What kind of nightmares are the worst for you?

In My Humble Opinion
1

Lately, by far, my nightmares have gotten to a whole new level of scariness. They’re not “ahh a monster!” scary, they’re more realistically scary.

Last weekend I had a nightmare I had murdered my grandfather. I don’t know why, all I remember is the realization that I had killed a person and would have to live with that the rest of my life. Also in the nightmare my uncle was highly suspicious I was the murderer and was bringing up all these incriminating facts that were true. The dream felt so realistic, I literally felt my life was over. When I woke up, I let out a huge sigh in the realization that it was a dream. Still, I was shaking like a leaf for much of the morning.

I also have had nightmares I got in an argument with my parents, and was so mad I burned the house down :eek: which later feelings of guilt in the dream felt very very real. When I was younger I used to have nightmares I’d take my dad’s truck out for a joyride then get in an accident and wreck it and he’d show up and go ballistic when he saw his truck.

My best friend thinks I must carry a lot of guilt or something to have dreams like this, but I don’t know. I certainly am not a murderer, or a pyromaniac, or a wrecked-my-dad’s-truck kind of son…heck I’m way too chicken to do anything remotely illegal for fear of getting caught/getting in trouble. I have a paranoia that if I ever got arrested the cops would act like angry parents and yell and berate me until I start crying…Guess all that fear and paranoia has projected itself into dreams :confused:

2

My worst nightmares, while not as violent as yours :), also involve me doing things I would never do in real life. The dreams are permeated with a sense of despair – it’s all over for me now, I’m an irredeemably bad person, I’ll never be good again, etc.

It’s funny because the dreams are usually sexual in nature, but since I started the Atkins diet, they’re about things like eating cookies! That’s made me think that the dreams are caused by a tight self-control in waking life that I’m subconsciously afraid of losing.

So maybe in your case, it’s not that you’re feeling guilty about something you’ve done but about something you could do (even if you’re not consciously aware that it’s something you’re capable of).

3

My wife’s.

I can usually get back to sleep after mine. :smiley:

4

I find dreams where I am lost, trapped or am in immediate danger are the scariest. One of my scariest dreams was when two guys who appeared out of nowhere had a gun pointed at me and my mother. One of them asked, “okay, which one of you is first?” I never let that dream finish before I woke up in a panic.

5

The ones I get after I wake up.

6

I almost never have nightmares anymore. I became a lucid dreamer in childhood after suffering from horrible nightmares. Now I can pretty much direct my dreams as though they were movies. I do sometimes suffer from night terrors, thoguh - those are different because with dreams you have build-up, you have story, which can then be changed. Night terrors are when I wake up jumping out of bed because 10,000 spiders have just jumped off the wall onto my bed.

StG

7

The most unnerving nightmares I have are where my teeth start to decay and fall out. I’ll be talking to a friend or something and notice that pieces of teeth are coming off. Then I realize that all of them are loose and crumbling. It’s one of the realistic dreams too, where you don’t think you are dreaming. I always wake up pretty freaked out after that. Ugh. Gives me the creeps just thinking about it.

8

I used to get teeth nightmares too. Same deal as you posted pretty much, vertigo. They stopped after I had my wisdom teeth removed at around age 18. Maybe there just wasn’t enough room in there and I was subconsciously aware of the pressure or something. Just a guess, I really have no idea.

I also get the night terrors. To me, those are when you wake up screaming and shoot out of bed, but can’t remember what scared you. My kids get them too. They freak my husband out, he’s more bothered than we are, I think. I’ve hurt myself, once fairly badly, by running smack into things in the dark.

9

Triss - My worst night terrors stopped after I got my eyes Lasiked (Look! A new word!) Part of the problem I had when I’d get the night terrors is I’d be bolting out of bed and trying to get my glasses on at the same time. Meanwhile my dog would give me this look, which just had utter cunfusion in it. Anyway, I think part of my anxiety was that things could be crawling on my wall, and without my glasses I’d have no way of knowing it. Now I can see my wall and I know nothing’s there.

StG

10

Two categories: rape nightmares, and apocalypse nightmares.

Samples of both:

I move into a new house, but as we go upstairs, the walls start to buckle and bend, and we realize the house is haunted. When we speak to the ghost, the stairway moves, revealing a hitherto-hidden passage to the basement.

We go down to the basement, where we meet the ghost of a fourteen-year-old girl. She was kept locked in the basement all her life, naked, in a cistern filled with her own shit. Every day, her father would come down and rape her, and give her milk and wine to drink as her only source of nutrition. When she became pregnant, she gave birth and then, in desperation, killed and ate the baby. As punishment, her parents killed and ate her.

She showed us all this through visions (those visions are still with me), and showed us the bones of her dead infant. I was furious, and said that I’d find and kill her father – but when I said that, she realized that her father was still alive and began to scream.

I woke up.

End of the world:

I am hiking with several friends, but we are not sure where the trail will go. There is a cabin up ahead, and as twilight falls, we reach it. There is an outdoor party – finger foods, drinks in plastic cups, people in summery clothes. Up in the sky, there’s a plane – a small streak of red light. Or is it fireworks? It is separating into many streaks of red light.

And then we realize: it is a nuclear missile, multiple warheads splitting off from the main missile. Nuclear annihilation is minutes away. Someone begins to scream.

I have nightmares more often than anyone I know except for my sister.

Daniel

11

I don’t really have nightmares as in “scary dreams”, but I have very stressful dreams that can leave me in a state of low-level anxiety for days. I get the teeth dream quite a bit.

My dreams are incredibly realistic and usually what I call “epic” in that they go on for months or years in the one dream (the storyline takes place over months, years in the one night) and that feel real-time.

Once or twice I have dreamt that I had a baby, and it died shortly after birth :eek: In the dream I went through the whole pregnancy, birth etc. Ick :frowning: for the record I have never been pregnant irl, or even thought I might be.

I also have regular stress-dreams about needing to drive (I cant IRL). They are sometimes, but not always, that I need to drive to get somone to hospital for example, but just as often I have been told to park the guests cars for a party at the house.

Often I have “rushing” dreams, where I spend the entire lenght of one of these “epic”, or real-time dreams trying to get somewhere, missing busses, not knowing street names, getting on the train in the wrong direction, etc. Sometimes these are combined with me needing to get to the prison to visit mrsiteki for the last time before she is executed :eek: , but generally just “rushing”. Gawd, I feel stressed just thinking about these dreams.

I also sometimes have nightmares that my father is still alive.

12

I don’t have too many real nightmares, but in the past several years I think my worst dreams have been the ones where I’m really angry, screaming, swearing, and trying to hurt or even kill somebody.

I just the other night had a 9-11 related dream (I think), in which the building I work in collapsed. The moment that I realized that the building was going to collapse, with me in it, was probably the scariest single moment I’ve dreamt in a long time, but overall the dream wasn’t really a nightmare.

13

I just had a nightmare last night.

I dreamed I was in high school again. Some kid went on a rampage and was attacking people with a knife. My friend and I were looking for tennis rackets in the gym closet and we were attacked. I was stabbed several times, and I kept saying “My husband will kill you when he finds you.” to the kid who was attacking me. The “kid” also sexually asaulted me. Obviously in high school I didn’t have a husband. (But my husband DID go to my high school, IRL).

Anyway, some of the guys I went to high school with IRL (who were in my dream) saved my friend and I somehow, and then they dressed our wounds and stuff. People kept telling me “Your husband will kill that guy when he finds him”, because they were all friends of his. I’m not sure where my husband was IN this dream.

The dream was bizarre. I had been looking on that classmates.com website last night, and I’m sure that accounts for a lot of the people that were in my dream, and for the high school setting… I haven’t given thought to a lot of those people for 5 or 6 years. It was weird.

Anyway, that was just ONE bad dream I have had.

I have nightmares all the time. Usually they are either about my abusive ex-boyfriend, or they have me in situations where I’m being raped or beaten up by someone, and I can’t talk. There are people close enough that would save me if I could just make myself heard, but I can’t get any sounds out. These dreams are awful. I usually wake up crying, and have to wake my husband up to make me feel better.

Anyone care to evaluate me? haha

14

This is a coincidence – Thursday night I had my first nightmare in months. This one was disturbing enough that I couldn’t get back to sleep and eventually I called a friend to sort it out.

The short version is terrorists blew up a local tunnel while I was in it. Since I also had to drive through that tunnel to get to a job interview on Friday, that was particularly bothersome. I survived the explosion, but woke up when I was being arrested as a suspect. As far as I can make out, there were two particularly disturbing elements. First, the feeling that the world was coming to an end; second, being destroyed by things that were out of my control. Some of the dream came out of old issues I’ve been working through, but I still want to blame government-induced paranoia for some of it. Come on, how do they expect us to react to these terror alerts? :wink:

I have had dreams where I wake up angry, sometimes literally punching thin air, but the last time I had one of those was while I was trying the anti-depressant Wellbutrin. That’s also the reason the doctor and I decided that I was better off without it.

CJ

15

When I was younger, the worst nightmares were those involving break-ins. They usually entailed me coming home from school and finding the door to the house standing wide open. Sometimes I would look over my shoulder and there would be the Burgular, looking all scary back at me. Or sometimes I would enter the house and immediately sense the presence of the Burgular, which meant having to alert my sister (who was always somewhere else in the house, like a fool!) Can you tell I was a latch-key kid?

Currently, I keep having these awful dreams where I cannot speak. There’s always urgency behind the information I want to convey, but when I open my mouth, nothing comes out. The person I’m talking to is always like, “Take your time. It’s OK”, but I always feel frustrated and sad. Yeah, those are the worst. :frowning:

16

I used to have the recurring “I’m naked in public” dream. It stopped soon after I fell in the lake in college and had to wait for a couple of hours in the parlors of the women’s dorms while my girlfriend dried my clothes, with nothing but a quilt separating my wang from the wide world.

17

I also have the teeth dream quite frequently… but the catch is that I grind my teeth in my dreams. From what I’m told, I grind them pretty fiercly, so I assume that my subconcious believes that my teeth truly are falling out.

18

If you can call the nightmares, some of the worst ones for me are the semi-lucid ones where I’m trying to move somewhere or do something, and my hands or legs have lost all dexterity and strength. It’s like being partially paralyzed.

Second to that would be the ones where I can hear my alarm clock going off in the real world, but some part of my brain just pipes through to the dream as klaxons, sirens, or even a normal alarm clock, that won’t. shut. off. Maddening.

After that, we get back into the standard “Naked in Public, and being chased by ghosts” dreams.

19

I hate the nightmares that are very real. Like your talking with one of your best friends and they just go off on you and tell you that your the most awful person and that they are sorry they ever met you.

for me, ghosts and monsters are just target practice and always are easy for me to kill/beat up. But to have to confront the people that you care about… I HATE that.

-x out

20

Yeap, tag another one for the teeth thing. I’ve had braces so I guess it’s not that surprising.

When I was younger I use to have nightmares about fire. Couldn’t remember what was on fire, just a general fireriness about it.

I wish my dreams were more exciting. I usuallydream that I’m talking to the usual people I meet/met. I daydream a lot, so I guess my imagination muscles are nackered out by the time I go to sleep.

Oh and Ranchoth, I’ve had the whole paralyzed arm this morning. Woke up and found I couldn’t move it. Had fun for a minute slapping my face with it until the sensation came back. Guess I need to adjust my sleeping position again.