I had this dream about 30 years ago and I still find it a bit disturbing. There is someone
on the ground in front of me lying on his side in a semi-fetal position. I am kicking
and jumping on him over and over until finally, he flops over on his back. There is a trickle
of blood flowing from the corner of his mouth and it’s obvious that he is dead. I look
at his face and recognize him. He is me.
In my dream we had moved into a new house and we’re having a great time discovering all the new rooms in the house. Being a dream, this house had a very funky layout with a lot of rooms.
I go into one room, it’s like a medieval hall, all dark wood paneling on the wall, wooden floors, no furniture. I walk into the middle and get the most awful feeling of dread and fear. I start to levitate up, higher and higher and the feeling intensifies…
And then I woke up. And never forgot that dream. Sometimes I start having it again but I can somewhat lucid dream and I avoid that room.
That wasn’t Mal. It was probably Caleb.
That’s a tough choice. I’ve had a lot of bad dreams over the years. I wrote them down for a while, but when my life got better my dreams got better, so I don’t have as interesting ones any more and so I don’t remember them as much. But the bad ones frequently involved torture of some kind, frequently my own death. I think the worst one is tied between being eaten from the inside out by insects, and the one where I was battered and raped (I say this as though it was a singular dream but I had several of this flavor, this one just happened to stand out as especially bad). I brained one attacker in a fit of rage afterwards, which was traumatic in itself, and then the dream continued into the next day (!!) where I had to explain to my best friend what had happened to me while I wept and changed my bandages and my broken ribs made every breath horrible.
Since I’m a lucid dreamer, this sort of thing comes across as very painful and emotional. I’ll wake up with tingly physical feelings a lot of the time if I had pain during the dream.
I did a poll of my own dreams at some point and out of 109 dreams I had written down, 63 of them involved things like “severely burned”, “suffocation”, “beheaded”, “battered to death”, “ripped apart”, “drowned”, “crushed”, etc. With that many physical hurt dreams you start getting used to them and what stands out are the ones that are especially creative or involving an emotional element.
I used to have nightmares pretty frequently and now can’t remember one that stood out to me as particularly worse than the others, but they would almost always leave me terrified of falling asleep again lest it continue. They often involved being choked or smothered by invisible beings.
I once literally dreamt of a nightmare, like in the classical sense. I dreamt I was lying in bed on my stomach when suddenly I felt something on my back and it was growling. That growl was absolutely terrifing, didn’t sound like any real-life animal, and for a months after the dream I would recall that sound and get chills. Whatever was on my back grabbed me by the throat and pulled me up and back (like in the yoga Cobra position), strangling me. At the time of the dream I was a devout Catholic, and in the dream I said the Our Father over and over again for help, while noticing that I was not feeling afraid at all of the creature, but instead very calm. Except then I woke up, lying on my stomach just as I was in the dream, and promptly jumped out of bed in fear. It was around 4:00 in the morning and I stayed up for the rest of the night rather than risk having that dream again.
I used to live on the waterfront in Bremerton, Washington, with a large window facing the bay. For a while I had a recurring nightmare where I would be looking out the window when a large extremely bright light flashed off in the distance(probably Seattle), growing larger and larger and brighter and brighter as it rushed towards Bremerton, evaporating the bay and going through the house in a flash.
My first memory is of waking from a nightmare, and I remember the nightmare too. I was laying in my crib, and I had just had a dream where there was an evil buzzing light on the far end of the crib, and cartoony lightning/electricity symbols around it. From the top left and right of my visual field, there were two clawed hands reaching down to grab me.
My usual dreams involved me endlessly trying to escape from something or trying to get to somewhere, and being endlessly stuck struggling, and not getting any further away from the terror or closer to the goal. I would have a dream that felt like this most nights.
Then I started taking the anti-depressant drug escitalopram. And the nightmares vanished. I still have as vast and complex a dream life, but the emotional tone has changed completely. The drug removed a constant negative tone to my thoughts and perceptions, and I wish I’d had it twenty years earlier. My life would have been far different.
I now wonder whether the emotional tone of the dream comes first, and we build a narrative around it?
I was out of town on business and had a late night business dinner with drinks and rich spicy food.
That night in my hotel room I had a “waking dream”. In the dream I had just woken up in that same hotel room, barely opening my eyes and noticed that there was a shadow figure in the corner of the room. It stepped forward to the foot of my bed and revealed itself to be a young attractive woman. Her neck was obviously broken and her head tilted over onto her shoulder.
This freaked me out and I woke up in a cold sweat, looked around the room and then laid there for a second thinking to myself that I needed to avoid that kind of dinner in the future.
Just I was almost back to calm, a voice, as plain as can be and apparently just inches away from my left ear says quite loudly,“Are you alright?”.
That’s when I bolted completely out of the bed.
I don’t quite remember the actual dream these days, but I still remember the cause and the events afterwards.
A few years ago, I was a volunteer fireman and EMT. Near my house, a teenaged kid was driving way too fast for the road he was on, went airborne, and wrapped the passenger side of his car around a tree, upside down. I was the senior medic at the scene for a while, and it took an hour and a half to cut him out of the car. He was pretty much a like a squashed bug, but still barely alive. We had to medevac him, and luckily enough for me, the flight crewmembers were paramedics, so I gladly relinquished the senior status. We worked on him for a very long time to get him stable enough to fly, and I did airway management. He finally was loaded on the chopper, still barely alive, but work came back that he finally flatlined in flight.
My issue was being at the scene, and having to wait those 90 minutes while he was extracted before I could do anything myself. That fed into my nightmares for the next few nights of being helpless when I was the most capable person in the dream to resolve a situation.
When the rescue squad offered Critical Stress Debriefs for that incident, I took them. Considering that my usual nightmares are the much more pedestrian being chased by hungry dinosaurs or having to go to jail for something I didn’t do, the helpless nightmares were a big shock.
I’ve had at least four nightmares over the past 3 decades in which I was killed by a bear or bears. This is one of the reasons I don’t go bear hunting.
When I was about 12, I saw my dad shot to death in a nightmare, that one stuck with me for a while!
Amusingly, I guess, I had an incredibly vivid dream last night in which my wife strongly hinted that she’d had sex with Howard Cosell! Since he died 5 years before we were married, it is pretty unlikely. It was disturbing, though!
I had a dream once that an invisible force was causing me to do terrible things. Like a giant invisible hand controlling my body while my mind was completely in control of itself…it was torturous. The thing that sent it over the edge to worst nightmare ever was when I was suddenly in a room with a basket that had 6 or 7 adorable puppies in it, and the force controlled my body to make me pick up the puppies one by one and break their necks and discard them. All the while, my dream self is crying and begging whatever had control of my body to please stop…
I woke up in a cold sweat from that one feeling like the most awful person that ever walked the earth.
That was one of the most frightening things I’ve ever read.
I had a pair of 'em when I was about 10 or 11 that shook me way hard and left me sitting bolt upright screaming and brought my parents running. They were bad enough that I couldn’t remember more than a fragment after a second or two of being awake, either that or the content wasn’t rational narrative that could be put into words to hold onto.
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Something about the damn light fixture overhead, you know, one of these, where, instead of being genuinely OFF while I slept, was radiating invisible blue pseudolight down onto me AND all the lines in the room were way too sharp, like instead of being actual physical walls with imperfections and ripples they were precise mathematical constructs. And all this was seriously terrible.
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Anticipating something… because something or someone knows I’m there and bad things are going to happen, almost too scared to breathe. Then when it happens it’s like being blown up to the size of the whole universe, immense, red, there is redness and pain and being dispersed to immense…whatever… then afterwards I am over, I am dead, blowing like autumn leaves horrible agonizingly sad to be dead.
Batshit weird, huh?
When I was still having my antidepressant dosage adjusted, I realized I was on a dose too high when I started having incredibly vivid dreams. The one I still remember, more than 15 years later, was that a plane had crashed in my neighborhood, and there was a skull laying on the ground with the lower jaw missing and I could see the upper teeth and foramen magnum.
And I somehow knew that it was that of the man who lived next door.
Most of mine involved nuclear wars or floods or other disasters, though once I dreamed the Nazis killed everyone on earth and I was the only one left as I walked alone through the dark. (And then awoke in the DT’s)