When I was younger, I used to have genuinely scary nightmares. Now that I am an adult, I have rather mediocre, ‘lame’ nightmares. Here’s what I’m talking about:
-I frequently have nightmares I crash my bus into a car/lamppost/etc at work. The dream is very vivid, often its a route/area I drove (as an example, today I worked a split shift. During the middle gap I went home and took a nap. I had a nightmare about rear-ending a car on the SAME ROUTE I had been driving that morning :eek: which, in the dream, had me convinced it was actually happening for real. But the outcomes of these dreams are always kind of mediocre- nobody gets seriously hurt, I don’t even get fired, just suspended, maybe getting involved in some kind of arbitration/civil suit/etc.
Its like having a nightmare you get audited by the IRS or something pretty lame!
PS: In real life I am a very careful driver at work, recently getting an award for 2 consecutive years without an accident (the whole time I’ve worked there more or less).
I sometimes awake from a terrifying dream only to realize that the terrifying thing which I was terrified of was super lame, and not scary at all.
For example, a few weeks ago I had a dream that I was being chased by an evil monster, but I couldn’t get away because it felt like I was running through molasses. Every step I took, my legs went slower and slower. And the monster was getting closer!
Then I woke up. The big evil monster? Oscar the Grouch. And he was still in his garbage can, and the garbage can was on a skateboard.
I dreamed that I was doing my elementary age book group at the library and one boy was misbehaving so I tied him up to a stair railing. Then I was worried about his parents being pissed when they came to pick him up and found him tied up. When his parents came I just sort of sneaked away. Yeah, pretty lame nightmares these days.
My nightmares are still scary, unfortunately :(. I have had ones where I’ve had to complete some weird, horrifying, or just plain stupid task, otherwise my loved ones or I would face grave consequences. Then I’d suddenly think “wait a minute, I don’t have to do this…it’s just a dream!” and wake up. Those are typically ones where I wake up and think “wow, that was dumb…glad I didn’t actually have to do THAT.”
Once I had a dream where I lost control of my car and drove off a cliff. I had a brief moment of terror and then a quiet calm, I thought of all my loved ones and in my mind told them I loved them and then just as I hit the bottom I was the Alec Baldwin ghost from Beetlejuice stuck in that house. Talk about lame…
You want to hear lame? I used to dream that it was the first day of school and I had forgotten to buy notebooks and pencils and stuff. This was terrifying. Then when I finished high school and went off to dorm-land, I had a dream that I moved in, but forgot all my sheets at home. Also terrifying. Yeah, I have a boring life.
My nightmares have throughout my life been like horror films. Killers coming after me, lost in haunted houses, though of course with the usual subconscious addition of thing that don’t make any sense. A few months ago, I had my first FINANCIAL nightmare in the sleep sense. I dreamed I bought a $220,000 dollar Ferrari. You have to understand, when it comes to cars, I hate sports cars, I like cheap and functional cars. In addition, I’m unbelievably cheap (I still have 20 year old shoes because they haven’t worn out yet, so I see no reason to get rid of them). For the entire nightmare I was desperately trying to find a way to return the thing and get my money back. I’m not saying it’s scarier than being chased by a serial killer, but for me this nightmare was way up there on the awful scale.
The scariest dream I have lately is the infamous “I can’t believe I never attended this class! The final is only 2 days away, and this is my last credit to graduate!” nightmare.
In college, I may have had history’s lamest nightmare.
I was studying soil chemistry, and we’d just gotten these little booklets full of swatches of soil color samples, sort of like paint samples, that you’d use to help identify different soil types and conditions.
That night, I dreamt about the soil samples. I was staring at them; they filled my world. I could think about nothing else for half an hour. Then I had five minutes in which my brain was free to think about whatever I wanted–and I realized I was in hell, and that I would spend eternity thinking about soil samples for half an hour at a time, broken up by five-minute periods of contemplation.
I get terrified by the unbelievable banality of some of my dreams. Packing a suitcase. Vacuuming. Running the dishwasher. Really, brain? This is the best thing you can come up with? :mad:
I do have more exciting, interesting dreams, but it is so lame that these stupid things pop up from time to time.
A dream I had last week happened the night I was sick (fever?), skipped dinner and went to sleep during a thunderstorm.
The dream world was as technicolor as the album art on Sgt Pepper, complete with glowing plants that would get brighter or darker, depending how you spoke to them. There were kingdoms, feudal lords, and magic.
The scariest person I met there was the God of Love, who was an insane/angry monkey in blue silk pajamas with gold trim who had a magic wand that could make you love anyone or anything he chose.
Above his throne, written in granite, were the words “If You Don’t Laugh, You’ll Cry.”
As an example was a woman in the corner who he had made fall in love with the seat of her wooden chair. It was understood that you didn’t want to mess with him.
I had a lame nightmare just last night. I dreamed that I overslept because I wasn’t feeling well and I forgot to call in to cancel my first client. BO-ring! I used to have these awesome Red Dawn-style dreams where communists were invading and only me and a few friends were left to form the resistance. Now I’m just late for work.
Yeah my adult dreams suck. I used to have a cool recurring dream when I was young about being a vampire hunter in a society of vampires (a’la I am Legend or Blade.) Most of the time, I was running and hiding. If they were about to catch me, I would wake up. I had superpowers sometimes, and love interests other times. It seemed to serialize, and each dream was a new episode. These dreams ended about 15 years ago. Then, I started dreaming that I could fly, which I used to make spectacular basketball dunks. This was also serialized.
Nowadays, my dreams are pretty transparent metaphors for my fears about real life. I miss my old dreams, particularly when they featured the original Charlie’s Angels.
I haven’t had actual nightmares since I was a kid, but some of my dreams are kinda disturbing. Like a couple of nights ago I dreamed about people being reincarnated as everyday objects. There was a woman who came back as a box of cereal, and as the people ate the cereal she lost pieces of her soul. :eek:
I once had a dream where I was on a canoe on a lake and was terrified to see beavers chopping down trees and the trees falling into the water.
I also had a strange dream where I got into Heaven and raided their file cabinet. I found the file for a terrorist and opened it, as I was curious to know what happened to her. The file said she’d been reincarnated as my pet bird.
They say that you can’t get killed in your dreams or you will die for real. Bullshit. When I was in college and stressed and sleep deprived, something big was going down as soon as my head hit the pillow. No city or person including myself was immune. I took on the Vietcong single-handedly and eventually lost, my father threw me a baseball that turned out to be a live hand-grenade, and I lost a race to a pack of alligators without being able to scream for help.
I am 37 now and just dream that I am in the emergency room feeling like I am going to die and the doctor comes in and tells me that:
pretty lame!