I think the scariest dream I’ve ever had was a few years ago, Iwas in a lake type setting, and swimming, but I somehow ended up underwater and I’m trying to get to the top because my breath is running out. I keep swimming and swimming but its like I can’t reach the top, then, as I’m about to just take a breath and die, I wake up gasping for air because I had really been holding my breath as I was asleep.
A couple nights ago I dreamed that my boyfriend decided to become a transvestite and leave me for my friend Rich who also changed into a transvestite. I caught them sitting together at a basketball game and I was ever so upset, not to mention shocked! :eek:
Seriously though, my nightmares are worse but I tend to repress them. They usually involve tornadoes. I’ve been afraid of tornadoes my entire life.
I’ve been having this recurring dream for the last couple of months where I find myself living with my ex-husband and his girlfriend. Even in the dream, I’m telling myself that this isn’t right, I’m not with him anymore and I don’t want to be with him anymore. I find myself searching, looking for my current husband, getting more and more upset because I can’t find him. By the end of the dream, I’m frantic because my ex is telling me that I’m stuck with him, that I will never see my current husband again.
There is also another recurring dream where I’m living in a castle and there is some kind of creature stalking me, but I can’t see what it is. I run from room to room, but there is no furniture to hide under and I can’t find a door or a window to the outside.
My worst nightmare is prett easily explainable.
I had it the night I came home from the hospital after the birth of my oldest child. I had just relinquished her for adoption.
The dream started with me in a swimming pool, in the center of a really big hotel. There were babies all around the edge of the pool, and on the balconies. I started pulling the babies in to the pool with me, knowing full well that they couldn’t swim. At one point, my mom appeared, just for a second, and dropped a baby in to the pool as well.
I woke up completely hysterical. There’s no doubt that the dream was brought on by what I had just done that very day. The weird part, to me anyway, was my mom’s appearance in the dream. I found out later, though, that there was a reason for it.
Two months to the day after my daughter was born, my mom told me that she too had given a baby up for adoption, a year before I was born. I had never been told this, ever. But something in my really, really deep subconscious must have known. Freaked the crap right out of me.
tater: I agree with L714 on the sleep paralysis. I’ve had bouts with that myself. I have epilepsy, and I thought I might be having some sort of seizure, but it was like no other seizure I’d ever experienced before. So I asked my neurologist, and he told me about sleep paralysis. Every time that it’s happened to me, it’s been at the end of a particularly stressful day. With me, I get so frozen that I can’t even make a sound. My neurologist told me that yes, it’s damn scary while it’s occurring, but it’s nothing to really worry about.
Shadowfox, I have recently had dreams about living with my ex-fiance and his new wife. Very strange. We had bought a house together (IRL) and I love that house, so in my dreams I am happy to be back in the house, but it is still a bizarre feeling.
Since I was a teen I’ve had these nightmares that are very similar, though the exact situations change every time. An example:
I wake up and look at the clock. It’s 2 AM, and I’m really thirsty. I get up and go to the refrigerator to get something to drink. Everything is normal, there is absolutely no sign that I’m dreaming. I pour a glass of milk, and stand there drinking it, when I feel something behind me in the kitchen. My back is to the room and I can feel something big and dark watching me. When I get up I never turn on the lights, it’s so dark in the kitchen that you can feel it in front of you like fog. suddenly in the darkness I catch just the glimmer of eyes…about 6 or 7 feet off the floor. I drop the glass and try to run for the bedroom, but just inches away from the doorway It grabs me, and I can feel it’s claws and hear it breathe…
…And then I wake up, safe in my bed with a start. Breathing heavy, heart hammering, all the normal things that you would expect. I look at the clock. Still the middle of the night. I relax back into bed, just happy to be awake. I think about the dream that I just had, and say to myself “gee…In the dream I was at my mom’s house…I should have realized I was dreaming. That was dumb.” I roll over on the bed, and realize that my hand is in something wet and cold. I open my eyes again and strain to see what it could be, and in the faint light I can only see that it’s dark. I reach over to turn on the light with my dry hand, not knowing what it could be. The light clicks on, and I see a pool of blood on my bed…and more on the floor, and the walls…probably a gallon of what is most definately blood splashed around most violently. I freeze in stomach-clenching terror with my hand still on the lamp. Then I hear a very soft sound from under the bed…
…And I sit bolt upright in bed, gasping. The first thing that I do is make sure that there is no blood, then I lay back, breathing heavy and still absolutely terrorized by that horrible dream. I calm down for about 10 minutes, then I start to analyze the dream. “I don’t even have a bedside lamp…that really should have tipped me off…I’m so silly.” I’m quite wide awake from the nightmare, so I get up to do some reading. “There’s no way that I’ll be able to go back to sleep tonight. That was just too creepy.” I pull out a book and turn on the light, settling in for some nice soothing reading, but there’s something that strikes me as not quite right…the ‘nightmare feeling’ creeps up on me slowly, and I don’t quite realize when it began, but I know that something is very badly wrong. Unable to help myself, I quietly close my book and pad to the door. I listen intently, barely breathing, but hear nothing. I ease the door open a crack…and it’s pulled open fully by sharp-nailed fingers that wedge themselves between the door and the frame. Right in front of me I see something hideous…and I’d let it in. If I hadn’t opened the door, it would have at least taken a little longer to know that I was there. I look at it and I know that It’s going to kill me. I look into it’s eyes…
…and I wake up, shivering in my bed.
This time I’m really awake. Everything is really fine, but I can’t bring myself to quite believe it fully. I have lain awake after one of these dreams for a full hour, just waiting for the other shoe to drop. Waiting for the monster, or the disaster, or the feeling of not-right to show itself.
It’s a really terrible feeling when you don’t know if you’re asleep or awake. If the things that are happening to you are really happening or if you’ll just wake up again.
In the end, I have to treat each of these dreams as if it were happening in reality, because if the one I’m in is reality and I don’t run from the monster then I’ll be killed for real. It may be a holdover from childhood, but I’ve never really believed that monsters don’t exist in real life, so it’s not as easy as saying ‘if that is a monster then I must be dreaming.’
Thank goodness that I don’t have them more than once every year or two.
K.
Gravity, you explained the phenomenon a lot better than I did. I know exactly what you’re talking about.
My dreams like that aren’t usually horrific, but even mundane dreams where that weird cycle of waking up in your dream, but still dreaming is just so jarring do the mind that I wake up with a start and cold sweats everytime.
I’ve had some really weird ones lately…
In one, I get a call from the guy who put together my old band in high school. He wants me to play a gig with the old band and I agree. I ask him what the songs are and he says, “Don’t worry. It’s all stuff you know.” When I get to the gig, it’s a lot bigger than it’s supposed to be and all the songs are ones I don’t know. I end up getting laughed off the stage and blamed for everything.
In another, I walk into my living room and notice that my fish tank is dirty. I start to clean it and dump in the appropriate chemicals. Later, the lid comes off the fish tank and my fish can swim through the air in my apartment. The fish become deformed (with two tails, two heads, etc.) and swim around my apartment, wailing and screaming (in English, mind you) about how awfully I’ve treated them and how I’m responsible for their deformities.
My latest is a little bit more than strange, though. In the beginning of the dream, I accidentally kill someone through no fault of my own (someone runs in front of my car or drowns in my pool) and instead of calling the police, I conceal the body. The dream continues through the usual stuff I normally experience in dreams - naked girls, strange conundrums, floating 2 feet above the ground, etc. - until I make it back to my home. There, waiting for me, are all my relatives and close friends. They’ve found out about my concealing the body and they all express varying degrees of disappointment with me. Curiously, I never seem to go to jail for this, or even see anything resembling a police officer or courtroom scene. I just live out the rest of the dream with every person I know being gravely disappointed with me. Weird.
THespos, have you ever seen the painting “Revenge of the Goldfish” by Sandy Skoglund? You might be interested in seeing that (or avoiding it entirely, depending on how bad the fish dream was).
I don’t have nightmares all that often, but I had one just last night. I was in what seemed like a hotel with my kids, but the older one was off somewhere and I was looking for her. As I went through the halls, I realized we were in a hospital, not a hotel, and I found her in a bed in one of the rooms. There were doctors in the room with her, but she was in her street clothes and seemed happy and healthy enough. I knew that the doctors were about to discuss something very serious with me, but we were making small talk. The creepiest thing about the dream was that the Oingo Boingo song “Nothing Bad Ever Happens” was playing throughout the dream (“Why should I care? Nothing bad ever happens to me”) and I knew that something very bad was about to happen. I woke up before there was any kind of resolution, but I have the feeling it would have just gone on like that, with the feeling of suspense and dread building but never coming to any conclusion.
I don’t know whether this is actually a nightmare or some kind of physiological phenomenon like the sleep paralysis, but I often wake up (it’s usually just as I’m falling asleep, so sometimes I don’t realize I’ve been asleep at all) with the sense that someone is looming over the bed or in the doorway. The feeling is often strong enough that I’ll sit up or scream, and it lasts long enough that I’m fully awake long before I get over the fright. I’m afraid that one day this will happen when one of the kids comes in from her OWN nightmare and I’ll scare her to death.
InternetLegend - ACK!!! I just looked up that painting on Google and it looks almost EXACTLY LIKE MY DREAM! I am so completely weirded out. If I could paint, I would paint that dream almost exactly like Skoglund. I am now thoroughly disturbed. Put two heads or two tails on those goldfish and this looks exactly like what’s going on in my head.
Thankfully I don’t get nightmares very often… but when I do, they’re usually pretty horrible (for me at least).
There’s one that happens pretty often. The scenery changes but the basic dream is still the same. I’m walking somewhere (on campus, down the hall at work, wherever)and suddenly my knees start stinging/burning and give out. I collapse and cannot stand back up again no matter how hard I try. I yell for assistance from people nearby but no one even looks at me. When I wake up from that one I usually spend several minutes massaging the phantom pain from my knees.
A more recent one involved my husband. In the dream he told me he had discovered that he had a fatal disease and was going to kill himself to save himself from any pain. I beg and plead for him not to do so but there’s no convincing him. Suddenly the scene shifts and I know that he had killed himself. The realization that he’s gone forever hits me like a semi and I’m crying and wailing. I woke up crying and woke him up when I cuddled up to him, still crying. It took him a half hour to calm me down I was so hysterical.
My nightmares are always incompetence-related these days. “Oh SHIT! I forgot to go to that class all month!” “Oh SHIT! I have to get out of bed to go to class, but I can’t move!” Oh SHIT! I have to write a paper, but I can’t even type this first word right after twenty tries!" The implications are obvious: I don’t care about anything but school. And it’s true. I guess it’s better than the end-of-the-world dreams I was always having as a kid.
My nightmares often involve me getting stabbed to death. Variations on that theme:
The lock on my back door was broken for about three days, and the first night it was broken, I dreamt that a man crept in through the back door and stabbed me to death.
Shortly after moving into my current apartment, I dreamt that someone was climbing up the side of my apartment with a knife in his teeth and stabbed me to death. He managed to get in the window even though I shut the window on his hands repeatedly.
I once dreamt that my son and I were in a trailer home, and a group of men surrounded the trailer and stabbed me through the walls and floor. I’ve also dreamt about getting stabbed through my bed.
The dreams that I have about getting stabbed are always far, far more vivid than my other simply bizarre dreams. I wake up screaming from them, and it takes me forever to calm down.
Jack Batty and Gravity, I know exactly how you feel. My worst nightmare ever involved a really creepy false awakening.
I was a kid at the time, camping with my family. One night, I dreamt that some man was trying to kidnap me. I realised that it was a dream, so I did my “wakeup trick”, which invovled closing my eyes and saying “one, two, three, WAKEUP” in my head. But I didn’t do the trick properly (kid-magic has very specific rules, don’t you know), so instead of waking up I somehow ended up in a bad copy of the real world. Everything was distorted, there were way too many shadows (even though it was the middle of the night, somehow there were too many shadows) and when I looked at where my parents were supposed to be sleeping, there were these things in their place, with no clear shape, and then they got up and looked at me…
Needless to say, I did the wakeup trick again and made damn sure I got it right the second time. The kidnapping dream was nothing compared to what came after it.
I really don’t have horrible nightmares, not anymore… I usually wake up first, although my wife says that I am sometimes violently shaking in my sleep.
What’s odd is that I dream of dying a lot… usually violently. It’s not scary either, that’s what’s really odd. Just dying.
Analysis, doctor?
I don’t really have nightmares any more. Or, more specifically, my dreams don’t really scare me. The worst thing that happens is discomfort, usually from those “not quite awake” dreams. (Interesting note, in those I usually find myself looking at a distorted version of myself in the mirror.) But this isn’t to say that my dreams don’t affect me. They often do.
I did have two reoccuring nightmares as a kid. The first involved an old hag woman. The dream usually, if not always, took place in some sort of castle. I would be wandering around and this woman would be in the castle with me. She was very tall and large. Not fat, but large. The terrifying thing was her face. It was horribly ugly and I couldn’t stand to look at it. I imagine it’s what Baba Yaga, or more recently, the Blair Witch would look like. Looking back I’d say it’s some sort of archetypal figure, but damned if I know what it means.
The second was much more bizarre. It always started me playing with my friends, or as it were, brothers and cousins. We would all end up hanging from something by our arms, usually the top of a swingset. Then the swingset would start shaking. Eventually my playmates would lose their grip and start falling off one by one. When they fell they would make holes in the ground. Black bottomless cartoon holes. Then the holes would wrap themselves up into bags and start chasing me around the yard. This dream usually terrified me enough to keep me from going back to sleep. I usually went and got my parents.
All in all however, most of the dreams that have disturbed me have to do with death. It’s always a real death. Somebody has had an accident an died suddenly and badly. I find out I only have 24 hours to live. You know, the usual.