I think I must have been about 4 years old when I had this nightmare, but 35 years later it still gives me the chills.
I’m sitting in front of a campfire with my little brother in a dark forest, telling him bible stories. I ask him “Mikey, do you know who rose from the dead?”, and before he can answer a skeleton comes out of the trees and screams “I did!”, then chases us into the woods.
I guess Sunday School and Creature Feature don’t mix.
I had this really freaky dream when I was small about having to fight a pack of coyotes. I kept hitting them and crawling away, but they kept dragging back. The dream got even more gruesome but I managed to drag myself home(I had no legs) hiding in hollow logs along the way just barely avoiding the persuing coyotes. Still gives me the heebeegeebe’s.
a group of about 50 to 60 men who were surrounding an adobe
type house somewhere in the south-west back in the cowboy
days.. We had the house surrounded and were shooting into
it (at I don't know who).. it was a small hill, about
100 yards across, and then some men rode up from behind..
they were on the side of the people who were in the house..
one guy on a horse rode up about 20 yards in front of me..
he was wearing a dark color and had a wide brim hat..
he dropped his gun on me and shot me in the head.. everything
went black and the sound was like what you hear under water..Every once in a while I’ll get a late-night visit from a murderous shadow that I saw in a Twilight Zone episode when I was young. Nothing ever happens, it’s just an incredibly frightening anxiety. Also, I usually see it a couple different frames at once (like Michael Jackson’s Billie Jean video).
Had a recurring nightmare in which I woke up in the middle of the night, looked out the giant east-facing picture windows in my bedroom (I usually loved them because I could look into the woods and watch the deer, but I hated them at night), and seeing a man coming out of the woods and across the cornfield towards me, and when he got up close I could see that he had no face at all, just a blank egg-like head.
::shudder::
I still am afraid to look out of windows in the dark in case I see the faceless man.
I still have dreams that my parents are supposed to take me to ballet lessons (or ice skating lessons; something I used to do but quit a long time ago) and they instead take me to an empty warehouse and leave me there.
Ronald Reagan.
(shudder)
I first started having my pet nightmare when I was about 10. It always started out with me running through my home town in a thick fog. There was never anyone around, and I knew that they had all run away from something–something that was out there in the fog with me. I couldn’t leave. I had to stop whatever it was before it did something terrible (why it fell to a 10 year old kid to do this, I had no idea). Every now and then, I heard someone out in the fog, laughing–not maniacal or sinister, just quietly amused, which was even creepier. I followed the laughter to the empty lot across from town hall, and came running out of the fog to find…me. Just me. A ten year old kid sitting against a big crate and laughing. The other me looked up at me and grinned so widely that his lip split and started bleeding, then hit a button on a remote control in his hand. After that, everything dissolved into blood and fire, and eventually I woke up.
I usually had the nightmare when I was especially tired and stressed. It was a vicious cycle; I’d get worn down enough to have the dream, then I couldn’t sleep because of it–it lasted until I was exhausted enough to sleep through the dream and catch up with myself. I still wake up from dreams of fire and blood sometimes, but if I still dream the rest of it, I never remember it.
I had a horrible nightmare once when I was a kid where I came home from school and my mother had been stabbed and left in the living room. The scariest thing about it was that I couldn’t get anyone to care–my dad or the police. It was so creepy. When I woke up, I hid the robe that she had been wearing in the nightmare so that it couldn’t come true.
For months, she would wander around in the morning saying, “Has anyone seen my robe? I can’t imagine what I’ve done with it!”
heart,
dpf
**Tron. **
I used to have dreams I was stuck in the movie Tron. Mainly, I was stuck in that motorcycle race game. Horrible. I will still have those dreams occassionally. It’s a sense of claustrophobia that just freaks the shit out of me - and I’m not a claustrophobe. I wake up with this hightened sense of awareness - I hear things louder, I feel things more harshly. It’s very odd.
I have a couple I can remember from when I was 4 or 5.
In one of them, me and my parents are going on a picnic. We sit on a bale of hay and it collapses, we then fall through a long tunnel into a cave. I see that there are about a dozen replicas or clones of each of my parents, and I can’t tell which one is the real one. I then notice that one of the Moms is wearing different clothes from all the rest, so she must be the right one. I run up to her and she turns to me with her eyes wide and makes this unearthly howling sound as she reaches for me.
Another wasn’t so scary at the time, but in hindsight it is kinda creepy. I dreamed that I was in Heaven, which looked pretty much like it does in cheap movies at the time, everything white and a thick fog covering the ground. I was wearing a toga for some reason. I had this ball that I had in real life - it was an inflatable orange one with the alphabet in raised lettering around it’s circumference. Some ‘big kid’ took the ball from me and was playing basketball with it, and wouldn’t give it back. I was really upset, but then my sister and our german shepherd Schatten showed up, both wearing togas, and they made the kid give me my ball back. What’s creepy about that is that my sister and Schatten were the first two close loved ones to die, Schatten about 7 years later, my sister a couple of years after that.
I used to have one reoccouring one that every one around me was moving full speed, but for me it was like walking through water, and something bad would always happen to me. It doesn’t sound like much now, but at the time it was pretty scarey.
The other one was when I was 3 or 4. I had just learned to read and was hiding a 3 Little Pigs book under my pillow to read later that night. I woke up, read the book and went back to sleep with the book back under my pillow. I dreamt that the wolf came out of the book, and was chasing me around the room. I screamed and cried and when my dad came to see why his son was freaking out in the middle of the night, I started kicking and biting him. Lemme tell you, that big bad wolf is one scarey mofo. I never did read that story to my daughter.
Frankenstein.
whimper…
hides under bed
Michael Myers from Halloween in my kitchen. Just standing there, staring at me in a creepy quiet way. I had that dream when I was about 10 I think. I didn’t dare venture into the kitchen by myself at night then and I STILL get the chills when I’m alone in the apartment. If I have to get up in the middle of the night to get a drink of water or whatever, I have to go through this whole process of switching on every light on the way to the kitchen.
I’m still freaked out by a hynopompic nightmare I had when I was twenty five.
I fell asleep in the afternoon, in a chair in the living room. I dreamed I woke up, in the same chair, only there was a thick layer of dust in the room, and all the houseplants were dead. And outside a dull red sun was setting on the town, which was in ruins.
<shudder>
Okay, this may not be so scary, but it’s kind of scary anyway AND it has stuck with me for 34 years at least. When I was little, I heard the name Don Rickles and I asked my mom who that was. She told me he was a mean man. Soon after, I had a dream that Don Rickles was beating people up. It was very disturbing!
Yes, I am a 38 year old woman who is scared of Don Rickles.
There was the one where I grew up and found myself all alone.
Oh, wait a minute…
Damn, that’s a cool dream. I actually wish I had that one. Very scifi.
I’ve had some disturbing dreams, too, but only as an adult. As a kid, I mostly dreamed about werewolves, spiders, that sort of thing.
Eek. I have a feeling that reading about the nightmares of others is going to have a direct effect on my sleep habits.
Mine aren’t so bad in comparison I guess.
I had two recurring dreams when I was little and they both freaked me out.
I was small, maybe 2 or 3 years old, and my mother and I were walking home from the grocery store through historic Salem, MA (I used to live there and there are cobblestone areas that play heavily in my dreams) I could only see my mother from the waist down and she kept walking faster and faster until I was left alone. Suddenly I was in a field and a huge space ship was landing. The doors to the ship opened and all of the Muppets jumped out and stated stampeding towards me with blood lust in their eyes. Just as they are about to get me an old fashioned black limo pulls up in front of me and Kermit is in the drivers seat telling me to get in. I jump in and he speeds me away from the evil Muppets. I wake up out of breath and freaked out every time.
I’m out at sea with the Brady Bunch on a fairly small boat. We all decide to go in the water and Peter hands me a raft to use. I jump into the water with the raft and realize that Peter had let the air out of it. At that moment a huge wave picks me and the flat raft up and hurls me towards the shore. I’m airborne and I can see a boardwalk in the distance. The entire roof of the boardwalk is covered in a black & white checker pattern. The roof gets closer and closer and I brace myself for the impact…and then I wake up with a jolt with my heart racing.
The dream I had where I killed my best friend was truly horrible…but I don’t think I want to get in to that…too freaky.
I hate those dreams.
Not a nightmare but I still prefer to have the closet door closed when I go to sleep.
Why?
Duh! The monsters live in there and the noise of opening the door will wake me up if they come to get me!