Your most memorable nightmares?

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Galumph_Triumph

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My book is about nightmares, and I'm always curious about other peoples' bad dreams. What are some of your most memorable/frightening ones?

A few years ago I had a nightmare that has always stuck with me. A swarm of wasp-chameleon creatures descended upon my town. They were about as big as your fist, and were basically chameleons with wasp-wings and stingers. They would affix themselves to the back of a person's head, stick their stinger into her neck/spine, and henceforth control their mind so long as they were attached. People took on cryptic British accents (Children of the Corn-style?) and would refer to their hideous overlords as "little sweeties."

That dream scared the absolute all-shit out of me.
 

Cereus

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Being attacked by a woman wearing a dress with long drape-y sleeves. The opening of her sleeves were black-hole-like vacuums.
 

Jamesaritchie

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I still remember my first nightmare. I was seven, and talked my grownups into letting me stay up and watch the original Frankenstein. It scared me spitless. When I went to sleep, I dreaded I built a bomb shelter to keep the monster out. I nailed the door shut from the inside, and when I finished I turned around, and Frankenstein's monster was standing right behind me, nailed inside the bomb shelter with me I woke up screaming.
 

Cyia

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When I was a kid, I loved horror movies, but once a year, it was like all of those movies purged out of my brain in one massive jumbled nightmare.

Two standouts that I can remember were the dream that came in levels, where I was literally aware of the shift between dream-scapes, and then this one where I was in a store and no one had a face because all of their faces were on T-shirts. If you wiped your face on something, it would come off.

The only other thing I'd mention is recurrent bouts of sleep paralysis, where I'd be awake and aware, but unable to move. Worse than actual nightmares.
 

Pike

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I dreamt one night that a pair of angels came to me. They grabbed an arm each and started to pull me skyward. I fought and kicked because I wasn't ready to go but they wouldn't let go. We drew higher to a bright light which made me fight harder until I woke up tangled in my sheets and blankets. Wouldn't consider a "scary" nightmare but it freaked my out something fierce!
 

Tazlima

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I had one when I was little that, even now, makes me cringe.

I was on a playground with a bunch of other kids when we were attacked by a monster that was vaguely humanoid-looking, but formed of geometrical shapes, almost like building blocks. Its torso was a large, empty, clear cylinder (that part is important).

It would grab a kid and consume it by biting it into large chunks which it then swallowed whole, so while I'm perched on top of the monkey bars trying to keep out of its reach and find a way to escape, I had to watch that clear torso slowly fill up with a slurry of my friends' assorted bloodied body parts.
 
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Greene_Hesperide1990

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I think the one nightmare I can recall is one where I was in my grandparents house in the Poconos trying to run from some demon, it cornered my in their guest bedroom and covered my mouth so I couldn't scream. I think I was like in grade school at the time. It freaked the heck out of me!
 

layzerphish

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I remember I was really young and I had a dream about my twin brother getting stitches. After receiving them, he began acting strange and was almost like an 'evil' version of himself if you will. He had weird black eyes and was standing in the back yard of our farm beside the swing set doing nothing, just standing. I begged him to stop and be normal again, but he just stood there, evil.
Not overly terrifying, but I was like 6 or 7 at the time and it was the only dream I have ever had that affected me that much even after waking, and the only dream I remember that detailed to this day.
 

Galumph_Triumph

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these are all really awesome. the worst nightmare i ever had is actually the one i turned into my first novel. basically, a demon came to my house and broke in. He sat with me over the course of a week, trying to have conversations with me about my shortcomings, my failures, etc. He tried to convince me to take my own life. I put a gun in my mouth and pulled the trigger and woke up.


the book ends differently, because i wrote it after deeply considering what the dream meant.
 

Rhoda Nightingale

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One really random one I had was this: I was wearing Smurf shoes. Y'know, big white floppy puffy marshmallow shoes. And because they were "Smurf" shoes, they were animated, even though the rest of me wasn't. And also because they were animated, they disintegrated once they got wet. As in, my feet, inside the shoes, started to melt. That's it--that's the whole dream. My feet and my Smurf shoes melting. I can't explain it, but it was horrifying. Possibly this was shortly after I saw Who Framed Roger Rabbit? I had nightmares about The Dip for YEARS.
 

WriterDude

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One was a waking dream as I was just nodding off but looking at the open bedroom door. Slowly, a face appeared, an evil face with piercing eyes, but not real, drawn on to a paper plate attached to a 30cm ruler. It peered round the edge and I jumped out of bed when I realised the danger. I was the only person in the house. Very real.

Another was of a foggy afternoon strolling through a peaceful graveyard. When I noticed a creepy cowled figure shifting silently between tombstones and began to follow it. It tried to throw me off but I stuck with it. Eventually I began to shout after it, instructing it stop. And it did stop and it turned to face me. It's face terrifying and I began running in reverse as this thing gained, unblinking, on me. I felt it's breath on my face when I woke myself up with my own cries.

I put both of these in my stories.
 

Earthling

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One from childhood. I'd gone to some kind of summer camp and all the kids had to stand in a row while the leader introduced himself. He was a cannibal who informed us he'd eat us one by one. The really horrific thing about it was when he stood in front of me and shouted, I could see and smell bits of human flesh between his teeth.

I remember waking up and thinking "I need to write that story" but I never did.
 

tiggs

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I had one earlier this week where a serial killer would carve its victims' hearts into the shape of a star and mail them to their next intended victim.

I say "its", because I never saw it. Just the aftermath - and the package I received in the mail.
 

Albedo

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Being chased by a sentient fire tornado up a dirt road through a forest. It was no use hiding, because it could see me through solid rock. And as soon as I reached the top of the hill and safety, I'd be teleported back to the bottom again.
 

Fruitbat

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When I was five, I dreamed that my mom had a baby and it was chopped up and put in a big glass jar on the kitchen counter.

The next day, my mother gave me a thick, warm ham sandwich for lunch. I couldn't stop crying and wouldn't eat it because the ham looked like chopped up baby. I remember my mother looked confused and said, "What baby?" but I couldn't explain it right.

I may have heard what "abortion" meant from the neighborhood teenage girls, since that's where I heard all sorts of other fascinating facts. I still cringe when people are eager to explain adult things to little kids.
 
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Synonym

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The most common one, and reoccurring, is an audible dream. I hear one of my grown kids calling out 'Mom' as clear as day. I wake up immediately, ready for a disaster.

It usually takes an hour or so to get back to sleep. (Most of it spent trying to decide if I should call to see if there really is something going on.)
 

ShaunHorton

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So, if any of you remember the old He-Man action figures from the 80's, you might remember Skeletor had this big robotic spider you could get that would actually "walk" along the floor. I wanted it, but never got it, although somehow I ended up with a poster of it. I didn't really have any room on my bedroom walls to put it, so I hung it up in the back of the closet, which doesn't make sense thinking back because it was behind the clothes so I couldn't see it.

Anyway, while the poster was up, I had a recurring night terror about walking up in the middle of the night and going to get a glass of water. As I stepped into the hall from my room, I could see the moonlight shining into the hallway from the kitchen window. I would stand there and watch, and after a minute or so, I would see the shadow of the robotic spider slowly start to crawl across the moonlight. It would get bigger with each step it took, and I could tell from the shadow that it was getting closer, even though it never actually rounded the corner and into the hallway.

I woke up, sitting up in bed with my mom holding me, rocking back and forth with all the lights in the house on. Totally freaked her out. She said I'd been screaming like I was getting murdered for at least ten minutes straight.

Dunno how, but she made the connection with the closet and took the poster down and threw it away. That nightmare stopped pretty much as soon as she did that.
 

Adniel Lenal

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Have any of you ever seen the movie Gremlins? I enjoyed that movie when I was young. Strangely enough one of my most memorable nightmares was me and my best friend running away from a eight foot tall gremlin. It ate me whole and it said I tasted good. That was a very odd experience to have least to say. Still love watching though. ;)
 

Irish Whiskey

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The scariest dream I can remember came to me after visiting my father in Las Vegas. In the dream, I remember walking the suburbs with my neighborhood friends and finding a very nice Las Vegas-style home with its door slightly ajar. I remember my friends daring me to go inside. When I got there, a woman was literally standing just beyond the door in the entryway. That was bad enough, but she looked like Scotia from Lands of Lore in normal clothes. Hair, wrinkled face, huge nose all just like her. And she had huge eyes, all bloodshot and just staring me down. It was awful. I remember she grabbed my arm and dragged me into her kitchen. And this is where it got weird.

She sat me down at a table, sat herself opposite of me. Between us was an old corded telephone. She put her hand on it and very slowly... told me to call 911 and turn myself in for trespassing.

The dream dragged on with her being very insistent. I don't remember if I actually did call before I woke up, but all in all the woman was as unpleasant in demeanor as she was in appearance.
 

engmajor2005

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I once had a dream that two of my friends and I went out into the woods to explore the abandoned house of a demented toy maker. The toys--of course--were possessed and wanted to kill us.

It's the only time I've actually drawn inspiration for a short story from a dream.
 

Leeland

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When I was a kid I had a dream that two men kidnapped me from my grandparents' house at night. They threw me into the back of their car and started speeding down the steep hill of my grandparents' driveway as I tried to escape. I don't remember many details but I still remember what the men in my dream looked like. I still get scared leaving my grandparents' house at night.

I also had a nightmare that my family and I were being carried out of our house by Secret Service/Men In Black type guys. Any time I tried to get away they would tickle me (doesn't sound scary, but I have a phobia of being touched without permission, people controlling me with touch, losing control of my bodily autonomy, etc., and as a kid tickling was kind of the main source of that). Additionally, I was going through a phase where I was constantly convinced I was going gp be killed by a poisonous spider, and I distinctly remember brown recluses hanging off all of our door frames as we were carried out.
 

JSPembroke

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Scary, then real scary

Maybe the dream I had as a teenager, which was a combination of Jaws and the cityscape-warping of Inception. The beach, port, and dunes kept curling into the sky in an attempt to dump me in the water where a number of hungry sharks lay waiting. I remember that in detail to this day, some twenty years later.

That was conventionally scary. Around the same time, I had one that was more feasible. I dreamt that I had failed a test in high school, which caused me to lose my college scholarship, which lead to my parents fighting and them getting a divorce over the financial pressure, and my friends ostracizing me for causing my family disintegration. It seemed all too real and I woke up screaming from that one.
 

Chris P

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My most memorable is that I woke up from sleeping on the couch (I wasn't sleeping on the couch in real life, just in the dream). It was dark and like a snowy TV channel, but I could see a person lying under the coffee table. I called to him a couple times: "Hey! Who are you! What are you doing here?!?" He lay still for a few seconds they slowly crawled out and pointed a gun at me. I tried to yell for him to drop the gun but he kept pointing it and getting up. My girlfriend woke me up because I was making sounds in my sleep.

My nightmares are usually along these lines. Someone with evil intent is where I am not expecting them to be and totally in control of the situation.
 
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