nightmare

Original entry dated July 10, 2002:

First I was sort of at school. Only it was like band-camp, and all of my friends played the trombone.

I was in the cafeteria getting food with two of my friends, whom I don't have in real life, they weren't real people... one of them was sort of pudgy with sandy hair and whined a lot, the other one was a goth chick with long black hair.

Anyway, in the cafeteria there were actually 2 food counters, and I was thinking that this was good because the lines used to be terribly long, and about how this was my last day there, and I never had to play guitar again (yes I was the only person there who played guitar). So we got in the car to leave and I was going with my friends, I was gonna stay with the goth chick over the summer, she hadn't been to her childhood home in years. It was an old victorian house. She was talking about how her parents were really restrictive and never let her do anything, and when she was in the yard she was never allowed to look around the left side of the house.

So we went into the house and it turned out to be haunted. There was this one demon/ghost who... well... had a really big rack. And green hair. She was chasing us around. And this one ninja dude who kept sneaking up on us and trying to catch/kill us. She was dressed kind of like Lum, only... wearing less.

For some reason I was wearing a full Victorian gown, and I kept falling over and getting tangled up in it.

Original journal entry dated July 8th, 2002:

I was in a hot-air balloon with some other person, and we were running away from zombies. Or something. It had something to do with my old middleschool, the scary one, and a locker combination. I forgot my locker combination, and then I lost my homework and got in trouble, and then I somehow wound up in the hot air balloon. In any case I was convinced we were going to die because had already died before as a result of losing control of the balloon, and neither of us knew how to steer it and we steered it WAY too high, and it was really windy and the basket almost flipped upside down, so I almost fell out. But we did manage to land it, eventually, and were attacked by hordes of undead zombies. And then I woke up.

Original entry dated June 9th, 2002:

We were in a city. The architecture reminded me of something designed by Tim Burton, or maybe Jhonan Vasquez. Very tall, black, and spiky. The atmosphere was blackish red.
In the city there were human survivors, but it was being overrun by these tall icky greyish aliens. Think maybe a cross between one of those things from "ALIENS" and a vampire-fish, and you're starting to get the right idea. Anyway, we (the humans) had this thing we could do, by concentrating really hard as a group we could create a field all around us so that they could not see us, as long as we remained completely quiet. This was REALLY important. So we were holed up in our little cave, concentrating really hard on being invisible, when our scout came back, and the dumbass was being really loud, so of course the aliens found us. I don't remember much after that, and then I think it changed into another dream, but before it did there was a lot of blood.
I had another dream I think along similar lines, but there were big-wheels involved, like the kind I used to ride when I was a little kid. It was weird. I've had other nightmares but don't remember those.

Original journal entry dated May 22, 2002:

It didn't really start out as a nightmare, it started out as a dream that I was playing Dungeons and Dragons like my friends, and it was a normal session except for the fact that we would literally become our characters. And the fact that the campaign took place on the actual campus, not in a far off fantasy world. This was a whole dream in and of itself.

It then phased into the next dream in this manner:
When we were done playing, we cleaned our stuff up, packed it away, etc. I asked for a ride home but nobody wanted to give me one, although M offered to drop me off at the closest bus-stop. Unfortunately, it wasn't the bus-stop that I needed to be at, which was a mile down and across the freeway. So I started walking down the side of the freeway, which wasn't there at first, but then there were walls along the edge of the road and I had to walk IN the road, inching along with my back pressed to the wall, while tons of cars barreled by. I managed to get across the freeway when I realized that I had miscalculated and overshot the place where the bus-stop was, so I had to go back. As I was going back, I found myself stumbling along a gravel embankment at the edge of the road, and the way that the wall and embankment were arranged, I had to walk away from the actual road and into a sort of hollow near the freeway pillars and supporting structures... all of the sudden, it got way too foggy for me to see, and I wandered blindly until I suddenly felt incredibly cold, clammy hands all over me, and then I passed out...

...when I woke up, I was blind, but I was in a warm bed and a house, and people were talking to me. There were 3 voices - one was a fatherly voice, conjuring up in my head the image of a man smoking a pipe. The second was a daughter-ish voice, that of a young girl. She spent a lot of time talking to me and stuff. The last one scared me, it was a mother-ish voice, but instead of conjuring up a motherly image in my head it conjured up the image of something rather like a medusa (I'm talking mythology, not squid, here). They took care of me and talked to me, but they never touched me. In my dream I think I was an orphan so I guess I finally had a family. I always refered to the fatherly figure as "father", the sisterly one as "sister", but didn't refer to the motherly figure as anything at all. I kept asking them when I would be well, when any important events would happen, when I would be able to go back... they told me, one day, that in a day they were going to go somewhere, and asked me whether or not I wanted to go with - I could go tomorrow, or in a week. I told them tomorrow, and asked them where we were going to go and what we were going to do. They responded, "Tomorrow they will uncover us." As I vaguely began to wonder if my caretakers were something other than... well, alive or human... back in real life, D knocked on my door, and the dream abruptly ended.

So then I managed to get back to sleep, but this time my dream was different, it was about the dorms only the design had changed (for one, they were nicer and the foliage was more lush, the landscape was prettier). There were some design flaws in the dorms, one of them was that in order to reach their own patio the next-door dorm had to cross ours. So there was a debate as to whether or not they also got to use and put their stuff on the half of our patio that they had to cross to get to their own. Then there was some stuff about mom and screen-names, and a bunch of random stuff, one thing of which included a mural with different descriptive name-bubbles that you could choose to put next to the objects depicted in the mural. The Mural of the Week was one with dinosaurs, and for some reason they didn't look sad but they were crying, and some of the word bubbles were pretty silly.

Original journal entry dated April 28th, 2002:

I woke up with blood under my fingernails, and all over my blankets for that matter. I don't remember any of my dreams but I guess I must have been having more nightmares. In any case, I tore my face up but good and was hoping that nobody would notice this morning, which they didn't, which is good.

The first dream was about a city. I think it was in England. It was old, and I was in the past, maybe Puritan times, I dunno. It was somewhere cold, rocky, and misty.
There was a plague in the village, and there was always a procession of corpses being carried to the graveyard. I suppose, then, that the plague was bad, but not so bad to the point where they couldn't bury all of the bodies.
And yet, everybody was dead. Maybe not DEAD dead, but dead inside. Except that one man murdered his wife, and then the Priest came and they took away the body... one more dead person, despite the cause, didn't matter... and then, either I died or my wife died, but I can't remember which. But there was a crazy, crazy old lady in one of the more dilapidated houses, and she wielded an axe... nobody went there, and maybe she died of plague, or maybe she DIDN'T die because nobody went there. But my wife died (I was male in the dream). Or maybe I did. And they said a few prayers, and everything was washed over with gray... there was an old stone building, it was haunted... come to think of it, the whole town was haunted... and all muddy... it was miserable.

And then the other dream. My brother and mother and I were living in bare shacks high up on stilts, in the mountains. It was snowy and windy and very cold. They had wooden planks for floors, and the wind whistled through the chinks. When I looked out, I could see the tops of pine trees.

I don't recall much of my dreams last night.

I recall a group of children, and one of them had a chainsaw, and I was trying to warn them that the chainsaw was dangerous, but they weren't taking me seriously. I looked away as the one with the chainsaw started swinging it at the crowd.

And then... people who turned into cans of mush? Looked kind of like canned pumpkin. I don't recall why, except that some of the cans were diseased, and they were needed to defeat some sort of evil ghost by piling all of the mush on top of it, and all of this was taking place on a boardwalk above a nasty polluted pond. I also recall a very gaunt woman with stringy blonde hair.

There was a lot of blood involved. Otherwise, my dreams were disjointed.

Then, I dreamed I was buying a bike. The store I was wandering around in also had a grocery section. I was looking for something specific there, but I don't remember what, and then my mother was grocery shopping with me.

Sept. 18, 2003:
I had this dream that I was back in my aunt's old house, and there were all of these zombies everywhere. And they weren't stupid, shuffling zombies, even though they were all nasty looking, they were cunning and intelligent zombies. They'd plan traps and pull all kinds of tricks and stuff, and this made them far more dangerous than your average zombie. And of course, the old standby - get bitten by a zombie, and you turn into a zombie.

So I'm holed up in this house, and there are zombies everywhere, and of course houses are not terribly secure, especially old ones. And this person busts in, and I think he's a zombie so I try to kill him, but it turns out he's one of the few people left who's still human... his name is, of all things, Sniper, and he's a sharpshooter. He's also a total asshole, but that's beside the point.
The problem - we have several guns (Sniper's are very nice and very deadly, mine's a worn out rifle and a pistol) but very little ammunition. The odds that this house has ammunition are slim to none. If we go outside to get it, we're toast. I have a feeling that Sniper sees me as a minor annoyance/possible human shield, at best. Especially since I have a habit of forgetting to reload the shotgun and running out of ammunition at the worst possible time.
Anyway, we secure the house as much as possible, you know the drill - board up the windows, etc. Except we're gonna run out of stuff to board windows up with, so we decide to secure a smaller but tactically crucial section of the house. By this point we're running pretty low on ammunition, although I've gotten a few chances to prove that I'm not completely worthless. Just mostly.
So once everything's secured, someone knocks on the front door. Sniper opts to open it since he has much better aim than I do. So he cracks the door open, and there's a woman standing out there, and she's obviously a zombie. But she pleads with him a little bit, says she only wants some money, that she needs to feed her kids (who are little zombie-lings by this point). So Sniper, in an odd fit of human compassion, opens the door to pass some money through, and the two evil children attack him. He shoots them before they can bite him or anything and the mother runs away, dropping a pistol that happened to be fully loaded. So we're like “cool, ammo”.
So then I had to go down into the basement, I don't remember why, I think it was to look for food and see if there was any ammunition down there (even though odds are, there was not), and I get freaked out when I see this zombie (the one from earlier) trying to get in through the basement windows... she can't, though, because there's a metal grating over them. So I grab what I need (no ammo down there) and run upstairs again. And that's when the dream sort of faded out.

Original entry dated March 6, 2002:

I had another one of my weird dreams, I had a dream that I was in Mrs. F's class again and we were in this huge old building evaluating essays, but the essays were all mixed up and impossible to read in order - and she demanded that we write a paragraph on what we thought about each one. The building we were in was very large and very old, but looked kinda like Ringling Museum, and the Fair was going on at the time so there were all kinds of trucks parked outside. That was the relatively normal part of the dream...
In my dream, I could turn into a cat, but I didn't have control over it most of the time. Sometimes I could will myself to do it, but usually not. There was a tom-cat who, if I was around him, I could easily transform myself. Anyway, so I had a son (yes a son) in the dream, and I was trying to save him, only the room he was in was pretty heavily guarded, so I figured that if I could turn into a cat getting in would be easy. Unfortunately, I couldn't will myself to become a cat, so I decided to do it in human form. As I opened the door to the room, several automated guns detected a human form and swiveled on me, I knew that if they began firing they'd kill both of us, so I willed myself harder than ever before to become a cat, and then -

the phone rang.

So I never got to find out what happened...

Original journal entry dated Feb. 22, 2002:

Ok, to begin with, I had a nightmare (what's new?) that I lived all alone in a weird dorm with a basement that had creepy stuff in it. I had a cat, too, but wasn't supposed to. It was a very sweet cat. It was like Abby, only gray.
Then my dream shifted, and I dreamt I was a grandmother. We had packed our two grandchildren (both boys) up into the car when I noticed that one of them looked sort of funny. As in, you know. Headless. So, naturally, I started shrieking at the top of my lungs until my husband came over and showed me he was ok. Apparently, I'd been mistaken (about him being, like, headless). Then I looked over and the OTHER one was missing the same vital part of his anatomy. So, again, I flipped out. At the end of the dream, it turned out that I'd been hallucinating... not that this was much comfort.

The worst part about the nightmare was that I'd wake up, look around, check what time it was, then go to sleep and resume the same horrible dream. This continued from about 7 a.m. until 9:30.

Original entry dated Feb. 18th, 2002:

I dreamed that I woke up and pressed my hand against my forehead. My skin was moving. You know how it feels when goldfish (or any other sort of fish, except for maybe piranhas and oscars) nibble at your fingers? It felt like that - all over my forehead - dozens of tiny moist nibbles.

I got up and looked in the mirror. My forehead was covered in dozens of tiny red... mouth-things... only without teeth. Moist, cherry-red little mouths, each about the size of a pimple, gapping open and closed and each of them making tiny peeping sounds like baby chicks. I couldn't stand looking at them, or bringing my hands anywhere near my face - I just wanted to gouge them off...
...I went to the doctor, and they were apparently some sort of parasitic infection. I learned that, unfortunately, it spread really fast and through skin-contact. There was only one way to treat them, too. The doctor had to inject each mouth - individually - with an antibiotic ointment. It wasn't so much painful as disgusting. When they died, they shriveled up and fell out in tiny brown balls, leaving dozens of tiny, deep holes in my forehead.

Original entry dated Feb. 19th, 2002:

Last night I had a dream that I visited a tribe in some sort of jungle-type place. One of the tribe elders had died and I came to attend the funeral. I believe I was an ex-member of the tribe, or else the daughter of an ex-tribe member. I know that I was blonde. I couldn't quite understand their customs, and was an outsider.

At one point, after the funeral, I wound up climbing a MASSIVE jungle tree to get a hibiscuslike red flower. I can't remember why. It was used in some sort of tribal medicine. I just remember that all of the colors in the dream were very, very vivid.

Original entry dated Feb. 16, 2002:

I had a dream that D and I went to buy a new bike. I was gonna trade in my old one. I wound up with a pink one with this weird little engine-thing attached. Anyway, where we lived was this scary supernatural world. Like, the laundry room - nobody went in after dark. If you opened up three of the washers, you'd find creepy, on the verge of horrifying, things. But if you opened the fourth washer, you saw something so incredibly and awesomely terrible that NOBODY was willing to go anywhere NEAR that washer (much less open it). There was a little girl ghost in a bonnet who would wander around collecting change for my laundry for me, and I always warned her not to go into the laundry room at night, and to go nowhere near the fourth washer. Anyway, back to me. There was this weird... like... demon overlord dude who masqueraded as an eight year old child with ice-blue eyes and white hair. When the kid died through some freak accident, he decided that he was gonna make the world a really shitty place. He specifically tried to hurt my friends and me. There was also a house called "Harriet's House", which was a museum of sorts. It was now a Londonesque sort of home, but used to be an asylum type place with torture chambers. People would go on tours through there, but were warned before they did. The proprietor was a tall black lady with her hair drawn back in a bun. She wore a brown sort of pilgrim-looking dress. The rest of the dream was pretty blurry.

I also had a dream that I worked for a company that produced video-games. We were in direct competition with another company that an ex-friend of mine worked for. It all sort of sucked. It wasn't so much scary as really depressing, and I can't remember most of it, except that the rival company stole our hit title idea.

I dream about a man... he is fairly wealthy, he's a respected lawyer. He's tall, with pale skin, blue eyes and very short blond hair. Something happens - he has a mental breakdown, or something - and he loses his job, and everything he owns, and ends up homeless.

Rather than hang around the city, where people might recognize him, he heads out into a more rural area. He's always looking for somewhere to hide in order to sleep... bushes, thick brush, etc. The landscape is very Midwest. It's harder than you'd think, partly because farmers pay attention to what's going on on their land, and partly because in order to be able to get any of the stuff he needs to survive, he still needs to stay near the highway. He's sleeping in some brush when his ex-wife recognizes him one day, and it's very uncomfortable.

He makes friends with a kid who wanders around the countryside. The kid is a little boy, also blond... he has run away from home. Even so, his family is very poor. The two of them find the dilapidated ruins of an old house. A company started building houses, but never finished them because the economy tanked and they ran out of money. A little girl lives in one of the other half-built, decaying houses.

"Their" house has graying wood siding with peeling blue paint. It has 3 floors. It's mostly unfinished, without a roof or anything, although it does have a trapdoor up to the attic. Naturally, because this is one of my dreams, the house is haunted.

The lawyer guy camps out in the attic for a while. The kid takes one of the downstairs bedrooms... despite being half-built, the house still has broken down looking beds in its bedrooms. Lawyer guy has lots of sheets of paper that he likes to arrange in stacks. After a while, the attic gets too uncomfortable because it's too haunted. The kid feels things pull on his leg all of the time. But it's shelter and sleeping out in the elements is still worse.

The kid's mom eventually shows up. She decides that maybe she'd like to buy the house and fix it up. She realizes that the lawyer guy is camping out there... he's worried about what she'll think about him hanging out with her kid, if she thinks he's dangerous, even though he cares about the kid a lot.

There's another kid, a shitty rich kid, who likes to pick on the poor kid. They have a competition involving bottle rockets, and the mean kid sabotages the poor kid's rocket. The poor kid is distraught, because making his rocket cost him a lot of money (for him).

The kid has a crush on a girl, a mutual friend of theirs... she's a bit chunky, with brown hair that goes past her shoulders. One day she starts flirting with him, kissing him, etc... he figures out she had a fight with her boyfriend (the rich kid) and she's just doing this as "revenge". He gets pissed, and tells her to get lost.

Somehow, he ends up falling down an embankment next to the house. He feels something try to shove him into the highway. He grabs onto a tree, but feels it trying to peel his fingers from around the trunk.

I wake up.

Review:
Dream clues:
- Spectator perspective
- Haunted house
- Ghost

Original entry dated Feb. 16, 2002:

I had a nightmare that I had a daughter. I don't remember much about it except that it was quite bizarre and I was very unhappy about many things that occurred in the dream.

I had a nightmare about a huge war in a desert, and a lot of people died, but I think that's more along the lines of the typical "post-apocalyptic" dream if not for one of the characters in it. I was 12 when I had it but the girl I met was so compelling that I still remember the dream. She was dressed in blue and had long, straight brown hair and dark, intense eyes. She was in her teens in the dream, but had an oval, almost classic face that was too sad for someone so young. She saved my life. In the dream, there were spaceship like planes that were black and flew very low, and tanklike things that transported weapons. I was almost crushed by one but she threw me out of the way. I can only assume that she died, but the whole scene was enveloped by the dust kicked up by tank-treads.

I had another dream about a bunch of people testing a plane. It looked kind of like a flat triangle. Like a stealth-bomber, but not quite, there was something decidedly different about it. In any case, the test backfired and the plane crashed and burned. Luckily, the pilot didn't die. I can't remember if he was badly injured or not.

This was followed by another, very long and vivid dream, which I'm going to try to actually do justice:

A tree towers to dizzying heights, wreathed in clouds. It is held up by a pillar of massive, mossy trunk. Through the tangled roots springs a city, its buildings sprouting like mushrooms between the toes of a giant. Grey and fading, the tree and city are cloaked by dusk. The strange slant of the sunlight causes the shadows to pool in strange places.

A man walks down the street, turning a corner, only to find himself amidst steaming tropical vegetation, a savage jungle. He panics, running blindly, and stares up into a dazzling sky to see something rushing toward him. That was how a nameless man was splattered in the middle of an intersection. The only person who took the time to observe this event was a small girl.

After pausing to observe this event, the girl continued on her way through the twisting streets. The residents of the city streamed about her in a phantasmal flow of ghosts, fantastic, colorful, distorted, and exaggerated.

Her eyes lit momentarily on a shadowy figure, and quickly jerked away. She drew into the phantom crowd, which closed around her in a flutter of harlequin rags, and she was relieved to see the figure encompassed by the swirl of paraders.

She withdrew from the stream of grotesques and picked her way along rambling streets, tiptoeing across melted bricks. She turned to find the shadow, floating languidly above the flowing pavement. It regarded her cooly with bulbous glowing orbs set into a body that seemed to have no substance at all, except for a blurred grey outline. Ghostly animals slunk behind the wilted trashcans, chittering softly from the half-shadows.

I've broken up some of these dream entries so I can tag them properly. With only 10 tags, it can be a little hard.

Original entry dated Feb. 16, 2002:


Nightmare #1:
I had a nightmare that I was in this deserted ruined city-place, and there was nuclear ash everywhere. The city was quasi-inhabited by the ghosts of children, who told me that I couldn't leave because nobody leaves. I tried to leave anyway, by climbing over a crumbled wall and biking down a deserted and shattered highway. I could bike a LOT faster in my dream than in reality - in fact, I was amazed by the speed at which I was going. There was something nameless and terrifying behind me, and I didn't want to look back because I knew that if I did I'd see nothing there but a tremendous wall of brute evil force... like a visual shock-wave from a bomb blast... and then I opened up my eyes, I was lying in bed in the pitch-black and felt something sitting at the edge of my bed. Something like a man but not a man. It terrified the hell out of me. I could feel it there like... a dead weight... solid as a rock. I was paralyzed with fear, but finally gathered the courage to lunge for the light. When I turned it on - of course nothing was there. Perhaps that was when I really woke up and the nightmare ended, or at least I hope so.

Nightmare #2:
There was a house that was - how can I put it? - unfolded. It existed in more than three dimensions, so to speak, and was very frightening to experience. There were ghosts living in it. There seem to be a lot of ghosts in my dreams. One of them was a sort of... respectable old gentleman, who would be kindly if he weren't so sinister in a way. The house was a labyrinth, and I kept getting lost and becoming very afraid.

Nightmare #3:
I had a nightmare that I had died. In it, my mother and brother and I lived in an old Victorian mansion. I couldn't move on, and wanted very badly to communicate with them, but the only time I could was that split second when they hovered between sleep and waking. At night I was chased by hell-hounds, and was sort of held back by things that I thought of in my dream as "death-bones".

Original entry dated Feb. 16, 2002:

I had a nightmare that the devil tried to seduce me, but at the last minute I pulled back and ran out of the room. It wasn't so much terrifying as unsettling. I also had a dream about being chased through an iron tower. It was creepy. I managed to escape and ran out into the road to ask for help, but nobody would pick me up. Finally, a nice young couple was kind enough to pick me up even though they knew the consequences, but they still didn't seem to appreciate the danger that I was putting them in.