Nightmares

[Sheilawisz]

Hello Thinker!

Thanks for that information, I have already been looking at various representations of Naga. They look very similar indeed, except that the one in my nightmare was completely naked and there was no cultural flavor in her, she was just simple and terrible.

Do Nagas often have bladed weapons? The thing in my dream had just claws and teeth.

 

[ThinkerX]

Don't know enough to say if Naga carry weapons. Lessee here...somebody put the old AD&D 'Monster Manual' online:

Naga (Monstrous Manual)

(The creators of AD&D swiped monsters from pretty much every culture on the planet, and mutated them to fit the game system.)

I had a 'Naga-like' entity in a story I wrote for one of 'Legendary Sidekicks' Challenges a few years ago.

 

[Sheilawisz]

These are cool Fantasy creatures, indeed.

I do not have any Naga-style monster in any of my Fantasy stories, except for certain and various species of snake-like dragons. They have very wide wings, only two arms with claws (no legs) and they are about the size of a large airliner. Those used to be the pets and also troops belonging to Mage factions in my earliest Fantasy trilogy.

In my dream, I was terrified of the monster but that oval mirror also had a powerful effect on me for some reason.

I wonder what happened to good old Legendary Sidekick by the way, I miss him. I remember that he participated in my The Metamorphosis Challenge back then, with a quite funny story.

When you want to share more interesting dreams with us, you are most welcome Thinker! =)

 

[LadyKas]

My worst nightmares are waking nightterrors. I am awake or atleast my brain thinks i am but i am paralyzed and my eyes will "see" things. Most common is spiders will take things from my walls and shelves and toss them around the room. Things also start to randomly float into the air, ive wacked my husband, myself and my daughter a few times trying to grab said objects.
Ive also had really bad onez. Ive had men stand outside my window talking about attacking me, ive had a banshee stand over my bed(scared a fellow debate member since we were sharing a hotel room) ive also had bugs swarm my bed and start to bite.
Sometimes i wake up on my own but a few times my husband has had to wake me up usually by talking to me and turning on lights.

 

[evolution_rex]

My worst nightmares are waking nightterrors. I am awake or atleast my brain thinks i am but i am paralyzed and my eyes will "see" things. Most common is spiders will take things from my walls and shelves and toss them around the room. Things also start to randomly float into the air, ive wacked my husband, myself and my daughter a few times trying to grab said objects.
Ive also had really bad onez. Ive had men stand outside my window talking about attacking me, ive had a banshee stand over my bed(scared a fellow debate member since we were sharing a hotel room) ive also had bugs swarm my bed and start to bite.
Sometimes i wake up on my own but a few times my husband has had to wake me up usually by talking to me and turning on lights.

Pretty sure that’s sleep paralysis. Had it a few times, and my brother had it chronically for awhile. Never had felt that creepy until after I was awake and remembered the experience, except for one occasion.

 

[Tom]

I don't get a lot of nightmares, but I do get semi-frequent sleep paralysis that comes with its own set of weirdness. However, what was the most frightening part of nighttime for me for years was when I couldn't sleep.

I have insomnia, so I spend a lot of nights lying in bed willing myself to go to sleep. Ever since I was very little, if I'm awake for more than two or three hours into the night, I'll start to "feel" a presence in the room with me. When I was younger this was absolutely terrifying. I'd spend sleepless nights tossing and turning with this invisible...thing hanging above me for hours and hours, watching my every move. It still happens, but I've lost my fear of it. I named him Francis when I was about sixteen. I have no idea why my brain does this to me, but it made nighttime a harrowing experience for younger me.

 

[Sheilawisz]

Hello everyone!

What LadyKas has described is Sleep Paralysis indeed, not just nightmares. I have fortunately never experienced that paralysis situation myself, but I have met in person people that have described it to me in great detail. One of them was a friend that my sister and I met quite some years ago, back in the days when we ran a shop in a little mall here in Pachuca.

This person suffered the Sleep Paralysis only one time in her life, but it had been so frightening that she was pretty shaken and scared to suffer it again at some point of her life. She described to me that one normal night she was just there on her bed, not sure whether she was asleep or awake, and then all of a sudden she could not move a muscle.

In her sleep illusions she started to float above her bed, then everything was spinning around her and she feared that some extraterrestrials or something were trying to kidnap her... she could hear the voices of her family that came from other parts of the house, and yet she was unable to cry out for help. Then it was over, and this woman took a long time to recover from the harrowing experience.

I am okay with nightmares, but sleep paralysis? No thanks!

In case that any of you guys wants to start a thread dedicated to the matters of Sleep Paralysis in particular, I think that would be a good idea.

 

[DragonOfTheAerie]

I've experienced sleep paralysis. It was quite a while ago, and I don't remember it well, but it was very scary.

 

[Sheilawisz]

Yet Another Plague Nightmare

I just posted in the other thread about a weird dream that I had recently, and guess what? I had a nightmare too, not the same night but also very recent. I have been experiencing a lot of unusually clear and powerful dreams these nights... I believe that London Dry Gin is responsible, since I have just added it to my heavy drinking habits and I abused it the other night.

After all, they say that juniper berries have psychoactive effects... Anyway, here comes the nightmare!

In real life, my sister just returned from a travel to certain place that I very much disapprove. In the nightmare, she also returned from said travel... and she was sick, very sick with high fever, fatigue and a lot of severe coughing. I took her to the doctor together with my mother... I was not there while my sister was examined, but very soon she emerged from the doctor's office carrying a prescription.

I took the paper prescription in my hands, and read it: Pneumonic Plague were the big words, followed by simple indications about taking certain antibiotics and having rest at home.

Well, I was petrified. I know that it would be utterly ridiculous for a doctor to send a patient home with a case of that thing, and yet that was not enough to wake me up or to allow me to know that it was just a dream. All I knew was that my sister was dying, she would collapse in a matter of hours and she was coughing blood on me and my mother...

My sister insisted that she was fine, and that we could purchase her antibiotics the following day.

I was like: No, you are dying! You have to start treatment immediately! We are... we are contaminated! After that, she started to get worse and worse and then I began to feel sick... terror overwhelmed me, and I woke up in great fear as daylight was just starting outside.

It took me some time to calm down and convince myself that nobody has the plague around here.

 

[Miles Lacey]

I had a weird dream last night that could be called a nightmare.

I have a pathological fear of deep water (I was almost killed when I was a baby by someone who tried to drown me). Many of my nightmares involve variations of trying to escape sea water - tsunami, larger than usual waves, higher high tides than usual - by clambering up hills, seeking shelter in a building of some sort (which is sometimes derelict) or simply running. The fact I live near a beach on an island (the North Island of New Zealand) may have something to do with it.

This time around I found myself being surrounded by sea water. There was a yellow grass clad hill with steep sides but I couldn't find the one place where there was a ladder (steps?) up to the top of the hill. Instead of panicking or trying to clamber my way up the hill I simply resigned myself to the fact I couldn't outrun the water and just let it surround me. I woke up then.

Granted I was flooded out of my home twice in a month after heavy rain and lost stuff mostly of a sentimental nature earlier this year and the flooding has resulted in the house being condemned but I've been dreaming about being chased by water since I was a kid.

I'm sure there is some psychological meaning behind it all.

 

[Sheilawisz]

I had a weird dream last night that could be called a nightmare.

I have a pathological fear of deep water (I was almost killed when I was a baby by someone who tried to drown me). Many of my nightmares involve variations of trying to escape sea water - tsunami, larger than usual waves, higher high tides than usual - by clambering up hills, seeking shelter in a building of some sort (which is sometimes derelict) or simply running. The fact I live near a beach on an island (the North Island of New Zealand) may have something to do with it.

What? Somebody tried to murder you when you were very little? That's awful! Well, I am happy that you survived the horrible attack. In my case, I love a nice swimming pool but I would be very afraid to swim in deep lakes or the sea. I have a profound respect and fear for the sea in particular, and I do not understand why people go and swim there.

Also, when I swim in very deep pools (5.5 meters) I do feel some fear of deep water... Shallow pools are the best!

I am sure that some psychological factor is involved in your recurrent water-related nightmares. I experienced paranormal phenomena when I was little, so perhaps that's why most of my nightmares are about that kind of things.

My recurrent (and sometimes very harrowing) Plague nightmares can be explained by the fact that I read a lot about the disease in my early years, saw plenty of scary paintings and photographs and also watched plague-related documentaries and movies. Apart of that, I have the theory that perhaps I was alive somewhere in England during 1348 in some past life of mine.

Sweet dreams!

 

[Crcata]

Many of my nightmares stem from an inability to fight back. Whether my arms are super heavy and I can't defend myself, or the trigger of a gun is to hard to squeeze and I just end up dying.

 

[Deleted member 6067]

My brain makes my sensors turn especially active working with two types of dream scenarios:
A, Sex
B, Death

Needless to say mixing the two is a recipe for disaster, and has produced the most haunting nightmares I have ever had. I will leave it at that.

 

[Night Gardener]

I have a waking life, and a dreaming life. That's how lucid a dreamer I am. I have even managed to have episodic dreams, like a tv series. Sometimes I can't wake up from dreams, because I think I'm awake.

The rather humdrum mundane "I thought I was awake" dreams are the most terrifying. Sometimes those spin into horrible nightmares. Mostly, it's my brain tricking me into thinking I'm awake, out of bed, turned the alarm off, fed the cats and in the shower. I usually wake up in bed when I open the shower curtain. Otherwise, I have intense, very memorable dreams with surreal elements that are my cues that I'm dreaming. I guess they're nightmares, but my metering for what qualifies as a "nightmare" is a bit off. I've remembered some dreams, nearly frame for frame, since my early childhood.

I'll share one that I can recall from May of 2018.

It's pre-dawn dark. It's cold and damp, and I'm wheeling a wire basket cart full of papers in 3 ring binders and huge books on a sidewalk in some sprawling compound. I turn the corner of a building, following signs, and the path ahead fades into total darkness. There is no moon, only stars. I wheel this heavy cart down the sidewalk into a vast lawn field. There's no buildings or lights visible. I can't see the part of the compound I've left. Just the concrete sidewalk reflecting dim starlight in a sea of darkness and fog.

In this misty gray haze of space, there is movement, shadow; and I stop: does and bucks are emerging from someplace I can't see. They can clearly see me, and don't run. But then they turn their heads back towards the direction they came from, and scatter. Run hard. Something is coming.

Suddenly, I am surrounded by snarling, vicious wolves. They start attacking me. I put my back to the cart, and grab a binder and start clubbing them with it. Over. And over. They won't stop trying to get at me. Eventually to my horror, I beat these wolves until I bludgeon their skulls in with the corners of books. I beat in their eyes. Break their jaws. Some lay dying, howling in agony. Convulsing. The others still keep attacking. They won't stop. They won't retreat. I can't get away. I am beating these animals to death. With books and my bare hands. Kicking them until their ribs break and their lungs collapse. There's blood everywhere. I'm wounded. And all the while I'm thinking, "They can't help themselves. This is their nature. They don't know any better. It's not their fault." And I am deeply disturbed that I am having to kill these creatures. I'm heartbroken. I feel sorry for them. My absolute relentless brutality-- and the efficiency with which I so effortlessly weaponized books--- was also incredibly disturbing. I woke up while bashing a book down a wolf's throat, dislocating it's jaw. I'm still haunted by the animal's eyes buldging as I heard its bones and teeth break.

* For the record, in my waking life, I revere the wolf and do not regard it as a mindless vicious animal.

 

[Night Gardener]

Ok, i'm never up at this hour (too early!) but i had a nightmare and I really really really don't want to go back to sleep so here I am, posting about it.

Apparently being a lucid dreamer can suck. I just experienced a freaking terrifying phenomenon that my friend once told me about...being stuck in a dream that seems to go on forever.

I'm not sure there was anything bad about this dream. From what I can remember there were no monsters or other horrors or scary, horrible situations. It was just the fact that I couldn't wake up. I went through an entire 24 hours in this dream that seemed to be in real time and tried every method I'd ever heard of to wake up. Nothing worked. I was stuck. I kept talking to my family: "I need to wake up! I want to get out of here!" And they kept trying to convince me that the dream world was not so bad. After all, they said, I was a lucid dreamer so I should be able to control a nightmare if this dream turned into one!

What scared me the most is that i didn't even use the argument that I wanted to go back to the real world. I wasn't even sure I knew if one was real and the other wasn't. Instead I remember saying that in the dream world, the order and security, everything good, is only a thin veneer. Peel that back and you have all the materials of nightmares, all the horrors which are the true state of the dream world. I think i was talking about reality generally though, not just the dream world. My interest in waking up wasn't that this world was real but that it followed rules.

I'm having an existential crisis.

I think what finally woke me up was that I realized that if i spent any longer in the dream world, i'd forget the real one and the dream one would be my reality. I woke up gasping for breath. I've never woken up gasping for breath from a dream and i guess now I know what it feels like.

I feel on some level that the medications are doing this to me, but i'm also having an existential crisis and that was easily the most terrifying dream i've ever had. I was lucid the whole time and my thought process was as fluid as now. I tried controlling stuff at first, but it didn't help to wake me up.

*sits awake for the remainder of the night having an existential crisis*

I have those dreams, too. If you are a lucid dreamer and get stuck in one of those perpetual false-awakenings-- regardless of your level of insights--- I have a suggestion for you: try to find and use the toilet. After a lifetime of our bodies being trained explicity for night-time continence, you can sometimes trick your brain into waking up because you trigger underlying programming to *not* soil the bed in your sleep.

You might be in your home, and the bathroom will magically disappear when you declare "I need to go pee". Or, it will be out of order, filthy, suddenly an outhouse, in the middle of a room, etc. It can help you navigate out of the 'am I awake, or am I dreaming?' conundrum. Your bladder can help you hack-in and reprogram. Or, hold your breath or make extreme breathing patterns in your dream. Your lungs have a lot of influence in your unconscious, and that might force you to wake up.

After you're aware that you're dreaming, you might have problems waking up. Don't panic. Once you accept the awareness of the 'malfunction', you can attempt to reboot your brain. If you have to, run a "logic list" outloud: you will eventually have to wake up and go pee. You'll get stiff and need to move. The alarm will go off. The phone will ring. You will be hungry and thirsty. The cat will sit on your head, demanding breakfast. The room will get brighter as the sun rises. People will check on you, etc.

I used to have reality-bending dreams where I was dreaming of my waking life all day, sometimes into the evening. Sometimes I'd go to bed in my dreams. I'd have to check and recheck the date and time when I 'woke up'. I'd have days go missing. I'd refer to conversations and events that *never* happened. Or, live in this weird deja vu state where things I dreamt, then happened irl.

I'd like to blame this false-awakening phenomenon on trauma and toxic stress, chronic insomnia and the fact that I had mononucleosis so badly (without knowing I was sick for almost 3 years) that I one day started fever-hallucinating in class, had to go to the ER and almost had my spleen surgically removed because they thought it was going to rupture.

You can try to develop observations to clue you in that you're not awake. I, 99.9% of the time, wake up because I 1. Have to pee and 2. Have a hungry cat dancing on me. If I wake up, don't go pee, ignore the cat, and get straight into the shower, it triggers me to ask: am I awake? Now, skipping the potty and getting directly into the shower is a 'tell'. Opening the shower curtain is me actually moving the blankets. Still annoying every time it happens, but not nearly as terrifying.

My other final hack is a total dream shutdown: go to bed in your false-awake dreams. Especially when you have identified that you are wanting to wake up, and can't. Get into your pjs, get comfy, and get into bed and try to fall asleep. Put your head under the covers. Block out all the nonsense in your false-awake or bizarre dream. Not in your house? Doesn't matter. You're just going to go to someplace to sleep.

It helps if you keep a specific (textured) item in bed with you irl that you have to seek out in the dream as you're trying to 'sleep'. I had a chenille herb-filled weighted sleep mask sachet thingy that I kept under my pillow. As I started waking up, I could try to find it and once I could squish it in my hand I knew I was really awake.

I usually have a stream of conciousness option in my dreams. Like, one time as I was dreaming about trying to escape an alligator and crocodile infested swamp, and super-imposed on this situation, I was thinking of a grocery list. Eventually my brain (me) thought the situation of wading through infested waters while trying to remember if I had an extra bottle of mustard or not was too absurd, so I woke up.

Dreams are supposed to be insightful. The fact you weren't sure if you could use the "I need to wake up because this isn't real" argument just acknowledges your existential crisis is playing out in your dreams. Hopefully, with some work, you can explore these feelings in your dream and waking life without being terrorized by the dream. IRL and waking life sucks most of the time for me, so when I say I understand and empathize with your existential crisis and these warped dreams, I mean it.

Things may not get 'better' for you in a Hallmark- Disney singsong kind of way, but they will be Different. And different can be good by comparison. You never know.

 

[Dina]

I don't have them often, but I do wake from nightmares occasionally. I have a hard time remembering my dreams, but this one is vivid for some reason? I watched the dream as an outsider, like in a movie film. There was a tall man in glasses and a lab-coat mixing potions in beakers, Jekyll and Hyde style. As he worked, he thought to himself on how he'd been wronged throughout his life and how now he'd avenge the death of his daughter. He held one of them up with that evil-scientist "AH-HA!" It was a lethal powder made of poisonous mushrooms. He proceeded to enact a series of murders on little girls until he found the one he was looking for. Upon finding her, he chased her through London's alleyways and caught her at a dead end. He smothered her and forced her to ingest the poison until she died.
At the time, I woke sweating and quite scared, but after about thirty seconds I recalled what exactly the poison was made of and laughed myself to sleep.
Poisonous mushrooms = Mario mushrooms.

 

[SamYellek]

I had a creepy nightmare a few nights ago that I haven't been able to stop thinking about. I was in my childhood home, and it was during some kind of invasion. The invaders were beings from some other dimension. They were human shaped, but they were slightly twisted. Their skin was metallic and shiny, their heads smooth and faceless. And they could fold themselves up, bend and flatten themselves to slip under doorways and windows so they could get inside people's homes. I don't know if these things had an actual name, but everyone on the news and in the streets were calling them the same thing. The Forbidden. I'm not sure why, but that's what we called them.

 

[Hir i-Chorvath]

I had a nightmare several years ago that still comes back to haunt me.
I was with my family and we went to visit this creepy old couple who lived in a very expensive and elegant 3 story red brick mansion that was covered in ivy. There were flowers and plants everywhere and a small pond filled with algae in front. The whole place felt wrong and everyone spoke in quiet voices, the couple took us to their extremely ornate living room filled with gold plated decorations and such. They warned us to be quiet so that we wouldn't wake the monsters. We thought that they were joking.

I wandered away from my family and the old couple getting bored with the conversation and eventually made it to the only set of stairs in the mansion I went up and there was a small landing, on the left side was the railing and there were only two white doors, one in front and the other on the right. Which I thought was odd, a girl probably around 12 years old was shutting one of the doors behind her, again I found this odd, the couple had said that they were the only people living there. There was a faint sound of snarling and growling coming from the door she was closing and I caught a glimpse of a huge yellow eye surrounded by fur. Shocked and more than a little scared by now, I turned to the girl about to ask a question when she faced me completely. Her eyes were solid red and as she grinned at me I was able to see that her teeth were all pointed and a long forked black tongue flicked through the air in front of me. "You aren't supposed to be up here." she hissed at me reaching for me as her fingers lengthened into claws.

I shrieked and ran back to my family. I tried to get them to leave but they just laughed and told me to be quiet, there was nothing wrong. The old couple began to look at me murderously. I ran from the mansion and into the front pond where I hid. Somehow I knew from inside the pond that the old couple and the demon girl were looking for me but they did not find me. So they set the monsters loose.

As I crawled out of the pond the setting suddenly changed and we were in a large field that had no visible end or beginning. My family was behind me and so were the monsters (which were from the movie Where the Wild Things Are). We all ran but the monsters were too fast. One by one I heard my family screaming as they were caught and eaten alive. Finally it was just me and then they caught up to me too. It was vivid I got caught and I was eaten alive as well. It was terrifying. Then I woke up. I was convinced that I was dead it had been so real. I eventually figured out that it had been a nightmare but I wasn't able to sleep for the next few days after that. I can still remember how being eaten felt. It was horrifying.

 

[Ban]

To return to this old thread, I find it amusing that my nightmares have dulled so much over the years. There are some terrifying ones I remember from childhood, but the current rare ones I have are just the typical "oh no, I forgot about an exam!" followed by me realising that I graduated with my master's one and a half years ago. It's a whole lot less dramatic than the fever-dreams of blue and green demons lunging at me from the walls which kick-started this thread. Some other great ones were a recurring dream I had where my grandmother's house was infinitely large and complex, with furniture on the ceiling and ghosts around every corner. That one could make for a fun short story. The other recurring nightmare I had was that I was trapped inside my own, boneless leg with walls of hot, pulsating flesh surrounding me. Still haven't been able to figure that one out, or how on earth I discerned the flesh walls were my leg.

Guess I'll take the current assortment of dull nightmares over the body horror haha.

 

[Finchbearer]

Okay, I’ll add to this nightmarish thread.

I’ll always remember one nightmare I had when I was around 20 / 21. It was one of my old secondary school buildings, and I knew that I had to get inside, because I had this constant pervasive feeling that the dogs who were barking incessantly behind were signalling the end of the world. I ran inside, but each room the dogs followed. Eventually it was more a feeling and an ominous sound that emanated from the corners of the rooms or the drawers that I opened. I was trying to escape the impending doom, but everywhere I went it followed me, and eventually the end of the world happened and I woke up. I just woke up (in the waking world) and outside was completely still. I checked my phone, 4am on the dot. Everything felt eerie, and I’ve never forgotten that strange feeling after I woke up.