I was fast asleep one night when I was suddenly woken up by a sound in my closet. My eyes flew open and I heard the sound again. It sounded like something hitting the inside of my closet door. I was frozen with fear remembering that the door to the attic was in the ceiling of my closet. I heard the sound again and then again and then again. I almost screamed. I don’t know where I got the courage from, but I jumped out of bed and turned on the lights. I stood in front of my closet wondering what to do and then heard the sound again. I finally slid my closet door back with a band and felt small objects fall all over me. I did scream at that point until I noticed the familiar waxy smell. My box of Crayolas (64 I think) which I kept on the top shelf of my closet had somehow tipped over. The sound I had heard were just crayons hitting the inside of the door as they fell. Boy did I feel silly, but I’ve slept with the door open since then.
Odd. This reminds me strangely of the final scene in the remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
SPOILER
Basically there’s a chase scene as the body snatchers hunt down the final two humans. It stops abruptly and then we see a town full of bodysnatchers going about their expressionless existence - all except for the girl human, who’s still human, and is sneaking around pretending to be a bodysnatcher. She sees her friend and goes up to him, assuming that he’s still human too. He does pretty much what your mom did in the dream, which is the bodysnatchers’ version of saying “I say, chaps, here’s one of those humans!”
Worst nightmare I had in my twenties: probably the combined influence of post-surgical Vicodin and mild food poisoning from the zucchini my boyfriend didn’t think had smelled funny.
The only thing I can remember was waking up, sitting bolt upright in bed, eyes wide open, and still seeing and hearing a disembodied jester head bobbing and laughing at me. It took about five seconds for the vision to finally end.
You’d enjoy my dreams, a lot of them have science-fiction elements to them, though often very weird ones. I blame reading lots of SF and playing lots of videogames. I’ll often dream I’m playing a game and then it shifts to me being in the game, and then things get really weird.
One I had when I was younger that was strange but not particular scary was a dream I had when I was 11. I was in what seemed like arctic terrain, and I was running towards a circle of standing stones carrying a rifle, someone was chasing me. I hid with my back to one of the stones, and just when I was about to lean around the edge and shoot at the guy after me he shot the rock right in front of me. I remember deciding to go around the other side of the stone to catch him off guard but as soon as I come around the corner I feel something hot tearing through my chest, and then I wake up.
And I’m laying in a hospital bed with a bunch of tubes stuck up my nose and in my mouth. I see people standing around my bed and I try to talk but I can’t because of the tubes. Then a woman tells me ‘You were lucky, we almost lost you. It was 20 below out there’ and then I woke up for real.
I get goosebumps remembering it. I’ve had dreams where I thought I woke up but hadn’t more than a couple of times, but that one freaked me out, mostly for the tubes in the second part, not getting shot.
I had a recurring nightmare where I’d peek into a room and see Frankenstein’s monster (Boris Karloff) with his back facing me as he worked on something on a nearby bench. Out of sheer fear, I run into the room and slam my back up against a metal cabinet trying to hide from him. Naturally, it only gets his attention and he slowly turns and comes toward me, while I’m too scared to move. He reaches out his hand toward my face and puts his index finger (which has no nail) into my mouth as he grabs my chin. I bite down and feel a spurt of blood against the roof of my mouth. Then I wake up with a vivid recollection of that sensation.
Another one I had as a teenager was where I was being chased by a murderer and ducked into a dusty storage room in our barn. There were barrels in there, so I jumped inside one when I heard him coming. I heard him come into the room and look around and then leave. Then I saw blood on myself and realized there was a dismembered woman in the barrel with me! (You’d think you might notice something like that before getting in). I freaked out and the murderer started coming back. That’s when I woke up.
Bees, with bodies shaped out of matchboxes, chasing me around the apple tree.
Yes, I know it makes no sense whatsoever, but I spent about two years having that dream as a child and it was scary. They were nasty, stingy bees! And they were as big as matchboxes! In fact they were half bee, half matchbox! HOW SCARY IS THAT!
Sorry, I’m going for a lie down now…
I barely remember any of my childhood nightmares. None of them affect me much. When I started college, I got the “OhmygodI’vegotagiantpaperduetoday!” nightmare a lot, and I still get it from time to time, despite being two years out of college. Oddly, I’ve never had the “Show up for class and get a surprise midterm you are totally not prepared for” despite the fact that it actually happened to me, twice.
One dream I had a lot when I graduated highschool scares me to this day, though. Me, and all of my classmates, are standing at a train station. The kids who (I thought) weren’t very smart/good students did have tickets, so they could never, ever get on the train and leave, which was very sad. The dream itself isn’t very scary, but it freaks me out when I wake up. It’s just so… obvious. Is my subconscious really that shallow? A freakin’ train station is the best metaphor it could come up with for my anxieties about going to college? Pathetic.
I’m 52 and I still get those dreams. In the latest one I’m back in high school, and although it’s well into the school year I have no idea what my schedule is. So I’m wandering around the empty halls clueless as to what I should do.
My scary dream that stuck with me was that my brother, mom, dad and I were in some woods and I got separated from them and while I was trying to find them a bunch of rattle snakes surrounded me so I couldn’t move. They never bit me, cuz I woke up, but it was still scary.
I’ve had scarier dreams, but not that really stuck with me. My problem is that my dreams are sometimes so real that to this day I wake up crying if they were “bad” dreams.