The worst are ones that reflect real life, but bend and twist it. Then I wake up and wander around during my day, trying to convince myself that what I dreamed didn’t really happen/won’t really happen.
The types where a friend or family member disown me just make my blood freeze. I had a few where a person very important to me (sister, friend, etc.) would just look me squarely in the eye with the same expression one would use to look at a stranger and say “I never cared for you,” and walk away. That one even beats all my childhood ‘scary monster’ dreams.
My dreams/sleep cycles are weird to say the least. I used to have MANY nightmares when I was little (I’d say up to about 6 or 7) and actually would have to go into my parents room after everyone. This was about one or two times a month.
Time passed and one night out of nowhere I had a very bizarre dream. I used to always be able to tell when something bad was about to happen, but I would never be able to prevent it. So in this dream, It was all very happy and symbolic (lots of white) when I start walking down a long hallway. As I walk though, I see a staircase on my left. I walk up the short flight of stairs and there is an empty doorway. Even though it was brilliantly white outside, just inside the door it was pitch black. I stepped forward to go inside (against my will) but I was stopped as somebody stepped forward from the dark. It was myself. A mirror image of myself came forward and said "You really dont want to go in here. Its really dark and scary, and you dont want to have any nightmares now! So I recomend you wake up right now."...so I say "Oh thanks!"....*pop*, I wake up. Ever since then, I've always been able to tell when I am dreaming or not, and would wake up when I was getting scared. It even got to the point that I could fully lucid dream and change whatever I wanted.
As I have gotten older (I'm 18 now) I've lost my ability to lucid dream as far as I know. Things generally dont scare me much anymore. Things that scared me when I was little dont scare me half as much as they do now. I have had a reoccuring dream even to this day about scary movies. (I've seen The Ring, so I can handle them now, but not when I was little. Heck, I wouldnt even go into the basement by myself until 8th grade. And no, I am not pampered, nor was I ever beaten. it just happened that way) These arent exactly dreams as they are events that happen in my dreams. Its where I am sitting watching TV, and something scary comes on. I close my eyes, but I can still see what is going on. I put my hands over my closed eyelids, and STILL see what is going on. I cant turn my head, and am forced to watch the scary TV program. As an older teenager, TV doenst scare me in the slightest, but its still beyond me why I dream that still.
Rather than have scary dreams very often anymore, I just have EXTREMELY BIZARRE ones. 3 nights ago I dreamed I saw Bill Clinton swinging around a lightsaber. He wassnt important in the dream, but I just saw him walk by cheeselly swinging it. I remeber saying to myself "Whoever made this (dream) is cheap because it is so obvious that that is just some old video of Clinton with a lightsaber put in his hand on a computer"...
Oh it gets a lot worse than that too. I've dreampt that me and one of my good friends were members of the Chinese hockey team. (do they even have one?!?!). When we were finished for the day, we went into a horizontally laid cryogenic chamber to go to sleep. the chinese people took all of the actual pods, so I had to sleep in the entryway with them sleeping all around me behind glass. Yes. I had a dream about cryogenicly frozen Chinese hockeymen.
I’ve had a LOT of weird thoughts when I’ve woken up too. I’ll look at my clock and since I’m not totally awake, I misinterpret the fact that it tells the time. Here are a list of things that I’ve thought my clock was when I’ve woken up.
[ul]
[li]A record of how long I’ve slept[/li][li]A record of how long I should sleep[/li][li]A record of how much longer I have till the alarm sounds[/li][li]A record of how long I have that I should sleep[/li][li]A countdown timer to a nuklear explosion[/li][li]I thought you were suposed to read it backwards[/li][li]I thought you were suposed to add the digits to get the real time[/li][li]I thought it was a mathematical code to reveal the actual time (i.e. add the first 2, subtract the 3rd)[/li][/ul]
Thats only a few of them. Its always something weird though. I have a lot more dream stories too, but I’ll save that for another day.
How weirdly reassuring to know I’m not the only one having the teeth dreams. And I have them a LOT.
The worst, most horrifying dream I ever had was that I saw a car coming through the parking lot, and was unable to stop it from mowing down my daughter. As I picked up her limp little body and started to run to the hospital (which was magically relocated to directly across the street from the parking lot) I realized my husband had also been hit and was in terrible shape. I realized I could not move him as well, and I ran to the hospital, knowing I’d left him there to die, knowing that he KNEW I was leaving him there to die. That was the only time I ever woke up screaming.
Lately, I’ve been having… not nightmares, really. Just incredibly frustrating and active dreams, that leave me feeling as though I’d run all night long. I am certain some of them are directly caused by reading the news. The other night I dreamed I was building a stage for a band, and that there really wasn’t enough room for all the people who were coming through the doors, and the band was making me crazy by asking me over and over again where I wanted them to put the firecrackers. As it happened, this was a band I know well IRL, and the guitarist’s name is Ty (which is also the first name of the guitarist who was killed in the RI fire). Ty wasn’t there, however, because he was in the hospital waiting for a heart transplant, and the stage manager kept asking me his blood type.
UGH.
And then last night, I was doing surgery on my friend Bill’s knee all night long, with limited medical knowledge and all the wrong medical instruments.
Ahh, other people have teeth nightmares? Me too! I get them more than any other nightmare. It’s always that my teeth are too crowded and I can’t even close my mouth cause my teeth get in the way and my gums are so swollen and they hurt, and the whole time I’m trying to close my mouth, but I just can’t. I hate to think of all the tooth grinding I must be doing in my sleep.
I also had a dream once that I had lice, tons and tons of little bugs in my hair. I think that you couldn’t even see my hair because there were bugs crawling all over it, and I will never forget how grateful I was to wake up. I me ntioned it to my friend, and she had a similar dream a couple weeks later
Probably the scariest dream I’ve ever had was the dream that I was pregnant, oy. I was 19 when I dreamed this, and I remember this terror I felt because I could not remember who I had sex with (which in real life was no one). It was a bad bad feeling.
I don’t usually count these as “nightmares” because they’re more anxiety than horror. But I often dream that I’m gritting my teeth so hard I can feel them loosening in their sockets, and I realize if I don’t stop they will all break/fall out. So I force myself to stop. Then later in the dream I’ll realize I’m doing it again. I never actually lost any of them, though. It was just sort of a perpetual worry gnawing at me. Until just recently, when I dreamed that one finally did fall out. The weirdest part is that after it fell out, most of the anxiety of the dream dissipated, and I just became obsessed with tonguing the empty hole, like a kid who has lost a baby tooth.
I have read that dreams about losing your teeth have to do with fear of losing power or control.
Well, since I have PTSD, most of my nightmares go back to that. Those are the worst, with being in prison being a close second. I usually don’t remember too many of the rest of my dreams, but someday I’ll tell you all about the transsexual parade in the giant bathroom. That one was very odd.
I remember reading somewhere that tooth/teeth dreams are somehow related to sexuality, but I’m too lazy to look into it right now.
I have a terrible lot of nightmares. I always have, and was diagnosed as having “night terrors”, as I sit up and scream bloody farking murder about once a week. (Yes, I have a very patient husband). However, I don’t really agree with the diagnosis, as I remember fully what I dream. 90% of the time I’m dreaming I’m in a concentration camp and my mother is taken from me and killed in front of me. I’ve dreamed this for probably at least once a month for 20 years. Ask me if I care to have it again.
Ugh.
(Yes, I’ve been to counselling, up to and including medications. Nobody has ever come up with any idea about what causes it.)
(Also - yes, I’m Jewish and European)
I don’t know why, but I haven’t really had nightmares since I reached puberty, save for an occasional dream where I’m lying in my bed, then sit up a bit, lift the corner of my pillow and find a huge spider under there. I then wake up in the exact same position I was in while dreaming and so spend a good five minutes frantically searching for the spider until I realise it was a dream. Other than that, I have plenty of dreams that could be considered ‘nightmares’ (standing naked in front of a classroom of zombie spiders studying algebra who then chase me off a rooftop where I fall 50 stories onto a knife blades that have been set up next to a bed so that the monster underneath can eat me as soon as I hit the ground, all while the nuclear bomb-carrying 747 piloted by Sadako is about to crash right next to us), but they never seem very scary.
I used to get anxiety dreams a lot, although I’ve been free of those for a couple of years (switching jobs solved that problem). I’d have to press a series of buttons on some device in order for my boss, my co-workers and about a hundred other people to begin their work. My boss would tell me what series to press, but I just couldn’t remember it. He’d repeat it, but it would be different from what he’d said earlier, then the buttons would be in a different order than before, and all the while everyone would be getting impatient and start muttering about how stupid I am and how I’m wasting everyone’s time. This was directly caused by working under two bosses, neither of whom could get a point across clearly even if they were just ordering lunch, who would contradict each other’s orders, and who were both bad-mouthing me behind my back. I had these every night for the last two weeks that I worked there, and every night I’d get up out of bed thinking I still had to make another revision to my report, that I was late for another meeting, etc.
So there you go: hordes of giant flesh-eating mutants get no response, but NEC sends me into cold sweats.
btw, Incubus, I’m sorry for any distress you suffered while dreaming it, but your Christopher Walken nightmare that you posted in The Pit had me rolling on the floor in hysterics.
It was my understanding that, at least for males, they are “castration” dreams. Not literally, but more of an emotional castration - hence the loss of power or control that someone else eluded to.
I have had nightmares near every night since I was nine years old. The worst ones are what I call “sequel” nightmares, because they end when I wake up, and pick up where they left off when I go to sleep again. It’s like I can’t escape them.
Another for the teeth dreams, except I wouldn’t really classify mine as nightmares. They’re more weird than scary. What happens is I’m doing something mundane, like sitting in a class or talking with some people, and I feel something gritty or grainy in my mouth. I spit it into my hand, and it’s a piece of tooth. I start to feel more pieces, and spit them out, until my hands are full of chips and shards of teeth. I’ve actually got a bit of a tooth fixation, and am fascinated by other people’s teeth both IRL and in books, movies, and television.
The worst nightmares for me are the ones where I wake up in a sweat, my heart beating out of my chest, panting, and have absolutely no recollection what happened. I’m always confused as to whether I had a bad dream or heard something in my sleep that woke me up (like someone breaking into my apartment and turning the knob to my bedroom door). I’ve had them with greater frequency as I’ve been dealing with a lot more personal stress. For the last week, though, I’ve been waking up with a scratchy and slightly sore throat, as if I had been screaming or shouting all night. I’m not sure what this means.
