Nightmares

[Euryalus]

I can't remember exactly how it came up, but I was recently talking with my girlfriend about some nightmares I had when I was little and realised I had some crazy scary dreams sometimes.

The one that stands out the most was one I had when I was like 5 or 6.

It started out with me in a sunday school class eating lemon filled donuts. They ocassionally handed them out to us. It was pretty awesome.

But anyway at some point in the dream the teachers led us all to a room where we were supposed to be for some reason. There was a latch like you'd see on a submarine that served as the entrance to the room. Being five year olds we crawled down because we thought it was cool, but it was a trap. The teachers locked us in the room and it started filling with lava. Some of the kids in the middle of the room died right off, and the rest of us were begging to be let out. As the lava started rising, I crawled up the ladder to the latch so I could stay away from it, and was clawing at the latch trying to get out. It was horrible.

I woke up as the lava reached me.

TL;DR What have been some of the most messed up (or just scary) nightmares you guys have had?

 

[Barbas]

I remember one in which there was a Nazi (there's always a bloody Nazi) I was chasing because he'd murdered my friend - no idea why, but I assume we were at war. He led me through the corridors of an otherwise empty building until we reached an unassuming wooden door. I reached out for it just as I heard him screaming from the room beyond, then there was nothing but silence. I slowly opened the door and stepped into the unfamiliar, blackened room. As my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I could see row upon row of metal storage shelves with ordinary things like plastic crates, sheets of tarpaulin and paint cans on them - the whole place looked like an enlarged version of a janitor's closet. A pool of blood was beginning to extend out of the end of one of the aisles between the shelves and reaching toward my feet. I could hear a sniff and a low rumbling from the distant corner of the room. When I turned around, the door had been replaced by a blank section of wall.

 

[Colour Scientist]

I rarely remember my dreams for more than a few hours.

The only one that sticks with me is a dream I had when I was four or five where some guy ran up to me while I was outside of my house with my mom and shot me.

That's all that happened, it wasn't even traumatic, I've just always remembered it because it felt so real. Obviously I didn't feel the pain of being shot but I vividly remember how I felt stumbling backwards after the guy shot me and seeing him run away.
I must have watched a film or tv show that I shouldn't have.

 

[lacktheknack]

I've never had a "dream so visceral I thought it was real", but I DID have a very protracted nightmare that could have been a horror film.

Basically, I had spent the day before playing Gubble and Riven all day. In Gubble, you play a little alien in a spaceship unscrewing toxic "zymbots" from a dying planet using various garage tools. It's a stupid but brilliantly fun variation of PacMan, and you should play it. Riven is a surreal and beautiful sequel to Myst, there's a couple scenes where you can get shot and killed with a poison dart.

This combined into a terrible, terrible thing.

I dreamed that I was running around a series of surreal landscapes, trying to find the that were holding everything down, and removing them. The whole time, I was being pursued by a character from Riven with a poisonous dart gun, and if he shot and killed me, instead of waking up, I started over from the beginning again.

And it was HARD.

The reason I remember it decently well is because it took so LONG. I swear, I think I was trapped in that dream for what felt like twelve straight hours. So yeah... I might have survived the "Neverending Dream of Death" trope.

 

[JoJo]

I don't tend to really have many 'scary' dreams, well other than one when I was about five about people being run over by cars. That and I've had a couple of dreams where ghost babies suddenly jump out at me from nowhere and I wake up immediately.

I do have quite a few weird dreams though, like the time I died and got sent to purgatory, which resembled a medieval town. In the distance I could see paradise, a bright white building surrounded by a forest, unreachable over a wall. A couple of days back I dreamed I changed my middle name to 'Zod', no idea why. Also weird sex dreams that sometimes involve gender-bending and the like, but this isn't the place to be talking about those >.>

 

[Phasmal]

I rarely remember my dreams for more than a few hours.

The only one that sticks with me is a dream I had when I was four or five where some guy ran up to me while I was outside of my house with my mom and shot me.

That's all that happened, it wasn't even traumatic, I've just always remembered it because it felt so real. Obviously I didn't feel the pain of being shot but I vividly remember how I felt stumbling backwards after the guy shot me and seeing him run away.
I must have watched a film or tv show that I shouldn't have.

I remember once having a horridly vivid nightmare of being shot in the head, and I could feel blood running down my face and I was freaking the hell out. And then I woke up to see my sister pouring little capfuls of water onto my forehead.

As for me I pretty much only have one nightmare and it's that I can't unclench my jaw and my jaw gets tighter and tighter until my teeth shatter and fall out.
So that sucks.

Also usually when I talk about it there's a good chance I will have it again, so I hope you guys appreciate that. >.>

 

[Euryalus]

-snip-

-snip-

I had a friend who used to have dreams of getting shot all the time.

He claims that instead of waking up when he died, he would have the music and blood dripping from goldeneye happen. xD

It was odd, but knowing him, I bet it was true.

 

[OneCatch]

I can't remember exactly how it came up, but I was recently talking with my girlfriend about some nightmares I had when I was little and realised I had some crazy scary dreams sometimes.
TL;DR What have been some of the most messed up (or just scary) nightmares you guys have had?

I used to have bloody horrendous dreams as a teenager. Would wake up screaming or thrashing around a few times a week.

Bugs, machinery, chemicals, unpleasant individuals, paranormal crap, mild fantasy peril, the whole works.
And I lucid dream a lot as well, which you'd think would make things better. But my sub-conscious is a dick; instead of just simply waking up or actually being able to consciously change stuff there's just a little bastard voice narrating who'll realise that an arm wouldn't actually break like that, or that radiation poisoning wouldn't manifest in that way, and then *correct it*.
Quite perverse really!

I seem to have mostly grown out of it though - the past few years I've been fairly peaceful (only occasionally get something so vividly scary that it actually wakes me up).

EDIT: I also occasionally dream in third person, which is a weird experience

 

[Colour Scientist]

As for me I pretty much only have one nightmare and it's that I can't unclench my jaw and my jaw gets tighter and tighter until my teeth shatter and fall out.
So that sucks.

Also usually when I talk about it there's a good chance I will have it again, so I hope you guys appreciate that. >.>

That made me cringe!
Ugh...

I used to have a recurring dream where I was running from something but it felt like I was wading through water and I kept tripping, I couldn't see properly either.

It's the most stereotypical recurring dream ever.
I haven't had it for years though, at least not that I can recall.

 

[Sean Hollyman]

When I was a kid, Darth Maul from Star Wars Episode 1 gave me really horrible nightmares, I used to wake up crying.

And not really scary, but one of my primary school history teachers showed me a photo of Lindow Man one day when we were studying ancient people.

I'm not really sure why but back then it messed me up, I found it awful to look at. I used to see it in my sleep and wake up sweaty and had tears in my eyes, I guess I just found corpses terrifying.
.

 

[Idsertian]

Ah yes, nightmares. Not something I have very often, I must admit. However, the one that stuck with me from being a kid was this:

I was in my parent's back garden, in my pushchair (I was maybe 2/3 years old), with the rain cover down because it was cloudy. All of a sudden, this cartoon wolf wearing a tan trench coat appears and blows a raspberry at me, and his tongue goes through the rain cover.

No, I have no idea either, but it terrified me at the time.

 

[deathwing2000]

When I was 8 or so, i dreamt I was a pirate. I attacked a ship, filliped a cannon around, and blew the ship up from the inside, then jumped onto a small row boat, with a fat bearded old man. We talked in gibberish because it was a dream and I was 8, then the guy grabs me, pulls me down, and stabs me in the stomach, and I swear to god I felt the sword inside me, in my stomach. He had a fecked' up face, like something you'd see on the Crystal Cove creepypasta. Terrified me, feeling the pain in real life. It's less gory than most of the other stories here, but in a way, you mag agree it's pretty freaky.

 

[Frezzato]

snip

Water or liquid-related nightmares must be common to kids. A recurring nightmare for me took place in my old bunkbed when seawater would start filling the room. A giant great white shark would try and break in but it was too wide for the doorway so it would start thrashing about. He never got in but the water would always reach the ceiling.

Another semi-recurring nightmare had me being kidnapped by a serial killer. He would toss me into a burlap sack, tie it off, and then lock me in a vertically-oriented box that had a grate for a lid. He then locked that and would pour water through the top until the box was full. The only way for me to breathe was by smashing my face against the grating, struggling against the burlap sack. Then he would push the box off into a closet somewhere.

 

[Mossberg Shotty]

Luckily my brain filters out most of the more disturbing dreams I have, so they're hard to recall. But the most recent one I can remember isn't scary just really unpleasant.

I dreamed I was in a prison for some unspecified crime (see any elder scrolls game) and another inmate stabbed me in the eye with a sharpened rat bone. Whoever says you can't feel pain in dreams is a liar.

 

[username sucks]

I still get nightmares pretty often. Most of them are some kind of monster slowly torturing me to death while I am unable to scream, with help nearby but unable to hear me.

I also had a pretty nasty recurring nightmare last summer. It changed a bit after a few times as I started to recognize what was happening, bu never could I wake myself up. I'll just say how it went the first time.

I'm chilling in my room, then I hear the doorbell ring. I answer it, and see a guy with a ridiculously huge smile on his face, wearing a red coat (the colonial British kind) and carrying a briefcase.

He starts to whistle the intro to Bouree by Jethro Tull, and at this point I close the door and run inside, only to find the corpses of all of my friends on the ground. The whistling gets louder, I turn around and the Redcoat is right behind me. He picks me up effortlessly, shrugs off all my attempts at fighting, and makes me look at his face.

I see myself, staring back at me. The whistling stops, and I wake up.

 

[MysticSlayer]

When I was approximate 5-6, I had two wasp-related nightmares. One was "waking up" and seeing a wasp nest above my head. The other was "waking up" and seeing a giant (i.e. the size of a person) hornet landing on a table I had in my room. Both caused me to truly wake up and run to my parents' room, despite it being on the other side of the (relatively) large house and despite being afraid of the dark as a kid.

I also had one dream where I was stuck in the same room as a giant spider. Honestly, I've never understood the whole literary description of "feeling a murderous presence", but that dream offered the closest experience I'll probably ever have to one. It was almost like evil was radiating from the spider as it slowly came closer to attack me. Thankfully, I woke up before it could really attack me. Not long after, my mom came rushing in wondering what I was screaming about. I guess I was so scared I started screaming and woke up the entire house.

 

[Trude]

Don't get nightmares frequently any more and when they do occur, I'm fortunate enough to recognize them and force myself awake most of the time.
When young, they would often revolve around surreal interpretations of mundane things like friends, family and familiar locations. Nowadays, they're more Resident Evil than Silent Hill.

 

[Someone Depressing]

I mentioned one, and it actually inspired a fellow member to write a scene about it in a book/story he's writing. I feel oddly proud and also disgusted. But whatever.

I have pretty detailed dreams quite a lot (blame my constant consumption of dairy products) and they keep getting weirder and weirder, at the same rate my hairline's receeding, so it's hard to pick and choose any that were odd enough to deserve being written down.

One I had quite young was I was just going to school, it was a pretty normal day. The sun was shining (in Scotland), the birds were making beautiful noises (in Scotland), and people were having friendly conversations (in Scotland). Something was wrong. When I actually got to the school - and it seemed like forever - the adults looked like someone adapted H.P Lovecraft's work into Japanese necrophilia porn. I can't really go into detail because when I woke up I'd mostly forgotten about it. It wasn't actually the start of the dream either; the dream was pretty long, at least what I could remember.

Pretty much, the whole day went bye, and nobody else really cared that we were being taught by guro monsters that came from the most disturbed doujinshi artist's sexually frustrated mind. It was one of the worst dreams I've ever had.

 

[BobblyDrink]

Mine are pretty constant, unless it's been a good day then it's usually a nice dream. Aside from that though, they always tend to be pretty awful.

Most recent one I can remember is right after falling asleep, my eyes reopened to the sens of entrapment, metal cage around me. Could freely look around, but my movement was locked into place in a chair. Thrashing around for a while did nothing but rise the fear, increase the panic. Eventually a hint of green melding with yellow light slowly poured into the world, didn't make it better though. Just now was able to clearly see my hands and legs completely bound to the chair.

More time passes as I struggle around. A cold metal dish caps off the top of my head, no clue who placed it there, like it had a mind of it's own to seat itself there. The shadows from the bars of the cage quickly shift and turn a deeper black, my vision blurs and distorts as I feel myself both unable to control my movement but kept very firmly in place. Quickly passing as soon as it rushed, another jolt straight through me once more. Stronger, more defined. Opening my mouth to speak only lets out a hazed breath, the shock is never ending as my body tightens.

I feel disconnected from my body now, my eyes fall down to the ground. The vision is blurred beyond focus and the feeling is numb to all senses, but my teeth are gritted to where I fear I might bite through them.

Then I woke up with a long shaking jolt around. Not really as bad as previous dreams, but that was the most recent one I can recall with more detail than my usual: "Yeah, I feel like shit after that dream." sorta mentality.