I was talking about nightmares with my girlfriend, telling her about how I was tossing and turning, trying to keep track of where all the information went in this Excel sheet, and what it corrolated to, and she said that when she first started working as a CPA, she used to have nightmares about auditing tick marks, and really long Excel formulas.
Let’s hear those weird nightmares. What do you have?
Oh! Oh! You cannot tell me that Dutchman did not put something into that rarebit besides ale. Oh! I’m sending that one to Silas.
My nightmares happen about everytime I look in the mirror and realized I haven’t shaved in days.
Well, it wasn’t really nightmares but after working in fast food management for years, when I slept I would constantly roll from one side to the other in my sleep because I was always dreaming that I was handing orders out the drive-thru window. I’ve stopped now, thanks for asking.
I was doing audits for a client that thought one of his managers was juggling the books and selling merchandise out of a warehouse for his own profit. I spent almost 2 weeks walking through that building counting items and checking the codes which were stamped in itty bitty little print so I had to squint to see it, then checking off numbers on a clip board. After 3 days of this I started dreaming about it EVERY #$%&ing night! My wife said I was counting outloud in my sleep (I otherwise don’t talk in my sleep). So I would do this boring, irritating job for 9 hours a day, then dream about doing it while I slept. I never dreamt about work before that! Dreaming about work is the worst nightmare there is.
We did nail the crooked manager though!
I often have nightmares about being half naked in front of my class. I suppose that’s not such a strange one, but it always freaks me out. I wake up worrying whether I’ll still have my job after showing up to class with practically no clothes on.
When in school, I would always have dreams about being in a building, and supposing to be somewhere, but I could never find that place I was to be.
Nowadays, sometimes I have dreams where an evil entity is nearby, I try to pray, but my mouth doesn’t work properly, then I wake up.
Ooooh, I just remembered, I had the creepiest nightmare last night! It seems there had been an indie slasher flick in the '80s made by high school students, about a demon who had to kill a certain number of fellow students before gaining some kind of powers. The film became a cult hit, and a pizza company decides to do a funny “reunion” commercial, and gets together all the now 30-something actors (one of them became a rock star, others went into other things).
Well, it turns out the guy who played the demon went nuts and really thinks he IS one now and starts to bump off his former cast members one by one, till he gets to one woman who also believes the plot of the old movie–which, it turns out, may be true after all! I remember the scene where he kills the Cher-like rock star with a crossbow.
I really have cool nightmares–did I tell you all the X-Files plotline I dreamed a few months ago? It was SO much better than anything they’ve actually filmed in the last two years.
I have a remarkable number of nightmares about school, which is funny because I graduated a long time ago and I always liked school.
In my dreams, I’m invariably in a very large school, like a high school only bigger and more labyrinthesque. I invariably have a locker I have to get things out of. My dreams often center around me being worried about failing a class that I have not attended in a really long time. Often I find myself scrambling to understand complex math stuff I know I should have studied but didn’t.
I had a dream early this morning that played like a cheap knock off of Jurrasic Park.
Me and some of my friends who I never actually saw (in most of my dreams where there are a lot of people around, I never really see them) were in some sort of futuristic compound which reminded me of my old college library.
Well, wouldn’t you know it, but these little dinosaur things bust in and start tearing up the place, so we all climb up to the ceiling and hide in the rafters and lie really still. The dinosaurs were pretty small, shorter than a person – kind of like the JP raptors, but they had really long arms with big claws on the end.
Hiding in the rafters, I soon discovered, didn’t do much good since these suckers could jump as high as they wanted to, apparently. One of them spotted me right away and jumped up and was hanging from the ceiling right next to me and was studying me. I just kept as still as possible, and I think this confused it. I could tell it was trying to figure out if I was worth trying to eat or not.
So it did what any anthropomorphic nightmare creature would do, it tried to scare me into moving around my hissing and thrusting it’s claws in my face without actually touching me. It was kind of like being teased by your big brother, “I’m not touching you! I’m not touching you!” I got the idea that if I flinched, I would become lunch.
I don’t know who won the ridiculous stand-off. I woke up and had to go to work.
I often have what I describe as the puzzle-as-dream. It often, but not always, involves some mathematical problem. I am not quite asleep, but not quite awake, either, drifting in and out, sometimes aware that I’m lying in bed. The recurring theme is that if I can just solve this problem, I can finally fall aslep and get some rest.
Usually it’s a physics problem that’s a mutated form of something I’ve been doing at work, and of course I cannot solve it because I’m trying to do it all in my head. Sometimes it’s something harder to understand, though in the puzzle-as-dream I clearly understand the rules but just can’t quite solve it. One time it was a complicated method of breathing that was supposedly going to clear out my congested nose.
I can toss and turn for more than an hour wrestling with it, until I either finally fall asleep, or realize what’s happening, wake myself up totally, and concentrate on thinking about something else.
After coming back from a week-long business trip with my former company (NEC Submarine Systems Division, if anyone’s job hunting and wants to know who to avoid). I had nightmares about my job for an entire week. Most of the time I would have to complete some small but vital task, for which I needed only one piece of information. I would go from co-worker to co-worker asking for the needed info, but not one of them was capable of giving a coherent answer that was in any way related to what anybody else had said. I would wake up screaming until I realized it was just a dream, then I would start screaming again when I realized that my job was really like this. 
My other wierd nightmare came after watching several episodes of the X-files. After finding out my girlfriend had been replaced by a robot (or alien) double, I killed the copy. Then it turned out that the person I thought was really her was also a copy, so I killed that one too. This went through about 4 or 5 killings until I finally woke up. I turned over, looked at my girlfriend sleeping next to me, and said “she’s a robot. (sigh) I have to kill her now.” :eek: Fortunately, I realized it was just a dream before I was able to carry out the orders from my subconscious.
–sublight.