place with in a partially framed house with wood everywhere in various stages of assembly. I started throwing 2x4s around , not AT her , just in frustration and anger. That’s when I woke up, still screaming .

[Amy is my domestic/romantic partner and things are GREAT between us, I hasten to add. She always finds my recollection of these events in dreams highly amusing.)

Well, there it is. Laugh, cringe, play armchair Freud, draw some inspiration for your upcoming cyberpunk novel - whatever you want. It’s your decision. (Or is it?! :crazy_face:)

When I was a kid, I woke up from a nightmare and had to be comforted by my parents.

I had dreamt that I was being chased by a gorilla round my local park.

See, I like nightmares. When you wake up, you feel like you just got off the rollercoaster at Six Flags.

I once told my girlfriend about a dream I had. I was at the movie theater. The lights are out and I’m trying to enjoy the show. But I can’t bc the lady sitting in front of me does a weird exorcist head turn thing, and she’s just staring at me with a scowl on her dimly lit face.

My gf told me not to ever share my nightmares with her again. Lol

In one of my psych courses (my minor), I read where dreams like that are classified as “anxiety dreams” and are caused by stress and anxiety in our actual lives. Yours seems unusually disjunct for one dream, careening from one completely different sequence to another. Mine, at least the ones I can remember, generally have one theme, although certain actions and sequences in them can be totally illogical.

It’s hard to convey how scary it actually was to experience all this. I felt like I was in an episode of Black Mirror. It was absolutely horrifying and I remained shaken up by it for at least an hour after waking.

I shouldn’t have eaten three buffalo chicken wraps with hot sauce right before bed, either. That was a dumb move.

Oh and to add: so I’ve had dreams where nuclear explosions are going off and I’m thinking, “they finally did it, they really did it” - one of those things you live in fear of your whole life but don’t think is ever actually going to happen, but you know that it could happen. “Well here it is, finally, after all the talk” - that’s the thought that accompanies it. So this latest dream was a bit like that, except instead of nuclear war, it was “evil Big Tech cyber-dystopian mind control.”

The weird thing is, I’ve never really feared that happening in waking life. I’ve just heard a lot of other people express fear over it, but I’ve always been very blase about the whole thing. This dream isn’t what’s going to push me over the edge of now fearing it the same way so many other people do, but if it keeps recurring, maybe that will become a fear of mine. I don’t know.

Me too. That is, I rarely have dreams that I remember having after waking, but when I do, my reaction is usually “Cool!”—even (especially) if it involved elements that would have been scary or unpleasant if I had been experiencing them for real.

I had the opposite experience with (prescription) mind altering drugs. “Maybe* there are people who enjoy being on that roller coaster, but I’m not one of them.”
*I shared this reaction with a more worldly friend, and she looked at me like I was crazy ignorant.

Back when hubs and I were first dating, I dreamed that I saw him kissing someone else. I woke up so mad that I hauled off and slapped him as hard as I could. The make-up sex was good…

When I worked, I had anxiety dream which always involved me losing things. I lost cats and woke up crying so many times, but I never woke up crying because I lost my car or keys or phone or even hubs despite all of those things happening as well. Retirement is so wonderful, the only time I have had one of those dreams was when the butthead had COVID. I lost a cat in a maze and woke up crying.

Yes, and let me add “indigestion” to “stress and anxiety”. Go and sin no more! LOL

This is an interesting statement. Out of curiosity, have you ever had a dream that was so interesting that you tried to immediately go back to sleep in hopes of continuing it? I have on several occasions, and I discovered that, if try to resume sleeping while thinking about the dream, I can actually slip back into the “stream” when I do achieve a sleeping state.

I’ve been staring at and picking out colors for painting our kitchen and cabinets: a pale grey and an off-white.

Last night, I dreamt there was some sort of apocalyptic catastrophe, and I went to an underground bunker to wait it out. When I emerged, I saw that the catastrophe was our very real and horrific drought, and all vegetation everywhere was crisp, dried out and bleached out to shades of pale grey and off-white. It wasn’t so much a nightmare as a not-so-far-fetched projection of what my state might look like in a couple of years.

I had a nightmare last week. My late father came into a room where I was working or attending a party (or something), and he had a really satisfied smile on his face. He explained that the reason for his good mood was that Arlen Specter had just announced that he was switching to the Republican Party, meaning that McConnell was going to be in charge of the Senate again.

It didn’t occur to me to wonder how he was there (he died in April of 2016), just that even though he probably wouldn’t have been a fan of 45, he was a Republican through and through and he’d prefer a Republican majority.
I’d been awake for several hours before it occurred to me to look up Arlen Specter and learn that not only was he no longer a Senator, hwas no longer alive.

I have had very few nightmares I can remember since I was a child, but my wife was once having one, so I shook her softly to wake her up and, being half asleep myself, just said: “Dream something else” and went back to sleep. She sometimes still says that was insensitive of me.

For me, at least, the anxiety of a nightmare doesn’t always dissipate completely upon waking. Any dread and hopelessness dissipates, but the actual anxiety is often still there, and the one thing I can’t do is just relax like I normally would, as I may fall back asleep and back into the dream.

So, no, I don’t like nightmares. I even get tired of just all the running around I do in my dreams. I need to try and bring my anxiety coping skills into my dreams.

This was disturbing, although not scream-inducing.

I was screening a cytology case and couldn’t find the one abnormal cell. Tens or maybe hundreds of thousands of cells on the slides, one of which the cytotech thought was atypical, but didn’t mark it.

Where is that cell???

(shudder)

I had a disturbing nightmare last night.

My mom came up behind me, pushed my head down, exposing my neck. Then she took a drill (the kind you use to drill holes in wood, etc.) and started drilling at the base of my skull. She then shoved a dog microchip in my neck. I remember screaming and her telling me it would only take a second. :scream:

I woke up then and thought to myself, thank goodness that was just a dream! I had to shake my head to clear it out.

I know there’s a theory that says dreams have no real meaning. I don’t believe it. OP, I had a recurring nightmare about my ex that had me screaming myself awake. Then I’d go back to sleep, and the nightmare would start over. This went on all night about once a week for two years. (I have PTSD from the marriage.)

The thing is, some nightmares will recur with me until I figure out what the heck my mind is trying to tell me. It took a long time to figure out the one above, but as soon as I did, it stopped, hence my belief that dreams have meaning.

Note that this has never worked for simple anxiety dreams, like the one where I showed up for my job teaching high school and realize I was in my undies. :flushed:

The problem with nightmares or dreams in general is that what feels vividly terrifying in a dream sounds ridiculous when described in words upon waking. There’s just no way to convey it properly.

I’ve had some horrific nightmares but most of my bad dreams these days are stress dreams, in the sense that in my dream I am involved in some kind of tedious task that I’m unequipped for. One I remember involves being back in retail and I am trying to figure out how to get to work via the bus and nothing will get me there, and I’ll be late. Or, I’m dreaming that I am in school again but my class is a subject I have no knowledge in and there is a major test. I rarely have dreams about my actual work I do now.

I do remember some horrible nightmares as a kid though. I even had some dreams where I suffered a terrible injury, like being shot with a gun, or stabbed in the side by a sharp stick, and it really HURT and when I woke up I could still feel the pain for some time. The pain faded after a while but it felt as real as a physical injury. So odd.

The scariest dream I can remember is really stupid to describe. It doesn’t sound terrifying at all, even to me. But during the dream I was so scared. In my dream I was looking at a picture, I think it was even a cartoon/comic book picture, very large, like a full-size portrait. It looked like an old time gangster in something like a zoot suit (huge wide-brimmed hat, big shoulder pads). I remember that the entire outfit was purple with gold pinstripes. The face of the gangster was in shadow, an unnatural shadow, like a blank black space, except two glowing gold eyes. It wasn’t even a scary picture, because it was cartoonish. But I would hear two drumbeats coming out of nowhere, a THUMP-THUMP, followed by a single chorus note like a hymn, and during the hymn the picture would shift very subtly. Think like a computer program that morphs one picture into another picture. Each time it happened the picture was becoming more realistic, like it was turning more solid, less cartoony, more 3-dimensional when it started fully 2-dimensional. I had no idea in the dream what was going on or what the end result would be except that each time it changed I became more fearful and I just knew that I would go insane by the time it was done. I don’t even remember how the dream ended, I think I just woke up before it was “too late”.

Like I said, it was really stupid. Thinking back the picture wasn’t scary and neither was the situation. It sounds like a really bad Lovecraft story or something. But while I was in the dream it was just terrifying. I don’t think I’ve ever been more scared. For days afterward I would get anxious thinking about the dream. It was really, really dumb. The human brain makes no sense (at least mine doesn’t).