| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Excluding the dream that terrify you but can't actually happen and the death/injury/etc. of your post post birth ____*, what is the worst nightmare you've had?
*However you want to classify your offspring.
I have a hard time remembering nightmares or "bad dreams". I'm a lucid dreamer and when the going gets bad I wake myself up.
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
Don't usually remember my dreams. But the last one I do remember having was pretty bad. I worked a full night at work, and it felt like it. Then my alarm in the real world went off and I had to go to work. Felt like I had to work back-to-back 8 hour shifts.
I remember most of my dreams. In fact, I sometimes dread dreaming, not because of nightmares, but because in the dreams my life is often idyllic or I'm reliving some past happy occasion (with a bit of weirdness thrown in. They ARE dreams, after all.. lol) and I'm sad upon waking.
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
Don't usually remember my dreams. But the last one I do remember having was pretty bad. I worked a full night at work, and it felt like it. Then my alarm in the real world went off and I had to go to work. Felt like I had to work back-to-back 8 hour shifts.
Yeah, i've had that dream. I even had a dream where I was looking at the clock waiting to go to work.
I imagine so. Ew.
I'm a lucid dreamer as well, but things get bad with sleep paralysis because the dream keeps going while you're awake :P
Kind of terrifying really, laying in your bed covered in fire ants and hornets all around and not being able to move at all.
Ouch indeed.
I don't lucid dream as much as I used to, but I do get sleep paralysis from time to time. Way scarier than any nightmare.
I had a 15-year marriage.
What's that?
Oh, yeah, it does count!
Oh snap.
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
I really did once have that movie-trope nightmare where you think you wake up in bed from a nightmare, but you're actually still dreaming.
It's pretty terrifying to wake up from a nightmare about a very bad day at work, get out of bed to go to the bathroom, and have the facehugger from Alien jump out of the toilet at your face.
*THEN* you really wake up.
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
...or do you?
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
Not the worst dream I've ever had, nor entirely mundane, but many years ago, I had a memorable one shortly after seeing Phantasm II, remembering the voiceover line (slightly paraphrased due to the long time since seeing it:
"It wasn't hard to follow the Tall Man's trail. Everywhere he'd been, the townspeople had been turned into zombies.".
Well, in the dream, I was in a similar situation, but the line was:
"It wasn't hard to follow the Tall Man's trail. Everywhere he'd been, the townspeople had been turned into used car salesmen.".
Hm. Interesting question.
The two things you eliminate pretty much eliminate the majority of "realistic" nightmares I have - add in my significant loved ones, though, in addition to my children. That said, such things are... extremely rare.
For whatever reason when I do have a terrifying dream, it usually is extremely "not real" in the sense that, although I'm rather convinced of it while I'm asleep, it's simply not a possibility in the real world.
That mostly leaves the extremely tense and stressful dreams - not the ones that make me frightened or fearful, but leave me exhausted, tense, or stressed upon waking. Those include the one you wake up from only to find you're in a dream (though the recursive moment is not as... clean as it is in films; "dream logic" is a thing, and your mind can generate nonsense sometimes, while telling you it's entirely normal in your sleep), ones where I was someone else and their life was stressful (so not something that could happen to me, but could to someone else), or those where I've for some reason relived the last day or week or whatever of these or stress filled moments - or projected similar moments into dreams.
I'd say that most of my dreams are probably banal, but a lot of them deal with interesting stories that aren't really nightmares. Last night, for instance, I dreamt of a guy who was running from a professional killer. The killer wasn't actually trying to kill him, though - he was trying to save his life from the people who wanted him dead. Being mute did t really help said killer communicate that well, though. See? Dramatic irony dream, instead of nightmare. Stressful a bit, I guess, frustrating they couldn't talk, but mostly interesting to see where it goes. In the game* dream target dude had a big blotch of catsup on his white shirt. He eventually gets to his house to change, but gets no further than grabbing a new shirt before killer guy shows up and he runs. I woke up around there. A lot of stuff had happened before that, but can be summarized as: killer hired to kill him, realized he didn't want to kill people (especially not family people), has change of heart, but in doing so is revealed to target dude (who was recently threatened). Killer decides to help, but target is terrified, and killer has didficulty explaining self - gets into a few fights with other killers sent to murder innocents.
Not exactly the topic, but that sort of thing is what the majority of my interesting non-banal dreams are like (that I remember). At least when they make sense. Plenty have no coherent narrative - they seem to try to, but instead are unrelated events with a central "cast" (some of whom sometimes morph scene to scene; makes total sense while I'm asleep - not while I'm awake; some of whom are more consistent; many of whom are "filled in" by people I know, whether or not the people I know have any matching personality element to the character in the dream), and even each event is weird at best - perhaps they have to hedge maze in order to learn the ancient secrets of cheese wheel the snicker doodle and this is vitally important to their cause of trombone playing in the background of the scene where they're in the hedge maze. After success or failure they must move on to inspecting pocket lint (it looks like grapes) found in pillow cases produced like I Love Lucy chocolate factory episode, but they have to throw them at passing nerf gun employees (who are equipped with ice skates to avoid their those) instead of eating them; those pillow cases sure are tasty, though, like motor oil (chocolate milk). After that, they... and so on. In scene one the "protagonist" would be some generic anime guy I'd seen in... a live action tv show, of course (I don't know either), I'd be filling in for the sidekick (though I would not identify with "me" - I'd only recognize myself later when Insaw my face), while my wife might be hero's girlfriends' best friend (and the deuteroprotagonist). In scene two, it becomes all about the former hero's girlfriend's little brother, and my wife's character was suddenly "always" played by this guy I know and was friend with the new protagonist, and the old protagonist is now someone from Batman Beyond and/or Static Shock, and "my" character becomes more prominent (up until the next even shift at which point it morphs into a non-me dog...); and so on it goes. I never notice the inconsistencies until I wake up.
And now that I'm rrrrrreeeeaaaaallllllyyyyyyy off topic... Oh, look a distraction!
*smoke bomb, coughs until it goes away, then runs away*
* Gotta admit I don't know whether that mistake was made by autocorrect or just plain me. I'm still partially asleep.
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
Quite a few years ago, I dreamed that I was walking home across a soccer field where a big lawnmower was working. The lawnmower blade hit a sprinkler, broke off, flew across the field and cut my foot off. The whole thing didn't feel at all like a dream - it hurt just like I'd imagine it would hurt, there was no sense of unreality at all. After a minute or so laying there screaming in the dream trying to stop the blood spraying from my leg, in real life my wife woke me up.
I hadn't been screaming, but I had been making some sort of noise. I was also shaking, covered in sweat, dizzy, sort of sick to my stomach, pretty much like I'd be if I were seriously injured in real life. I was worried I'd throw up, staggered towards the bathroom, and passed out before I made it through the door. My head bounced off of the sink as I fell, and my face slammed onto the bathroom scale on the floor- my forehead and cheek had scrapes shaped like the tread of the scale for days afterwards.
| 3 people marked this as a favorite. |
I think the worst "mundane" nightmare was a bunch of years ago, when I was the front-of-house manager at an IT support center. My office had a window that looked over the walk-in center. It was positioned in such a way that, if the doors were open, I could see down the corridor that led to it.
Anyway, in my dream, I was writing my weekly status report, when I looked up from my computer and saw two uniformed police officers walking down the corridor to my office, along with the pastor of my church, all with grim expressions. I could see that my pastor had been crying. I just knew something terrible had happened to my wife and/or very young daughter and they were coming to tell me. I drew the blinds to my window and opened the door to my office. The cop said, "Mr. Haladir... I have some bad news..."
I felt the bottom drop out of my world.
And then I woke up.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Here's a new one. A never-ending stream of telemarketers.
That's not technically a nightmare -- I wish I had gotten Call Waiting years before I actually did . . . .
* * * * * * * *
Not the worst nightmares I have had, but if you want really mundane ones, I seem to have a fair profusion of dreams in which something really bad happens to the bathroom (or at least the toilet) wherever I am staying, making a horrible mess to which my clothes often fall victim. Very often happens when I have to go to the bathroom really bad . . . .
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
I had a horrible one the other night that Donald Trump was elected President of the United States.
I'm still hoping to wake up from that one.