Make way for ducklings!
This is the truth. I used to have horrible nightmares about a yellow duckling. I can feel the horror even now, but I have never been able to even start putting it into words. By the way, this never influences my waking view of ducklings.
I also used to have nightmares about those little circles on Sesame Street. There was always the one that didn’t fit. I would toss and turn all night over this.
Also: Bigfoot, gorillas, an eight-foot Jesus Christ lizard…the normal fare.
Are we all talking about my family here?
Anyways…my scariest dream monsters are almost never recurring, but damn if they didn’t freak me out. The worst one that does occasionally come back are ghost/phantom dogs. Yeah, that’s right. When I was a little kid I read a mystery book about ghosts and such. The next night I was getting something from my mom’s car, and I could swear I saw something running towards me from across the street. Several times during the next few months I would have a horrible nightmare about a ghost dog, and I would wake up with a sweat. It just so happens that my room at the time (And the room I’m back in again) overlooks the street corner…and after every nightmare I would think I saw something on the corner.
Of course, I never got any sleep on those nights. Occasionally I’ll still have a dream about ghost dogs, but the dreams just get way too weird now for me to be scared.
Well, I’ve never had any dream monsters, as for some reason i’ve always had an overactive imagination, and I always knew it was a dream. So I always seemed to kick their butts. But the scariest recurring dream I used to have was more of a situation. I would start out normal size, and start shrinking, quickly. To this day I can still remember one of those dreams where a carpet fiber was as big as a redwood tree, and I was still shrinking. Along with the shrinking, was an immense feeling of dread, and fear. It was probably the only dream where I had no control over and couldn’t stop. Wierd.
As a child: The McDonald’s Fry Guys. You know, those sort of pomn-pomn looking things with legs but no arms? And they were always stealing people’s french fries. Man, those things scared the crud out of me.
As an adult: Not a monster, but I have a recurring horrible doom-and-dread filled dream in which a black, windowless van follows me around. I can’t see who is driving it or what is inside and it never actually reaches or contacts me…it’s just always there, sort of like a black cloud hanging over my head, giving me the feeling that something horrible is pending. Gee, wonder if I might be worried about something!
Scariest Dream Monster? My mother. No, really, I’m not kidding. She shows up in my dreams and somehow “thwarts” me from doing what I want to do, or make me do something I DO NOT want to do. The feeling of helplessness when she’s in a dream is something I HATE! That, and the frustration of knowing that, no matter how I try, she will always be the victor. (Do I have issues with her, or what?!?)
Scariest recurring dream: right after my grandmother died. We’d been extremely close, and since she lived in the same town I did we saw each other a LOT! (In fact, I’d just spent more than a week with her while my grandfather was in the hospital.) She died two days after I left, very suddenly. Anyway, in the dream we would be together, going about normal business (such as walking to the library), when all of a sudden the realization would hit. I’d turn to her and say “Grandma, you’re DEAD!!” and she’d reply “That’s right. I am.” in a matter-of-fact tone, almost happily. I’d invariably wake up at that point, sweating and shaking. It took me YEARS to get over that one!
Who’s to say you’re NOT being followed by a black, windowless van? You know THEY do that to people all the time! And what with their mind control beams ‘n’ all you can hardly be expected to remember it, except in your dreams.
Actually, I know someone who used to get followed by a black van. It had windows, but they were tinted so you couldn’t see in. This went on for months and he never did figure out who it was or why.
You’re not alone on this one. For as long as I can remember, my mother has almost always been a malicious presence in my dreams (and frequently out :(). The worst were when I was young (4-8 years old). She was always wearing this bright red coat she had, and every time I would look at her, she would roll her eyes up in her head so just the bloodshot whites were showing. It scared me to death, and the worst part was that she knew this and found it entertaining. Doing it just for the pleasure of terrorising me. Would keep promising to stop and trick me into looking at her so she could do it again. Yeesh…
I never knew Sasquatches gave me the creeps until I watched “Legend of Boggy Creek” one afternoon. It didn’t impact me at the time, but there was no sleep to be had for this Warlock that night. I used to enjoy walks in the woods. Not so easy anymore.
My worst recurring nightmare – in early adolescence – was a large, faceless man, whose only distinguishing characteristic was his huge, white, misshapen hand. He would corner me and touch me with his hand. :eek:
It was one of those dreams in which you try to scream and try to run, but can’t do either.
I think it was a rape-nightmare, and the hand was my dream-mind’s way of saying “erect penis.” It was not an enjoyable experience.
It’s interesting the number of people in this thread that have recuring torando dreams. I have them as well, tho not as often as I used to. And I have never lived in an area where tornadoes are a problem. Like Gazoo, mine aren’t really scary – they’re kind of fascinating.
Many people who have severe nightmares have found relief through lucid dreaming. If you become aware that you are dreaming while you are dreaming, rather than waking up you can confront the dream monster (now with the awareness that it can’t really hurt you). Hopefully this will resolve the underlying issue causing the nightmares.
The scariest dream I’ve ever had involved the girl who beat Lisa Simpson in the beauty pageant. However, she only appeared in between dream scenes, by herself, on a black background. She’d blink at me very rapidly, with great big, razor sharp eyelashes. With every blink there was a sound like a camera shutter.
The dream itself involved a series of false awakenings. Usually I can wake myself from a dream by closing my eyes deliberately and tightly, then opening them again. However, in this dream, it didn’t work, which made it all the more scary. I would get out of bed and walk to my bedroom door. I’d see the light switch and notice that it was different from my normal light switch, so I knew it was a dream. I did this several times, each time seeing the light switch and trying to wake myself. Finally, I walked out of my room and downstairs. I saw my mom sitting at the kitchen table, looking truly zombie-like, sitting in front of a bowl of water. Finally, she collapsed into the bowl of water and I woke up.
Nowadays, my nightmares almost always focus on the police being after me for something I didn’t do. Once it was because I happened to go into a store with a friend and he decided to rob it. Another time, my sister killed someone, and I was around. Several times I have found huge quantities of crack or opium or whatever in my dorm room. These nightmares all stem from the time when I actually was arrested for a baggie with drug residue in my dorm room that my old roommate had left behind without my knowledge.
The scariest dream i ever had was after watching a cheesy post-apocalyptical-future movie in which most of the people are cannibals. My dream was also set in a post-apocalyptical-future and there were cannibals, but there were also zombies for some odd reason. The dream itself was pretty scary in general, but the worst part was when i got caught by the cannibals and they began to behead people after setting them up in a line. I was at the front and they began to behead from the back. I remember thinking that i was really going to die and i’m too young to die etc… It felt so real, and i don’t know if that’s how i feel before i REALLY die. But some guy i knew (but didn’t particularly like) came along to save me.
About sleep paralysis, i know a lot of people that have experienced it. They say that they can’t move at all and it feels like something heavy is on their chest. And about hypnagogic sleep paralysis, i had a friend who claimed that his elf-shaped alarm clock came alive and began to mock him while he was in sleep paralysis.
That sounds a LOT like the dream I talked about here. Spooky.
The talk about nightmares about your mother reminded me of one I had when I was 5 or 4. One of the earliest dreams I can remember involved my parents as monsters. I dreamt that me and my parents were going on a picnic, and I fell through a haystack into a cave. I was scared and there were a lot of copies of my mother and father, they were like cyborgs or something, expressionless. I realized one of the Moms was dressed differently and figured that must be my real Mom, so I ran up to her and she made this scary face and howled and reached for me, and I woke up. That one has stuck with me for 23 years now…still creeps me out when I think about it.
Another weird dream I had when I was a little kid was that I had died and gone to heaven. Heaven looked like it did on cheap TV shows, a big white area with a fog machine running somewhere. I and everyone around me was wearing a toga and leaves in our hair. I was playing with this orange ball I had that had the ABCs on it, when some big kids came along and took it from me. I was sad and wanted to tell my parents, but I knew they weren’t there. Then my youngest sister (she was a teenager back then) and our german shepherd Schatten (both wearing togas) showed up and made the kids give me the ball back. What’s kinda weird is that sister is the first immediate family member of mine to die, about 8 years after I had the dream. The german shepherd died about 6 years later, but he was 13 so it wasn’t that weird.