…and by nightmare I mean an actual dream, not your job/marriage/kids.
I had one the other night that was like watching a documentary being secretly filmed at a super-secret government site in Antarctica, where grisly genetic experiments were being carried out. There were all these freakish, Hieronymus-Bosch-like animals, e.g., cows that were as big as minivans and that had seven teats, goats with hooves where their teeth should be, and so on. The cameraman’s voice said, “This site is so contaminated, there is no way it can ever be cleaned up,” and then I was in a room with racks on racks of steaming stock pots with human entrails hanging out, gray and stretched from the cooking.
Then I woke up, semi-creeped out and semi-not-too-sure the government isn’t actually doing this.
After my firstborn son died at age six, (of natural causes), I had recurring dreams in which he was still alive but in terrible danger–being attacked by dogs, say–and I was unable to get to him.
When I was a little kid I had a couple of dreams of being either orphaned or permanently left behind by my family. Immense, crushing sadness, crying my eyes out (in my dream).
I once took a nap where I woke up screaming. I was in a ‘dark place’ at the time. My nightmare was simply that I existed and was trapped in the life that I was, at the time, living.
So basically I was hopelessly depressed, had a dream about being hopelessly depressed, and woke screaming.
I dreamed that my head had been chopped off. Weirdly, I could see this in the dream by looking at a mirror with my headless body.
In another, I dreamed one of those “thought I woke up but didn’t” in which I “woke up” to find people had broken into the house and made it all the way to my bedroom. I remember trying to get my husband (in another room - he snores) to hide in his room while I handled them (he’s 6’4" and I’m 5’2"). I woke myself up for real by punching the chest of drawers by my bed.
I don’t think I’ve ever been scared as much as by a recurring nightmare I had when I was a kid. I walked into my house at night. Every single room in the house was lit up brightly, but the house was empty. Instead of my family members, I found sitting in the middle of every room an oval metal wastebasket full of mud and dead flowers.
Mine is from when I was six years old. I dreamed of an alien invasion where people I thought I knew, including family members, turned out to be aliens. I remember being scared for at least a couple days after that. Seems like a young age to have such a dream.
First one is when my 3 year relationship ended I would have dreams where she and I would get back together (which isn’t a nightmare) but what made them nightmares is that I would have a feeling of elation and happiness, and then once I woke up and realized it didn’t actually happen my mood would just crash and that feeling was so horrible…
Second one was a “dreaming that I woke up but still dreaming” but I knew that the situation was happening. And in this dream I was desperately trying to wake up and I would (in the dream) but then I would realize that and try desperately again to wake up, and the false finishes happened like 3 or 4 times and it was frightening because I felt I would never wake up again
I remember finding myself in the house my parents used to own. The lights were all on and it was furnished as I remembered. It was night time, in winter, with two feet of snow outside. Nobody else was there though.
I then went outside and walked up and down the street and all of the houses had lights on, but were totally empty. It was like the entire neighborhood had been evacuated and nobody had told me… and then 2 feet of snow had dropped.
I had a dream that I was in the office of the pastor of our church. We were in conversation, when suddenly masked men broke in and shot him to death. The force of the shots blew him backwards in his chair. They were after him, not me apparently, because as soon as he was killed the bad guys ran out. Hardly even looked at me.
Where THAT came from I have no idea! He was a nice guy, no enemies I knew of. Very strange.
It was a dream in which my high school boyfriend was in terrible trouble and was somehow sending me a thought message to come and save him. I had no details on where he was or how to find him. I couldn’t get anyone to believe me or help me. I was literally shaking when I woke up it had affected me so profoundly.
I went so far as to call up his parents to check and see if he was indeed ok. Although I hadn’t seen him in years, his family still lived in the neighborhood where I grew up, so it was easy to find them. Fortunately everything was fine. But it was months before I stopped worrying that something terrible would happen to him.
Once I had a dream that my uncle, who’s been like a father to me, had died. I didn’t see the corpse or anything; I was just walking down the street in the neighborhood where I grew up (possibly to the funeral-- the route I was walking was between Mom’s house and the church), perfectly ordinary scene, except that my uncle was dead. I don’t think I’ve ever had a dream that felt that real.
Second-worst, I once dreamt that an assassin stabbed me in the throat with a long dagger. In the dream, I had gotten involved in a political movement to try to bring some justice to the university residency requirement rules (which were, indeed, seriously screwed up in real life), when the assassin just appeared suddenly and stabbed me. I guess our movement was making enemies, or something.
Shortly after my daughter was born, I dreamed that she was in a swing my husband had suspended from the rafters in the garage. While she was swinging, a nail protruding from one of the wall studs caught her arm and tore it open.
I don’t remember it but one time (and only the one time) I woke up screaming with my wife shaking me. I wish for all the world I remembered at least something about it but as soon as my eyes opened it was all gone.
My grandmother’s old house had a cellar all the way downstairs. It was a creepy, perpetually moist little room where you would find slugs clinging to the dank walls.
In my dream I was in the cellar and I saw some man who was wrapped up in what looked like a cocoon. Then a large spider came up from behind him, wrapped its legs around the guy-who was still alive by the way- and then took a bite out of the man’s head. It was much like someone taking a bite out of an apple.
I remember I wasn’t so much scared as fascinated as I watched silently. That was when I felt something from behind slowly wrapping its arms around me.
Now that did the trick and it fortunately startled me out of my slumber. Oy. I remember waking up out of breath and heart pounding.
I mentioned this one in another thread. I was 3 or 4, and I dreamed one of those mannequins with no head and stubs for arms and legs (used to display underwear) was in the bathroom that was connected to my room. It started walking toward me making a scary squeaking noise.
As an adult, I’ve dreamed my wife left me. Of course she’s always right next to me when I wake up.
1978-I had just turned 16, and our family was flying to Germany for a vacation.
I slept little on the plane, and when we finally got to the hotel, didn’t sleep much that afternoon even though my family did, nor did I get much during the subsequent night.
The following evening I finally hit the wall, and told my parents and sister to go on ahead to have dinner without me. I nodded off…
And started dreaming about wandering around in this underground dungeon, with torches flickering on the walls. I entered this chamber, rough hewn stone arched above, more torches-and beheld this thing perched on a low dais. It was c. 10 feet tall, pink, had a head of a sort, and I could perceive that it was slowly breathing; I quickly grasped that it was a giant phallus. I fully expected it to lurch off the platform at any moment and consume me.
I was utterly scared out of my mind.
I woke up in a blind sweaty unthinking panic. I hurriedly searched for my jeans so as to go out and find my family, and got frustrated when I couldn’t get them on. I then simply gathered a nearby airplane towel to cover myself and stumbled out of the room. Found them in the restaurant, only then fully waking up and realizing that I had tried to put on my younger sister’s jeans, to my mortification.
It was only years later that I realized that this dream almost exactly matched one that Carl Jung had had at the age of 4 or so. Like me he was terrified to death by it.
About 100 miles south (in Switzerland) and a 100 years earlier than where and when I did.
Back then I had only a vague idea of who he was, and never read any memoirs or such of his where I would have encountered the chronicle of his dream. He later said that it was a very ancient type of fertility god.
It was bad enough at age 16 for me to grasp the sexual symbology-I can’t imagine dreaming of that thing as a preschooler.
I’ve only had one or two nightmares in my life, and I never have bad dreams about anything I’ve watched on TV or in the movies, but the original Dawn of the Dead gave me nightmares for two days. The third day was actually a funny dream about zombies. The fourth day, all over.
I had nightmares from early childhood, but the one that terrified me happened over and over again in my early 20s, to the point I feared going to sleep.
Somehow I knew I’d killed someone when I was younger, the grave was about to be discovered, and I’d be arrested. I had no knowledge of who, when, where, why I’d killed someone. So I started running down dark and narrow streets, begging for help, and everyone turned me away. Something awful was going to happen to me, and I was all alone.
I still am surprised when I ask for help and help is given. I always expect to be turned away.
Worst nightmare I ever had happened while I was helping out at a review panel - the entire day was work-work-work, with no social interaction. I didn’t leave the hotel for a 48-hour period, and when I wasn’t in the review panel room, I was in my own room. I was stressed and not a little depressed at being cut off from my real life, even if for a very short while.
So that night I dreamed that man was laughing, a devastating laugh that I can’t really describe. His face was lit with red light and he was really the only thing I could see. Everything outside of him and me was gone, completely gone, and we were all that was left. There was this sense, thinking about it later, that even he wasn’t really there, he was just the expression of my terror at being completely and utterly alone in a void.
I still think about this dream sometimes and I’m getting bad chills even writing about it now.
What’s really weird is that the man laughing was Mal from Firefly, except that he was the definition of evil. Of all the people who might express a nihilistic emptiness of feeling, I wouldn’t have thought Mal with his boyish charm would be the one my unconscious mind decides to pick.