non-lucid

Non-Lucid: Rat Circus
Prior to my lucid, I had a regular dream. In it, a bunch of hamster, mice, and rats took care of a bunch of human babies that lived inside of an aquarium. Somehow, something happened and the aquarium was contaminated with radiation. The rats were distraught, since a hazmat team had sealed off the aquarium. They managed to save all but one of the babies.
The aquarium was in an apartment that one of the rats owned. For some reason, some other rats (and a mole? I can't remember) dug up his garden. They would do this by digging holes under it at night and grabbing vegetables by the roots. The mole could also turn into a sort of sentient gas if he needed to.
Anyway, after the whole aquarium baby fiasco, another group of rats decided to build a tiny circus in a corner of the parking lot. There is sort of a time lapse sequence as the circus is built and illuminated, until there is a bustling rat city built around it. I woke up bewildered. I have weird dreams, but that one is pretty up there.

Lucid: The Cottage:
I settled back into bed and did my relaxation exercises on my back. Once I had begun working on my trance, I very slowly rolled onto my side and began visualization exercises. As with the prior night, I began the exercise where I explore my cottage (a location I have been "building" as a placeholder to get kicked back to, rather than something like the void or my bedroom or a stupid laundromat in Nebraska).

As I continued the visualization slowly gathered intensity. Lucidity actually snuck up on me on this one, since I was so engrossed in what I was doing that I didn't notice my body falling asleep, and the change was so gradual that I didn't realize the dream had fully formed until I looked around and realized that I was actually standing in a hallway rather than imagining that I was standing in a hallway.

I decided to explore in earnest. The floors were polished wood, sort of a dark honey color. I decided that I needed to find a mirror so I could reinforce my lucidity. I turned to my left and went through a door.

I found myself in a small alcove right before you enter the great-room, and there was a small wooden table against the wall, of the sort you would put in an alcove. It was dark wood, with turned table legs, and on top of it was a porcelain bowl with potpourri in it. Above it was an oblong oval mirror with a baroque-looking gold frame. This wasn't exactly what I'd envisioned (the furniture was a little more elaborate and fussy than I'd normally pick out). They both looked like antiques, though, so maybe it was the antique-lover in me.

Anyway, when I looked in the mirror, I saw that I was wearing a green-gold bodice with a cream colored chemise and green skirts. My hair was chin-length, and it was red, but it looked like I had a bad dye job. I laughed at how bad my hair looked and made some faces in the mirror before reminding myself that I didn't want to get too fascinated by mirrors again.

I went into the great room. The walls were white plaster. The floor in front of the fireplace was stone. The fireplace itself was made of irregular stones, fitted together. The fireplace had moved from where I initially imagined it. I decided to find the DC I'd been looking for (because I have some questions for them) but I didn't see them. I went through a door to my right, where there was a small den, but he wasn't there. Since the den also connected to the kitchen area, which led back into the great room, I decided that I would simply wander around the cottage in circles until he did appear. Lo and behold, on my second lap, there he was.

He looked different from the DC I recalled, far different, so I was a little irritated. I couldn't decide whether or not he actually was that DC. For one thing, he had very short hair, and it was a chestnut color rather than ash blond, and in sort of a faux-hawk. I told him that he didn't look the way I expected, and asked him to at least change his hair.

He responded, "I'm a warrior and I don't want long hair. It gives my enemies something to grab in combat." I actually couldn't argue with the logic of that, to tell you the truth. I took my glasses off and put them on again (made things blurry and then clear again, basically) and every time I did this, his face would shift a little bit. His eyes were kind of a dark blue-green. I still couldn't decide if this was the DC I wanted, and how much I could rely on his answers to any questions I asked him, so I decided to wander around the cottage a little more.

I crossed through the great room and opened the door. Rather than the snowy forest from before, or the temperate rainforest I was expecting, instead the rolling landscape was more like the Shire. It was bright and sunny out, and the sky was a pretty shade of blue, with white puffy clouds. There were some hanging planters full of flowers hanging over the door and windows. They were red and blue, and I don't know what kinds of flowers they were, but they spilled over the sides of the planters. I smelled them, but they didn't smell like much of anything.

I decided to go find Grimalkin (he is a cat in a wizard hat). I figured he might be in the kitchen, because he likes hanging out there. I went into the kitchen, and he wasn't there. I could feel that the dream was drawing to a close, so I wanted to find him quickly.

"Grimalkin?" I called. Immediately, as if in reaction to my attempt to summon him, the dream lost intensity. It became a ghost of what it had been. I tried to restore the intensity of the dream, but didn't have much luck. I could already feel that I was on the verge of waking up, so I let it go.

I woke up and looked at the clock. I'd slept a solid 8 hours, although my alarm wouldn't go off for another 30 minutes. I tried to doze, but my brain seemed to have decided that it had had enough sleep for the night, so I got up and made coffee.

Original journal entry dated April 23, 2002:

This one was about an old friend of mine. I haven't had any dreams about him in a really long time. I had a dream that I was having my wisdom teeth pulled and I was REALLY messed up on painkillers when I left the dentist's office... apparently he'd been the person who had given me a ride, he tried to help me walk but my legs were jell-o so he had to kind of half-drag me to the car. I realized that, since an old friend was in it, this was going to be a sad dream, so I woke myself up.

note: I have since gotten my wisdom teeth removed; a different friend took me home from the office.

Original entry dated April 13th, 2002:

My friends and I were battling giant robotic ponies in the mall. It was a sort of laser-tag type setup, only less fun and more deadly. Our foes looked like giant My Little Ponies with googly-eyes that shot lasers, so they were REEEEALLY creepy.

*THUD THUD THUD* "AAAH! GIANT ROBOTIC PONY! ...aww... it has a butterfly on its butt!"

In the battle all of us had skills, MUD-style, that we had to use and train to develop proficiency in. There was a kickass hoverbike with cannons on it that I couldn't ride because my Cycling skill was only at 20%. So instead I had a sorry-assed excuse for a pistol that did about as much damage as, say, a squirt-gun.

I don't remember the rest, I think the dream just sort of fizzled out, and then I had a really sad dream but I don't remember what it was abou

My dreams are mostly jumbled and nonsensical.

I dreamed that I found a DVD case. It was for a Disney movie. I was worried I was ruining a collector's item, but unwrapped it anyway. There was a children's book inside, sort of a young adult's book, that was missing the first three chapters. It looked like they'd been ripped out. The subject matter of the book was Arthurian legends.

I opened another DVD case, and Minnie Mouse hopped out. She got into a fistfight with a Disney Princess (Tiana) over who was the best. Tiana won. Minnie was still pissed off over getting her ass kicked, so she challenged me to a duel to the death. I refused to fight a cartoon mouse, though. I picked the book back up and now the chapters were back.

I woke up, scratched my head over the dream, and lay back again. I woke up and dozed a few times while trying to visualize. I try the cottage from last night - no luck. While I am doing the visualization, I actually lose awareness as I fall asleep, but I must still be thinking about it, because as soon as a dream starts it's me sitting down in front of my laptop. I manage to link this to my prior visualization and realize that I am not actually awake, because the last thing I was doing was exploring an imaginary cottage, and I never got out of bed, but I am not in the cottage either, so I realize I am dreaming.

I forget to stabilize. Instead, I dive into the laptop screen, trying to use it as a portal, but everything goes gray. Not black... gray. I wander around in the grayness. I can see vague forms, and I can feel my feet shuffling along the ground while I try to conjure up a dreamscape... I'm afraid to open my dream-eyes because I'm worried I'll wake up. I open them, and I do. Still... it wasn't pitch blackness, so I guess I'll call that progress.

Original journal entry dated April 4th, 2002:

This time, my dream had some people in it I know - S and Sr. S was a nobleman who was a slight notch above a knight, and Sr was a monk. As the dream progressed they sort of lost their resemblances to either person, though, and became characters in their own rights.

Anyway, "S" had gone to the monastery to get some peace and quiet. He wasn't so much ill as stressed out. As he was walking through one of the fields he came across the monk, who was running around wearing butterfly wings and singing. He stopped to watch, puzzled by the strange sight, and the monk came up to him and started talking about how he wanted to communicate with the faeries. The monk had a Bible which was actually (and oddly) bound with the spirit of a demon. There was also a blue flower in the field that was a parasite, and grew so quickly and aggressively that it was strangling the others - this upset the noble/knight guy so every day he would go out into the field and try to hack the harmful plants up... it was a losing battle, though.

Anyway, he went into the monastery to go back to his chamber and was admonished by a monk for being so loud. He was then stopped by a messenger who had been sent by his wife, to tell him that she was arriving there the next day. The servant was a little worried about the Lady's sanity, and as for the nobleman himself, he said, "I believe she is quite looney".

The end of the dream was garbled, though - the Lady arrived, caused a lot of upset, and then through some sort of spell or ritual the nobleman or the butterfly-wing-wearing monk caused an earthquake - a chunk of the monastery that had been built to overhang the cliff fell into the sea, and unfortunately the Lady was in it at the time. And there was something about the demonic Bible, too, but like I said, the end was blurry.

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...

Lots of dreaming about snow.

In my first dream, there was a blonde woman driving a red convertible around. I think that there was also a movie being filmed... I don't recall, I think it was like one of those B horror flicks. The landscape was super snowy, and it was up in the mountains.
Anyway, she ran into a unicorn. It was gray, with a kind of bronze colored horn. There were some Bad Guys (pretty one-dimensional, they looked like mobster thugs) that wanted to kill the unicorn.
Somehow, the movie was concluded, and the blonde woman started driving around. She drove up onto an outcropping, like a huge ice cliff that jutted overhead, extremely high up... the view I had was from way below, all I could see was a plume of snow kicked up by the car wheels. Then she drove over the side of the cliff (somehow part of the Bad Guys' plan?), but instead of crashing, the car was suspended in the air by a spider-web-like strand of ice.

I then dreamed I was working on an art project. Somehow I hadn't been told about part of my homework. I needed to turn it in TODAY. I was inking my work and crying and arguing with the teacher that I'd joined the class later than everyone else, and it wasn't fair because I hadn't been told about the homework, and I ought to get more time.

Now it's Christmas. There is a Christmas tree full of hamsters that are dressed as unicorns. They have tiny stuffed unicorn horns on their heads that flop around a little bit.

Next, I am drawing Sonic the Hedgehog fanart for N, a friend of mine who loves Sonic the Hedgehog. It's hilarious because the fanart I drew a) Mocked terrible Sonic the Hedgehog fanart, and b) Is something I actually drew in real life. N thinks that my fanart is hilarious. I decide that if the teacher is going to be an asshole, I'm going to turn in terrible fanart as part of my homework, so she has to suffer through looking at it. I am now standing next to the ice cliff that the woman drove off of. I dig out handfuls of snow and eat them.

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.

I took 3 mg melatonin before bed. I don't know if it did my dreams any good, but I slept pretty well.

I dreamed that I was staying at somebody's house... a couple, who were maybe in their 60s. I don't remember the man very well, but the woman had shoulder-length dyed brown hair and wore sort of flowy pastel blue clothing with lots of jewelry. Their house was on the edge of the water. It was mostly open to the air, with pastel curtains hung between pillars. It reminded me a lot of some of the houses in Florida. When I asked about hurricanes, they said they'd rather live on the edge of the water than relocate to a hotel on slightly higher ground where they would just drown anyway.

Then, there was some sort of hurricane/typhoon. The house was blown to pieces. Somehow, the couple was unaffected by the craziness going on around them, but extremely concerned about me. Even though I hung on, I ended getting blown away.

The dream shifted. I was entering a city that was built on the water. I descended on the city from the air, somehow. The houses' walls were made of white plaster, and the rooftops were glittering ceramic tiles in all sorts of jewel tones. The architecture reminded me a lot of the American Southwest. There were canals between all of the houses. Somehow, all of this was on top of a mesa that rose out of the sea. I recall that I was able to get into the city because my cousin J helped me get a passport.

The environment around the mesa reminded me a lot of coastal South Africa. There was a cave system inside of the mesa, with different levels to it, all of them filled with enough water to pilot a boat around. The poorest people lived in boats in the lowest levels of the cave system (which also opened to the sea, through a tunnel that looked very mouth-like). The richest people lived in the houses on top of the mesa. The lowest level was very dimly lit, and the cave walls were made of sort of a brown clay.

I was at the lowest level, and suddenly had a boat. My boat was a little house-boat, about as small as a house-boat can get. The lowest level of the mesa, where I was, had terraces, with waterfalls. I thought the sound of one particular waterfall was very annoying, so I tried to pilot my boat to a higher level. One of the other residents was an extremely skinny man with tan skin and a shaved head. He stopped me and said they wouldn't allow boats at the higher levels, because the water was too shallow. I thought that sounded like bullshit, but turned around anyway.

The dream shifted. I was somehow involved in a plot to detonate a bomb somewhere in Sweden. I don't remember why. I remember moving there because my friend had moved there to teach English (which she does in real life) even though I really wanted to move to Norway instead.

My great grandfather lived in a run down little shack there, and wore a ratty red robe. I remember thinking that he looked very thin and frail. He was trying to tell me in broken English that what I was doing was evil, and begging me not to do it. I was doing it for his good as well as my own, although I don't remember how. After I had completed the task, I was able to move my great grandfather to a much better apartment. He still wore the same ratty red robe, and he refused to talk to me.

I woke up, rolled over.

Dreamed my roommate was talking about getting married to one of our other friends, but I don't recall anything else.

Original entry dated Feb. 12th, 2002:

Last night, I had a dream that by going into womens' bathrooms and walking through a certain special wall in a particular stall, I could reach a magical alternate dimension where witches and warlocks and stuff hung out. I also collected stuffed animals as a hobby, but that was a relatively minor part of the dream.


Original journal entry dated Feb. 16th, 2002:

I had a dream a while ago that there were two villages of little toy-people. Like teddy-bears and stuff. There was a little village at the bottom of a tree, and a little village on a branch of the tree. The village at the bottom of the tree sent a scout up the tree to ask the village up there why they never came down to visit. When the scout got there, he found out that the reason was because they couldn't get down. All of the different villagers had little quirks - like one was always rollerskating, and another one watched a lot of Sesame Street. The scout showed them how to get down - just jump off the branch. The problem was, he had a parachute - and they didn't. So they all broke into little pieces when they hit the ground, and had to reassemble themselves.
So one of them was, like, half of a rabbit and half of a rollerskate, and another one had a TV instead of a torso, and one had two heads, and I think two of the others were joined by a slinky thing, and one of them had heads for his feet...

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".