Your freakiest dream ever

In My Humble Opinion
1

Inspired by this thread…

What’s the freakiest dream you’ve ever had?

Mine was about seven years ago (January of 2000, to be precise). I was living with my mother in New Hampshire. She left at about 5 am to go to a seminar in San Diego, and woke me up to let me know that she was leaving, and I watched her pull out of the driveway; this was my mistake. I had a series of dreams that involved cars and headlights in the driveway.

One of these began with my being woken up by something. I couldn’t tell what it was, but I had the impression that it was the slider in the next room being closed. Knowing that the only other person who lived in the house was on her way to California, this rather freaked me out. I lay in bed for a few minutes trying to see if I could hear anything else; I finally heard some creaking from upstairs. I crept my head over the window sill and saw a car, headlights blazing, in the driveway. I decided that it would be wise to call the police, so I picked up the phone…

The line was… not dead, just silent, as if someone had called someone else for the express purpose of tying up the line. It was then that it became clear to me that whoever was in my house knew that I was there, and had it in for me.

And then I woke up.

The vividness of the dream, combined with the fact that it had all started with my being woken up (so I was fairly well convinced that I was awake) made it particularly creepy.

Anyone else?

2

I spent awhile learning about lucid dreaming from a friend who had a bad experience while doing so. I won’t relate that story, as this is my post, but I will tell you my experience.
I awoke during my dream and decided I was going to go swimming in a pool during my dream. It was during the winter and I thought a break from the cold reality would best be a hot summer day spent in a pool. As the dream started, I was diving in. Now, during dream state, you brain shuts down the physical impulses that you are dreaming about. Failure of this function has been cited as a cause of sleepwalking. In my dream, however, it worked as should.
Can you imagine diving into a pool of water and not being able to move a muscle as hard as you try? I woke up flailing and screaming. I gave up lucid dreaming at that point and sometimes still have nightmares about that.

SSG Schwartz

3

Somehow in the dream I’m aware that I’m not in my own time period, but thousands of millions or years in the past. Yet the world I’m in is like modern times. Maybe I’m in another dimension? I don’t know, it made sense in the dream.

So I’m in a house full of people (I don’t think I knew any of them in real life and I’m not sure if I knew them in the dream either), and everyone becomes aware that the end of the world is coming soon. Everyone in the house is pretty worried, but they’ve all kinda accepted their fate and are just hanging out, waiting out the last few minutes. I on the other hand am somehow very confident that I’m going to survive whatever catastrophe is coming. I’m quite sure that instead of dying I’ll just fall into a coma and wake up in my own time. There’s a big flash from outside, a rumble, and everyone dies. I black out, and I feel my consciousness slowly fading away. I feel my brain running slower and slower, and I start to panic. Am I really going to die? Is this the end of my consciousness for good? Surely I, being the main character in the story of my life, am not going to die right now? But my life continues to slow down, and I keep trying to force myself to stay conscious somehow.

Well, something works, because suddenly, I wake up. Everyone else around me is awake too. But I’m moving backwards. I realize that I’ve just somehow made time run backwards and I’m being forced to relive my life from the end to the beginning. I walk back into the kitchen, where I was a few minutes prior to the end, and through sheer will, break free of the backwards flow of time, and time flows ahead normally again. I’m ecstatic to still be alive, but I realize that I’ve only gone back a few minutes, and that the end of the world is still going to come “again”. I’m determined to do something about this, so I walk back into the living room, where everyone is still waiting out the end, when someone points out something on my arm. I look and am horrified to see jagged pieces of metal, like a buzz saw, sticking out of my right arm.

I run outside, and I hear a deep menacing voice in my head. Tiny metal spikes start popping in and out of the ground, and I keep hopping around to avoid them. Meanwhile, the voice says something along the lines that I’ve broken the flow of time, and because of this, I have become mutilated. The deep menacing voice stressed the metaphor of time being an eggshell, and that I’ve broken it. Anyway, the spikes stop popping out, and it’s quiet again.

Now, more freaked out than ever, I just run. I’m not sure where to go, but I’m running wildly down the street, not really caring if I die, since the world is ending anyway. I find a small group of people out near a pier. Slowly more people come, and I find out that these are all people who don’t belong in this time period as well. I see a few other people with mutilations on their arm too. There’s discussion of cryogenic freezing, and people yelling out which time period they’re from (one yells “Holocene!” which I realize is mine!).

Then I wake up, relieved that my arm is fine and that the world isn’t ending (yet).

4

In that dream, a girl I liked in real life (who hated my guts in real life) was chasing me with a foot-long chef’s knife while propelling herself impossibly fast in a wheelchair…

5

I had a pair of really vivid, weird-as-batshit dreams when I was around 9 or 10. I’ll never forget either one of them, but they aren’t easy to describe…

a) I dreamed I was asleep in my bed as usual but then gradually woke up; just as I often really could, in this dream I could see the ceiling and the four corners of the room and the overhead light fixture by the moonlight or ambient light from streetlights on our block filtering in through the window. But in this dream I became aware that the overhead light fixture was emitting something akin to light even in the darkness, and it was pale blue but invisible (yeah, kind of like invisible pink unicorns, I guess), and very very bad news, that non-light light. It made lines too sharp, too distinct. It was like too much precision, it was like antiseptic, some kind of perfection or exactitude of a very bad and anti-life sort. Merciless. The lines formed by the walls coming together, and where the ceiling met the walls, was much too un-fuzzy, too knife-sharp and lethally straight and linear and extreme. And that non-light blue light was shining on me and on everything else. So of course I woke up screaming and babbling & crying to my folks about the light when they came running.

b) Even scarier, I dreamed I was one nervous individual among other nervous folks who were sort of muttering and talking to each other in a worried and distracted way like we were all expecting something bad to happen momentarily, and then it did, taking the form of something very horrible focusing on me, and it expanded me, as if my body were a balloon that was being blown up really huge, and lost somehow (can’t get back I’ll never find me again, or something sort of akin to that), and very very RED, like a huge M-class star or something. AHunter3 runs out of hydrogen and expands and starts burning helium? I dunno. But very very expanded and red and this was spectacularly horrible. And then I am sort of like a crunchy brown autumn leaf blowing end over end in the wind, I am over, I am dead and unfortunately aware of it, “this is what it is like to be dead”. Again, screams in the night and distressed parents not able to make heads nor tails of my incoherent story of what was so damn scary.

6

I think mine would be a toss up between being chased by a giant lobster through a trailer park, or the one where I’m back in high school.

What makes the high school one weird is that the school is floating in the middle of the ocean. The sidewalks all have guard rails, and we (the students) stand there during lunch skipping shrimp across the water. Except instead of looking like shrimp, they look like popplers from Futurama. Instead of tasting like shrimp, they taste like cheetos. And we’re all in our underwear. Other than that, it’s a normal high school day.

Yea, it makes no sense.

7

I had a weird one last night where I was sitting on a couch and talking to three ex-Presidents. Clinton, GHW Bush and, I think, Carter.

As far as dreams that freak me out, I think the winner is one I had about a month ago. I was going to be put into The Matrix, and somehow, doing that required me to have my left arm amputated above the elbow. It wasn’t ‘real’ in the dream, but I still wanted out, and nobody was helping me. So this gigantic machine with blades is pulling me in and stamps a mark on my arm, and I’m shouting for help and nobody is moving. I woke up as the anesthesia was taking hold.

8

Strangely I can remember a dream from about 25 years ago, when I was 5. I had some strange ghoul chasing me the entire dream, and I was freaked out to no end, but then at the last second, just before he caught me, I froze in place. For some reason, freezing in place made the ghoul freeze/unable to move for some time, so I started to laugh and mock him as he stood there like an ice sculpture…Hrm, NO clue what this dream means 25 years later.

I used to write down my dreams, it’s fun to go back and read them years later because you can actually still remember them the second you start reading them.

9

I don’t remember dreams unless I wake up in the middle of them, so I never find out how they end. Oh well, here’s my contributions.

Short bit of one a couple of years ago. I was flying with a friend in a small Cesna type plane and somehow managed to fall out. We were near the airport so I steered myself towards the building housing the snack bar and coffee shop. The pilots lounge. I crashed through the roof and ceiling, bounced off the top of a table and manage to land sitting in a chair. Then I look over at the server behind the counter and order a cup of coffee.

Next submission. About a week ago.
I have traveled back in time to the year 2002 and have made it to my girlfriends house (from 2007) except that someone else owns it at that time. For some reason I’m having to create a map, not sure why in the waking world. Of course, I’m having to deal with the female tenant of 2002 who has a total stranger in her house claiming to come from five years in the future.

Several things made that dream odder yet. First, the GFs house in the dream isn’t my GFs house, not even close to the design. Second, no one lived in GFs house before GF. She had it built and was the first and only occupant. Third, she’s my ex-GF. We decided it wasn’t going to work out so we’ve gone back to being good friends. (Broad hint to fem Dopers. wink)

Ongoing threads of dreams remembered.
Post apocolypse Mad Max style.
I can fly! Not so much flying as falling in the direction I want to go. Kind of a variant of the Ford Prefect Hitchhikers Guide method.

10

Here’s a few especially memorable and disturbing ones:

  1. I’m watching/inhabiting a first-person view floating down a corridor in what appears to be an old house or hotel. I’m not in control, but am sort of passively inhabiting/watching. I can tell that I’m floating, not walking. Occasionally, someone will enter the hallway, look at me, and usually scream and run away. I float onward. More people see me, freak out, and run. I finally float in front of a mirror, and I appear sort of green and stretched out, with giant grinning teeth. This is terrifying.

  2. Reoccurring, every couple of motnhs for about the last 15 years: I’m walking on a beach, often at night time, and there’s a sort of sucking sound and the water rapidly recedes by a couple hundred yards, like a more dramatic version of what I’ve always imagined happens before a tsunami. I can see that there are all sorts of strange things that were previously under the water - some look like shipwrecks, some look like strange Atlantis-esque castles and buildings, there’s usually some sort of submarine or something. Just super-strange, but mostly weird because of how long I’ve been having the dream and the fact that it pops up even in the middle of completely unrelated dreams.

  3. Another reoccurring one for the past six years or so has to do with my stepmother, who died suddenly in 2001. I wasn’t even remotely close to her and we often clashed, but I had a really hard time with her death because of how completely shocking, sudden, and unexpected it was. Since she died, I’ve had a reoccurring dream where she’s back in the house and she’s kind of like a zombie - she definitely looks dead and waxy and “off.” The whole family knows that she’s dead, but everyone’s sort of whispering to each other that we can’t let her know that she’s dead, as it would be a very bad thing for her to become aware of it. So everyone’s basically trying to act as normal as possible, but it’s tense because she’s clearly kind of a zombie and is somehow reanimated. In another variation of the dream, everyone else seems to think it’s completely normal, like “oh, there was just some sort of misunderstanding - she didn’t die,” but it’s clear to me that she’s pallid and waxy and dead even though she’s walking around and talking and stuff, and I feel like I have to hide that I’m aware of this.

11

A quarter of a cheese wheel that had two little legs. It was running.
A rabbit was chasing it.
Just before I woke up, a giant foot, like the one from Monty Python, squished them both. I laid there and stared at the ceiling for 5 minutes and tried to figure it out. I failed miserably.

12

More interesting variation of the typical dream in which I have to repeat college or med school and can’t find my classes or even figure out what courses I’m taking:

I show up at college to check out my room and find it is a cramped double, mess strewn all over the place and my brother sleeping in one of the beds.

I go hunting for my first class, find the room and have a seat. I figure something is amiss when I notice a uniform draped over the chair and students helping an instructor fire a cannon at the front of the room (it dawns on me that the class is taking place outdoors, which is a good thing as cannon fire tends to be quite noisy indoors and plays hell with the walls). I awoke before I could discover what class it actually was (Civil War 101?).

13

I had one dream during my second pregnancy, 15 years ago, that I will never forget.

There was an ultrasound being done, and I’m lying there looking at the monitor. What it shows is a little baby monkey in a cage, which is my uterus. I ask the doctor, “Why is there a monkey in there?” He says, “Because we evolved from apes, this is bound to happen once in a while. They’re called ‘simian babies’- nothing to be concerned about, but it’s a monkey.” I start crying, “Okay, I understand that. But why does it have to be MY baby?!”

14

Some of the dreams here are fascinating. Sgt Schwartz’ story reminded me strongly of one I had in high school.

I am aware of “waking up”. Everything feels strange and sluggish, and its pitch black, absolutely dark. I’m not talking “close my eyes” dark. I mean 2 in the morning, power failure, no windows in the room, and you’re inside of a box dark. I’ve never actually BEEN in an environment in real life that was this completely void of light, and I’m not sure such a place even exists in the same way it did in the dream.

So I’m in this dark place, sort of floating, not standing , and I open my mouth to breathe. Water falls into my mouth unexpectedly, and I spit it out. Now I realize that I’m under water, but I haven’t quite panicked yet. I’m trying everything to figure out just which direction is “up”, but the bubbles are going every which way, and I’m completely motionless. No buoyancy, or light, or bubble-motion tracking or anything. I start to swim frantically in a random direction, realizing that there’s no way to know if I’m just pushing myself deeper or making progress. I’m terrified now, and panicking so deeply that I’m actually crying (in real life, I woke up with tears all over my face). Eventually I just can’t hold my breath anymore, and I just give up. I wake up (for real this time) as the water goes into my lungs.

I’m pretty sure that I was holding my breath in real life, because my chest still ached from the effort, and I was panting more in the “need oxygen now!” way than the “I’m having a panic attack” way when I woke up. I was so grateful to just be breathing that the “freakiness” of the dream didn’t hit me until much later, when I’d had some time to think it over.

15

My MOST vivid and scariest dream is too long to explain… and actually involved one of the members of the SDMB. :dubious:
My second most scary: I’m in a dark hallway, and there is a light on in one room. I can hear a baby crying hysterically in it, as well as a muffled coughing. My first person view moves toward that room as the crying intensifies, the room is a rotten yellow color, and the terrible florescent light is flickering. As I get closer and turn to look in I see a few pieces of old medical supplies as well as an old stained bed with a miserably sick old woman coughing, and the baby was sitting on top of her belly. She has a terrible face, stretched with psychosis and horror. Coughing, she leans up and begins vomiting blood all over the baby who is still wailing in fright.

I can’t do anything but watch, as this sick old woman throws up blood, covering the baby.

16

I think I like David Lynch movies so well because I have dreams he would jump at the chance to film. They aren’t ‘jump scare’ or gory, just sad and broken and derelict and wrong in some inexpressible way.

One that has stuck in my mind for a long time involves me walking along a road on a hot summer day near a house I lived in years ago, pretty far out in the country in Missouri. I came upon a guy trying to fix his broken bike who asked me to go in and get him a glass of water. I did, but when I got into my house it was night and I was downstairs in my bedroom as opposed to upstairs in the kitchen. I felt really bad for letting the guy down, then I looked out the window and saw a young doll-like girl (lifesize, but lifeless) in a dress patterned after a soccer ball (a normal-cut dress, but the pattern was exactly like a soccer ball) with a normal face but a skull’s eye sockets. I could tell she wanted to come in and was sad, but I was paralytic with fear and couldn’t help her.

Another dream had me standing out alone in a vast plain of dried and cracked mud. I suddenly become aware of doll-like fetuses with umbilical cords like dry sticks and completely dessicated amniotic sacs like cellophane. They crawl to me and begin to climb me. I woke up shuddering.

In a third dream, I was on a road trip with my family when we came to this decayed town completely dominated by a huge, abandoned factory. We drive through the factory, which looks like a parking garage-slash-concentration camp designed by James Cameron, in a huge procession of other cars all guided by old-fashioned police officers giving hand signals. Somehow, I know that driving this bleak path is the only thing the people living in the town do since the factory closed. There are no guard rails and the factory’s design is dominated by rusted catwalks impossibly high off the ground, on which all traffic passes. We miss a turn and I wake up as we start to fall into the abyss.

17

:eek: and :eek: some more. You win the thread…

Although its futile, I’ll post a couple of my own;

From the ages of approximately 5-10 I had a recurring dream about an abstract shark which swam menacingly around me as I floated on my couch in my backyard. The shark was a dark blue outline without coloring in the center (something like a 4 year old might draw, but usually with a simple geometric shape affixed to it, in addition to the fins) and somewhat irridescent. I guess it makes sense, since I often slept on the couch, our backyard was prone to flooding/sogginess and I was terrified of sharks (from reading about them), but still very odd…

Another I had recently isn’t that weird, but it scared the bejesus out of me. For background, I became familiar with the idea of lucid dreaming after reading about Richard Feynman, and started to experiment with it. I’ve been successful a couple of times, in that I have been able to control myself or the objects of my dreams, but usually I am just aware* that I am dreaming. That being said, I recently had a dream in which I was driving down a country road at night, drunk (for unknown reasons) and, predictably, wrecked. Knowing it was a dream, I took the tumult of the accident fairly calmly, but then it settled into pure black nothingness (what I imagine being dead to be, if humans had the ability to experience it). I remember equating it with a cut scene in a movie, ie-a couple of seconds of dramatic darkness before the next act-but after about 10-15 seconds of absolutely no (imaginary) physical stimuli, my resolve broke and I freaked out. Woke up taking panicked breaths and sweating bullets.

*hard to explain to someone who hasn’t experienced this.

18

I just had a dream last night that was a trial for George Bush and he was being admonished very heavily by a judge as he went down a list of charges and Bush was sitting there completely stunned. It was weird in the sense of I don’t think I’ve ever had a dream about a political figure before.

19

Here’s my entry from a similar thread a few years ago.

I don’t normally dream with a sound track.

I’m glad of that.

20

I had a dream just last night that I began an affair with my (much older) professor from the class I’m currently taking. I evidently killed someone who threatened to expose us.

I dunno about that one.