I have a few:
- I was in my house at night and got scared, so I went to go get my parents. Their dream bedroom was huge, though, and almost pitch-black, so all I could see was a bit of carpet directly underneath and around me. The carpet swarmed with fist-sized bugs that skittered around and over my feet.
- I was on a beach with my brother, looking at him while he faced me. My brother's face was grotesquely distorted, elongated and stretched to one side. His eye socket on that side took up a good portion of his face, and it was stuffed with what must have been dozens of regular-sized eyeballs.
- I was trapped with my family in a big outdoor area surrounded by concrete walls, with the ground covered with gravel and trash. We were all sitting together on a long bench atop a trash pile, and we couldn't leave the bench because we were being menaced by an animate blue plastic tarp that wanted eat us and the bench was - somehow - the only safe place. The tarp fluttered in front of us, then reared up onto one edge and struck at us like a cobra, accompanied by a sound like duct tape being violently torn off of something. The bench protected us, so we were unharmed, but we were all very distressed and afraid.
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tash from the last battle, the lion the witch and the wardrobe series. terrified me to the point of hysterics.he would pick me up and carry me away for being a sinner.
Yeah that guy scared me too. Funny growing up how I finally realized that Calormen was a representation of Islam and the Middle East. There's some racist stuff in there that I was kind of aware of at the time but it became more clear as I grew older.
I finally realized that Calormen was a representation of Islam and the Middle East
...WHAT? makes sense but holy shit ive never thought of that!
Yep there's a reason why fascists grab onto fantasy narratives especially LOTR which is a story about the Men of the West fighting the brown people from the other continents in the East
tolkin and cs lewis were friends, bigot friends lol. but when i was a kid o thought they represented atheist/ satanist. now that i think about it i didnt know what islam/ Muslim people were till middle school.
It looks like one of those demons of Tzeentch that exist to be fried by meltagun
I had a recurring dream where my family all had hockey masks on and my mom would bring a sandwich that was put through a metal door with a slot in the middle where the sliding glass door to the porch was in RL. There were also a plumber and fairy that were like my companions but the plumber would end up with a hockey mask sometimes too. There was also werewolves sometimes I think?
I had a dream where I was in the countryside in a Steve Irwin like get-up (he was big at the time) chasing some Monarch butterflies. It's peaceful, sunny, beautiful. I'm having a blast. I hyperfocus on the butterflies, happy as can be. Then I fall off a cliff I didn't notice, get absolutely terrified I'm going to die and then have one of those jolt-awake moments. I really hate my brain sometimes.
I slept on like a raised single bed that had skirting around the base, big enough for a kid to crouch underneath. I had a recurring dream of rolling off my bed, then being paralysed lying down on the floor as something underneath the bed growled and slowly came towards me, and only being able to see the skirting ripple with its breath. Would always wake up before I saw the beast though.
Also another series of family-turning-into-vampire nightmares after watching the Treehouse of Horror ep where they all turn into vampires. Fancy that.
Pretty low stakes, but the awareness that you have that they're recurring creates that accreting layer of trepidation before you sleep. Fortunately they only lasted about a year a piece.
Also another series of family-turning-into-vampire nightmares after watching the Treehouse of Horror ep where they all turn into vampires.
Yeah, as a kid, even campy horror can mess with you. I once had a nightmare inspired by, of all things, Ernest Scared Stupid.
I can't remember much, but my parents were killed and the bush next to my house was set on fire.
a mountain sized boulder crushing me, always occurs every once in a while.
When I was 6, I had a dream where a giant gargoyle thing chased me through my school
I got chased around pretty good, but the thing that really bothered me was just how alone I was
No matter how hard I screamed, no matter what doors I pounded on or opened, there was nobody but me and the monster
I remember waking up screaming at the top of my lungs and crying for a while, until my dad managed to get me to calm down by telling me that it if i prayed for it, God would help me
The thing that really makes it stick into my head though, was the fact that I remember being utterly terrified of going back to sleep, because that meant I might get chased again
Which, I did, pretty much immediately after I fell back asleep
No, praying didn't help
The only one not related to a real event can only be described as Silent Hill meets rugby inside a candlelit gymnasium.
My imagination is running wild trying to put together exactly what that actually looked like.
I had a whole childhood nightmare pantheon of recurring characters, including:
- Stanley the Steam Engine
- The Great Pooper Snake
- Ooga and Booga
And probably others I've forgotten.
Stanley the Steam Engine was essentially a typical steam engine with a single big light on the front. It could travel off track and would randomly appear in my neighborhood with bloodlust, and one would have to avoid being shone on by its front lamp to be spared. It had a loud, piercing whistle that could be heard echoing for many miles, sounding almost like a ghastly scream. I don't quite remember if it could talk, but I certainly remember that it could take one's speech away -- any time one would attempt to speak in its presence, not a single noise would come out, and a tombstone would spontaneously appear directly afront oneself.
Source: the historical rail line in my hometown, the collection of somewhat worn video cassettes about trains that my family owned, maybe also the sleepover episode of Disney's The Replacements (though I think I only saw that later). I think one of the train video cassettes actually had an identical train also called "Stanley the Steam Engine".
The Great Pooper Snake was a giant felt hand puppet that was some sort of reptile or dragon, not necessarily a snake though that's what I called it. It would abduct me from the comfort of my home while no-one was looking, and once it had taken me to a secluded place, it would "eat me up and poop me out".
Source: identical to a felt hand puppet from a Baby Einstein video cassette.
Ooga and Booga were C-3PO and R2-D2 but with the faces of my preschool teachers. They were so called because the only words they could say were "OOGA BOOGA", in unison in a weird autotune-vocoder-esque monotone voice. I don't know what they actually did aside from being slightly creepy, but they lived in the world under my bed, which could only be accessed by rolling into the crack between the bed and the wall.
Source: The falling into the crack part might've been inspired by Disney's Alice in Wonderland. Otherwise, inspirations are obvious.
The one that sticks with me was a kind of randomisation of size perception. An alarm clock, the red LCD numbers were as large as a bus, but the rest of it was still small. It was so far away, but I could reach it with my short arms, and the red numbers totally filled my vision even though I could easily see the rest of the room. Every part of a thing disagreed with the rest of it.
Why it sticks with me is that this distortion persisted for a time after I awoke. I was still perfectly capable of moving around in my dark house on muscle memory, but everything familiar was addled. I ran downstairs and outside and huddled in the dark until things stabilised. Not quite a scary nightmare, as it wasn't a threat - more like it wasn't a space I could exist in.
Thinking back now it reminds me somewhat of the perceptual switching I encounter with psilocybin, just more chaotic.
I have one. I was in a backyard, don't remember exactly what I was doing, but I picked up a worm with huge blades on either end of its body. As I held it, it curled around one of my fingers, and sliced it off. Then I woke up.
I had a recurring one that was probably inspired by a big toy shed we had at kindergarten, but in the dream there were long corridors attached where there were of course various monsters chasing me around. At one specific place in the corridors I would always get stuck mid-air while running, struggle for a while, and then wake up.
The Skinless Man. A man without any skin would appear in my dreams and stalk me.
