What are Your Scariest Recurring Dream Monsters?

In My Humble Opinion
1

My other thread on mundane and pointless dreams got me to thinking about dreams in general, and specifically about nightmares. Here are my scariest recurring dream monsters - there are three of them:

  1. The Headless Horse - that’s correct, I said horse. You see, when I was a young gal I had to go to a summer camp run by a childrens day care center here in Kansas City, and by default they would normally pack us all on a bus and drive us to a large park to run wild until the day was ended. There is a large park nearby here named Shawnee Mission Park, which has a large lake in it. One day while at the lake and we were having a Scary Story Contest, our bus driver told us a scary story about the Headless Horse. The Headless Horse was a horse that was running through the woods one day, minding it’s own business, and was beheaded by accidentally running into a fence. It died, but at night rose up, it’s zombie corpse animated and galloping through the thick woods around the lake. Often, during the day, it would hide in the lake, swimming around the bottom (Headless Horses don’t need to breathe, after all).

He told us a story of how he had seen it, running behind him chasing him, it’s coal black pelt corrupted and decayed, strips of flesh pulled back to reveal gleaming white bones, and a hideous stump of a neck that produced the most horrific “squeeking” noises from it’s windpipe, as it tried to scream in rage.

Well, the headless horse has been in many, many of my nightmares since. I think you can see why.

  1. The Faceless Bigfoot - yes, sigh, I know what I just typed. I traced the origin of this creature to how much I was scared by the Sasquatch that appeared on the old, old shows, The Six Million Dollar Man and The Bionic Woman. It looks essentially like him, except for some reason I can never see it’s face - even if I am brave enough to try and look as I am running for my life, all I see is a blur - like when Cops or some other show blurs the face of a crime victim.

Normally, in these nightmares, I am in the woods, often camping, and almost always near a fire. I think the fire will protect me, but I am wrong. I sit so near the fire, terrified, and hear the Faceless Bigfoot roaring in the woods, branches snapping and trees creaking, until finally it can wait no longer, and it will come tearing into the campsite. Then I run and run, but it always catches me. Then I wake up. The Faceless Bigfoot has also chased me through my old school, and on the University of Kansas campus, so it doesn’t need to hide in the woods apparantly. I did actually kill it once, shooting it again and again until it died. But it came back - they always do, don’t they?

  1. The Howling Tornado Siren Demon (HTSD) - This one has not visited me for a while, mainly I think since I cannot hear the County test the Civil Defense sirens (Tornado Sirens, in Kansas-speak) since I am inside all day at work. This demon is about 8 feet tall, has coal-black leathery skin, leathery bat-like wings, and long, razor sharp claws and talons on his feet. His notable feature is a long snout shaped like a siren - like something out of an Heironymous Bosch painting. What he does is swoop out of storm clouds in the sky after me. I run and run, but he always catches me, normally cutting my back or legs with a swipe of razor-sharp claws. I know I am dying then, bleeding to death, and paralyzed. Then, he stands over me, and howls into my face - the Civil Defense Siren sound.

This dream came about due to me growing up in Wichita, Kansas, and experiencing many near-misses by tornados while down there. They always sorta scared me, but what scared me more were the sirens - the sirens meant the tornado was coming, and if it decided to hit your house there was not a damn thing in the universe you could do to stop it.

Well. That was long-winded. Anyone else?

2

Black Tornados - I have a recurring dream in which several black (well charcoal grey, but close enough) are all around me. It never really scres me, and I actually enjoy watching them in the dream. Only once have they hit the house/structure I was in. That was kind of disturbing…

3

Well, Anthracite, I don’t have recurring dreams about monsters, but I DO dream about tornadoes and EVERY SINGLE TIME I do, I wake up sweating and have to watch the Food Network until the dawn.

The tornadoes are always accompianed by wailing sirens, and they’re always in groups, like five or six tornadoes at a time, winding their way towards me, dark black, skinny, twisting. GOD BLESS IT, it is so scary. I hate hate hate storms and the threat of tornadoes.

The interesting part is that whenever I have these dreams, I always say the same line * in the dream *:

“gosh! I always dream about tornadoes, and now I’m actually going to be killed by one.”

that same line, word for word, every time.

It gives me chills just to think about it now.

jarbaby

4

my monster dreams are always involving some arachnid. usually spider or centipede. the big problem is in the dream there are billions of 'em and the buggers are crawling in my bed, between the sheets. shudder not really a monster, more of a pest. still, i always wake up and must inspect the entire bed before resuming slumber.

5

Don’t have any recurring nightmare monsters, but I have to agree with you Anthracite , the sasquatch from 6 million dollar man scared the heck out of me when I was a kid. It and the Daleks.

6

jarbabyj - sounds like we’re having the same dream, but with different results. I absolutely love thunderstorms (and pretty much any severe weather) though, so maybe that’s why they don’t bother me as much.

7

gazoo, you and my mom should go have coffee. She’ll sit on the porch and watch the world end while I’m hustling cans of creamed corn down to the basement.

I’ve never been in a tornado. I grew up in New York, where we didn’t have sirens or tornado drills or whatever, and then I move to Toledo to be with my beloved husband, and every damn day in April they’ve got that little Tornado up in the corner. THEN I MOVE to Chicago and it doesn’t get any better!

yikes.

jarbaby

8

snakes. big, mean rattle snakes. there was a time that i would have nightmares that snakes had wrapped themselves around my legs, and although i was holding them behing their heads, i knew that if i made the slightest move, they would overpower me and strike. i was haveing problems my (ex-) girlfriend, so any freudian interpretation of that situation would probably be correct…

as a child, it was grover. cute, furry, loveable (a description which is a grave misrepresentation, by the way) grover from “sesame street.” he would delight in biting my hand, causing me to fall unconscious for a while, then he would run off and hide somewhere that he could pop out, scare me half to death, and do it all over again. a few times bert (of bert and ernie fame) that was my appointed tormenter, but he would swallow me whole, which of course meant my death, but at least that would end the dream. usually, though, it was grover.

shudder i still hate that blue pile of evil.

9

Ha! Just substitute “Huntsville” for “Toledo”, jarbabyj. I also grew up in NY, except I moved here with my wife. The sirens are scary, since, like Anthracite says, if a tornado has your name on it, there’s not a thing you can do to stop it. However, I don’t have nightmares about them. In fact, I can’t remember the last time I even had a nightmare as an adult.

Now, as a kid…well, let me tell you about Harry and Bert. There were these 2 little ceramic knick-knack statues that my parents had. They were 2 hobos, and my father called them Harry and Bert after the guys from the 50s who did, I think, Rheingold beer commercials? Anyway, The Bert statue had a smiling face, and he seemed like a nice enough fellow, had he actually been alive. Which he was, in my nightmares as a child. Bert, on the other hand, had this evil looking grin on his face. Oh, how they terrorized me as a little kid.

Harry and Bert did horrible things to me - they would tie me up, they’d beat me, they set stuff on fire - all kinds of awful stuff. I often woke up screaming in the middle of the night, which, I’m sure, thrilled my parents to no end, especially on a work night. It didn’t help that one of Bert’s ceramic hands had broken off. This just added to my horror, as my dreams were almost an inverse of “The Fugitive”, where I was being chased by the One-Armed Hobo.

After a few months of this, my parents kindly retired Harry and Bert to a box in the attic. They’re back out on display now, and whenever I go up and visit (and this will sound so retarded), I go over and say “Hi” to them. I fondly recall my childhood nightmares, and all the “fun” times we had together. :rolleyes:

10

As a child, I dreamed about vampires and Frankenstein’s Monster and such. Strangely enough, they were cartoon dreams.

As an adult, all the nightmares I can recall involve scary aspects of my own psyche. When I was into meditation, I had a dream at one point where I was a murderer. To make things more odd, the victim was also myself. Another dream involved me being a cannibal.

Fun stuff under the primal covers…

11

My 7 year old son is scared of Morlocks, ever since he saw a Wishbone episode on H.G. Wells’ “The Time Machine”. I saw “The Night Stalker” when I was a little kid in the '70s…too little…it’s realism successfully defeated all adult arguments that vampires were not real. I had bad dreams for a year. I actually wore garlic to bed. In the dreams, the vampire, wearing a suit and tie, would chase me around the church across the street from my house and then I would make it to my couch, convinced I was safe, and then he would cross that sacred boundary and the dream would end with the vampire vaulting over the back of the couch with his mouth open and his eyes looking me in the face. (Shudder.) Glad those are gone. I also had abuncha demon-possession dreams…never me, though, always someone else.

Yuck.

12

The scariest monsters in my dreams are the ones I never see. I know they’re back there, I know they’re after me, I can feel it. I just never see or hear them. Maybe it’s the Paranoia Monster. Whatever it is, it still scares the bejeezus out of me.

13

I remember the first time I ever saw the live footage of the Sasquatch (you know, the one where he’s ambling along, then–just before he ducks into the woods–looks toward the camera), and I dreamed about him for years. The very first time I ever dreamed about him, he actually looked like a gorilla, but had tusks curving up from his lower jaw. (That quality never showed up again, though.)

Other than that, the only recurring scary themes I have are pretty ordinary: snakes and tall buildings. Situations vary, but occasionally, I’m surrounded by snakes. And with the tall buildings, I’m always on the roof–apparently in no danger–but still scared out of my mind.

14

When I was small, I had dreams about a guy whose eyes popped out of their sockets on springs.

[sub]Those of you who’ve played Thief 2 will know what I’m talking about here:[/sub]
I once had a nightmare about being trapped in the library from ‘Casing the Joint’.

By far the worst dreams I had, though, were the ones where I was being chased by some undefinable horror and either I couldn’t run at all from it or I could only run in slow-motion.

15

jarbaby and Anthracite, pass me some creamed corn. Ditto me on the tornadoes.

My worst, though, are the ones about my ex husbands and an ex boyfriend. Living through the beatings and such (nope - ain’t gonna give details -don’t want to go there) night after night - I’m still suffering from bad memories - and it’s driving Mr2U nuts - woke up screaming last night. Really shrieking. Then the migraine comes…

Sorry - night is a really really bad time for me. I prefer to just stay awake until oh, like, 1 AM and then go to bed for about 4 hours - if I can wait until I’m exhausted, sometimes the bad dreams don’t come.

16

This will sound stupid, but when I was a kid I had a recurring nightmare about a huge ladybug that was trying to climb in my window. It was so big it couldn’t fit, and it’s front legs would be scratching and scrabbling on the wall and the floor. In my dream, I was in bed, and I would jump out and run just in time before the bug would squeeze in. I knew it was right behind me, and I always tried to get into my parent’s room, but I usually woke up before I could.

Rose

17

Yep. It’s a big LONNNG dream staircase, of wood, completely unsupported, that winds down out of sight into the inky blackness.

And I always slip, tumble forward and dream I’m falling and terrified of how hurt I’ll become once I hit the stairs. But I never actually HIT the stairs, always wake up sweating first.

Never dream about monsters since I was a kid, then it was an island full of cannibalistic Hamburger-people (you know, like in the old McDonald’s commercials?) :eek:

18

I don’t remember ever having actual monsters in my nightmares, nor having nightmares about particular creatures–I don’t like spiders, but I’m not that phobic. What I do occasionally have are nightmares about myself, or versions of myself, particularly when I’m stressed. Sometimes the dream-Balances are slightly different physically to reflect whatever is wrong with them, but usually they’re just me (only crazier and much more dangerous). Nothing like having a nightmare about your evil twin, the mass murderer, coming to visit, right Purd Werfect? Those of you who live near me now have official permission to be worried.

Also, I sometimes have nightmares about Behinders, like Arden described.

<hijack>

That must suck. The ghost in there scared the crap out of me a couple of times, appearing right in front of me–good thing she didn’t go hostile when I tried to blackjack her. I think the hidden dungeon under the Sheriff’s estate was worse, though–I nearly jumped out of my skin when the guy “planning a jailbreak” ran through me. I thought he was alive until he did that. The little girl-ghost in Trail of Blood was creepy, too.
</hijack>

19

I realize, posting this, that I am a true child of pop culture. After all that I’ve read, experienced, heard about from first-hand witnesses, the monsters that lurk in my dreams come from the movies.

Two varieties:

1)The zombies from Dawn of the Dead. I saw that one way too young, and the horror of these unreal creatures in such a real setting made for great nightmare fodder. They could pop up anywhere. Ergh.

2)Aliens. From the movies, except… they made it to earth. Specifically, my neighborhood. Where I would fight them, all night some nights, and wake up exhausted…

3)Opal. Coming after me for just having two list items. Shudder.

20

The Mush Monster

This big ugly green-grey mushy monster with oozing lumps and warts and hairs sticking out all over him. The dream is always the same. He’s chasing a bunch of kids with a net. He catches them and puts them into this machine. You can hear the machine going and you can hear the kids’ screams and their bones crunching. At the end a little bowl of mush comes out. The Mush Monster eats it up and then the dream ends.

The creepy thing is that he always grows bigger when he eats that bowl of mush. In the next dream, he’s the same size he was the last time around! So, he’s always growing bigger, mushier and oozier and hairier!

Gives me the willies just to think about. The bile rises in my throat and I go all tense. I think this started when I was about 3 or 4. It’s been recurring all the way into my early teen years when it went away for awhile. Every once in awhile it returns, but never like it once was.