Nightmares

Also, wtf is your background image?

The image on my phone was pretty scary, actually: it was a photo of a little Vietnamese girl in white-face makeup that I'd cameraphoned off a flyer seen in the LA metro. Since I'd snapped through the window, in half-light, at high speed, the image was significantly blurred, distorted and ghostly.

I have nightmares every single night. There are three very often recurring nightmares that I have. Or, well, they feel like nightmares.

Lately, every night I've been dreaming that I'm still in school, usually high school, and I'm years older than everyone else. I can't make the grades and I'm stuck as a senior in high school, usually, forever, and everyone's passing me on and leaving me behind, and the embarassment is just completely unbearable. When I have this dream, and it's the last dream I've had before waking, I usually wake up wondering if there's school that day or not, and whether or not I'm already late if there is. It's terrible.

Another one I've also had almost every night for about the last eight years, takes place at my childhood home (it's been eight years since I've lived there). I'm a child and running around playing with my sister in the backyard. We had a huge backyard, there was a picnic table, we had a good tree for climbing, a swingset/playset, a pool, lots of bushes and trees to play around in, and the yard just went back pretty far. My sister and I are having a great time. It's the early afternoon and we're playing and having a snack of cookies out there, while my mother and father are in taking their usual nap. It's so, so, so nice. (Every day there was this.)
Or, I dream about my childhood home and my old bedroom. I'm the age that I am now, and I'm back there for some reason. It just isn't the same at all, there's always just something different, but, I'm living there again and I'm still pretty happy about it, though.
Those are nice dreams. But, when I wake up and they were only dreams, and the last dreams I had before waking, I just want to cry.

The last one I've had for a few years, almost every night. It involves my father. He died a few years ago from a brain tumor. We found out that he was going to die four-and-a-half months before he did. So, I spent four-and-a-half months watching my father deteriorate as a living man. I spent four-and-a-half months watching him die. In the nightmare I've had since he's died, I'm back in those months. Somehow he beats the tumor and lives, but, his mental health still completely deteriorates... Or, less often, I'm back to those months again, and my father beats the tumor, and everything's okay. We're the family that we always were before. If these are the last dreams I've had before waking, I wake up from these dreams thinking that my father is still alive and I'm wondering where he is, but then I remember, and I just feel completely empty inside.

Every night. Oh, man.

I have this dream at least once a month.

i'm sorry that was so personal. i totally didn't think at all about what i was sharing with you guys. i was just trying to contribute to the thread, is all... so, maybe nevermind, or this doesn't have to be awkward or anything because of that post. people that know me irl know i have a knack for saying too much, so...

sweet dreams.

the past few days i've had some nightmares, but nothing too heavy. last night i dreamt that i had a lego village set up in my bedroom, with a lego castle at one end.
So far so good.
Suddenly all the little lego men started coming to life and began to kick the shit out of each other.
If that wasn't freaky enough an army of ants swarmed my walls and then i woke up.

I had the worst nightmare I've ever had last night. I was being sought by the guys from The Sopranos who wanted to kill me because I'd done something which was unspecified. And I got the impression somehow that they didn;t want to just killed me but torture me first for some reason. I was in a limo at one point and met my brother (who didn't look like me real brother) wandering around the road in a coat which was made of clear plastic. At another point I was in a strange hotel which had tiny rooms about the size of a mini-sub. At another time I was just about to give up because they seemed to be running at me at superhuman speed but then suddenly I found myself in a church and they actually came in the church and started talking to me but for some reason didn't figure it was me. The I hid up in the rafters of the church when they came back. It went on and on and on. I woke up three times and every time I went back to sleep the dream kicked back in. I know it might sound funny being chased by TV characters but it was absolutely terrifying.

Still recovering from bad sleep = poor typing skills.

I woke up the other night cause our dog Lucy has interesting bowelmovements. My husband says it's her breathing. Whatever it was she did, I got majorly creeped out, waking up thinking that there was a BEAST inside our room. It's also due to the fact I'm in my last trimester of my pregnancy so I sleep very lightly and tend to wake up easily.

I once dreamt that I'd killed somebody that I know. That was quite scary.

How did you kill him/her?

on saturday night i dreamed i had a baby, which if it happened irl would pretty much be a nightmare. it was a girl, v quiet and called sarah. there was also some big heroic quest adventure i was involved in and this baby turning up in the middle of it all was inconvenient. i looked at dream interpretation on teh interwebs and it said baby = warmth, innocence and new beginnings, and that maybe i am trying to preserve my own vulnerability. ???

having some serious nightmares this week, that type where everytime you close your eyes they resume again. last night i had a sort of horror punchline sequence which went on for about 30 mins after the nightmare. eg anytime i'd close my eyes some innocuous image would lead to a big horrible reveal connected to nightmare. i couldn't make it stop so i had to get up for 10 mins. then finally got back to sleep.

there can be no doubt this is cos i took e at the weekend for first time in about a year.

I had what might be the ultimate existentialist nightmare at the weekend. I had got into a lift at the top of a building intending to go down, but when I pressed the button it went up. I looked around but couldn't see any other buttons and I realised I was in one of those lifts that travel round in an endless loop. I also realised you're really not meant to stay in those lifts when they go over the top and I started to panic. The lift started to go down and I saw there was a peg attached to the wall, inside the lift but it stayed stationary relative to the shaft so it should have stopped the lift as it hit up against the roof. Instead it tore right through the roof and the lift carried on going down, but now the floor stayed stationary, in effect rising up as the lift went down. I knew with certainty and terror that the floor was going to crush me against the ceiling and I thought, in the words of Arthur Dent, "This is it, I'm going to die". And so I did, painlessly, but I immediately realised I appeared to still be in the lift - I could see the fake wood effect walls, I could feel my limbs, but I was completely paralysed and I suddenly knew with equal certainty and even more terror that I would be frozen in this limbo, conscious but unable to move or change my situation in any way, for all of eternity. Somehow, fortunately, the sheer horror of this scenario was enough to propel me like a rocket out of the dream and I woke up gasping.

Anyone have advice on reducing the frequency of nightmares? When they're bad I'll wake up utterly ruined and fall back into the same dream continuity wise. Hard to shake it as a bad dream can leave you exhausted and lull you back to sleep. Stress and dietary concerns could play a factor, any helpful hints or am I s.o.l.?

i had a nightmare the other day which has really messed with my waking life, ever since. it was very long and very vivid, and as soon as it started i remembered and knew the place i was in. i had a very similar nightmare several years ago but this was my first return visit and i hope my last. it is a very large, enclosed indoor space. although the setting is not an airport terminal, it's similar in two ways: it has a very similar audio ambience to the sounds at the beginning of radiohead's "A Reminder", and it's a liminal space where people are almost always walking or traveling somewhere else, or waiting. escalators, lifts, hallways, but all with very high ceilings. there is also a kind of common ground area with many hundreds of people, similar to the soccer fields at night just south of prospect park with lots of people milling around, but not sports themed. everyone there seems to be waiting to move again, or waiting to meet someone.

it feels like a resort. everything is "fancy". like i mentioned, the ceilings are tall, and everything is very clean and spacious and organized. each time i've been there, it's gradually revealed to be a menacing place. the workers there are watching. they help you and they guide you along, and are very professional. everything seems fine until you want to leave. there is always another step and it seems wrong that you want to leave. you always have to go somewhere else first before it's possible, and then you go there and there are very good reasons why you have to go somewhere else first. then traveling again, workers looking at you. that kind of thing.

i rarely dream about real people that i know. they're almost always just anonymous people, like most of the hundreds of people in this place. but i saw a recent ex in there, and she wasn't happy with me at all. she seemed surprised and disappointed that i was there at all. and then, someone i knew 20 years ago and haven't thought of since for a single second, a hotshot handsome young musician who went on to be in well known bands for a minute. he also seemed irritated that i was there. then everyone seemed disappointed and irritated.

the worst part was at the end. it was becoming apparent that i didn't belong there but that i wasn't allowed to leave, and the annoyance was starting to turn to anger, on the parts of the workers. i was woken up irl by pounding on the door at about 3am, which was the friends of my asshole neighbor who are incapable of doing anything at all unless it's at maximum volume and disruptive. they like to watch sports and yell woo. they were pounding on his door but it sounded like it was mine, and it just kind of ripped my nerves out. i didn't sleep the rest of the night and was unable to think about much else, and then i went to a party where i was the only solo person in a gathering of people my age who all had partners and children, or just a partner. i was trying so hard to just be normal and not feel out of place but it was excruciating. then i went on a blind online date and the other person had a lot of trauma, some really tragic things, fentanyl and physical abuse, a stalker. i ended up laying on the bed next to her all night until about 5 am, talking. it was kind of an unforgettable night but also i just can't sleep on a normal schedule at all. i slept in until 2pm and i'm doing my best to just make it to 10pm and go to bed like a normal person tonight.

this is my body and brain's response to being (almost entirely) sober this month

This all sounds very relatable and familiar in terms of dreams I have: Big liminal spaces filled with anonymous people and the occasional person I haven't seen or thought about for several years, and this sense that while everything is technically fine moving away from this space involves an extremely complicated number of steps. I often dream, for example, about being stuck at an airport or train station, keen or excited to get somewhere, but never able to get there for some obscure administrative reason. I also often have dreams about being on a train, often not inside the train but clinging to the side of it somehow as it takes me against my will to destination stops I don't recognise before whisking me off again.