Now, what is a nightmare exactly? We all have them, some just don't pay attention enough to remember. They're scenes from your other life. Think about it this way... You live in two worlds. The waking life and subconscious life. In the latter, you switch roles all the time but everything that has happened in that world exists still in that world, which means you remember the dreams of your past. When I was 15 I studied dreams. Lucid, premonitory, ordinary, telepathic and nightmare. Those are the types of dreams that exist. The other day my friend and I decided to set up cameras in the room so it could record us waking up from nightmares. I guess my friend are too much fish before he slept so he woke up mumbling "music doesn't work sometimes." I just knocked him silly after that. And the other night I had a terrifying nightmare. I dreamed that I had this condition that makes me fear certain things. I was playing GTA when I saw Zelda (from pet sematary) walking around in the game. I tried to ignore her but my brother turned on da introduction by bone thugs n harmony and started tickling me and I couldn't control anything. I just had this ugly, terrified feeling of being tickled and attacked before I woke up screaming.. What are your thoughts on this?
I'm pretty sure I used to have nightmares about Zelda from Pet Sematary, too! That chick was creepy as all get-out. Alternate world? I don't know about that. I don't know how I feel about the idea that me eating spicy chicken wings right before bed in this world means I get crucified on an electric cross by an insane doomsday cult in the other.
Yeah Zelda is a terrifying girl.. And the other night I had fish seconds before going to bed. I dreamed that it showed a picture of a mother and daughter both with this weird look to them and they were kind of going through each other like some progressive band would do in a magazine. Her name was stelline lol.
I had no idea that eating fish before bed would give you nightmares. Looks like I'm experimenting with some sardines tonight.
I used to live in a room with three people (me and two others). One of them really liked burning mugwort, which I liked because it smelled good and gave me interesting dreams. But the other room mate had intense, horrifying nightmares every time mugwort was burned. I mean, every, single, time. These nightmares ruined his day. I wish there was some research on this.
I don't think dreams are alternate worlds. But I do think anxious people are prone to nightmares. I've only ever had one lucid dream, and it was an accident. It was the most horrifying experience of my life. Most people talk so fondly of this practice, but fondness is not at all what I experienced. I kept trying to wake up, and couldn't. I thought that I would, but then I'd realize shortly that I was still dreaming. I honestly thought I'd spend the rest of my life on loop in that dream, since I couldn't force myself to wake up. God, I wonder if that's what some people in comas experience. How awful. I've also experienced sleep paralysis, which wasn't as awful as people make it out to be. I woke up to see a clown hovering over my bed, and was unable to move. I watched as it slowly floated backwards out of the room. Thankfully, logic happened to take precedence over fear in my groggy state, and I simply thought to myself, "I can't move. But this also can't be real." And that's when the clown left. It wasn't until I awoke the next day that I realized how scared I should have been.
Funny. I was just researching this the other day. Apparently nightmares are scary dreams you wake up from immediately, while 'bad dreams' are the unhappy kind that you stick with, and can leave you with an uncomfortable or sad feeling the next day. I always thought the two were interchangeable, but apparently not.
That's interesting, actually. I used to have this weird dream when I was a teenager -- not sure if you could class it as a bad dream or a nightmare, but I never really woke up until a certain point -- where I would be running along this road by a house I used to live in, and there were these group of guys in overalls chasing me -- strangely, one of them was Robert Patrick from Terminator 2. And as I ran I kept tripping over my own feet and falling, finding it difficult to get up. When they finally caught me, they would put my hand in this hole at the end of a shoebox that contained a bomb designed to blow my hand off. That was the part were I woke up, and I had that dream on numerous occasions. Freaky, eh.
I believe I've had something like this happen to me before. Several times I've woken up to see a giant spider on my wall. One of those times I tried to swat for it and then it disappeared, leaving me freaked out as I tried to search for the bugger and kill it. Other times I'm aware of what's going on and just close my eyes.
Speaking of bugs, I remember this one dream from a few years ago that quickly proceeded to become a nightmare on steroids. There was a double wedding out in the park in my hometown, a field just on the other side of a small bridge. I was one of the two brides. The other bride and I were pretty annoyed by this, and apparently, I had conspired with a few rebels (have no idea what cause) to get me out of the wedding before vows were exchanged. Their idea of disrupting the wedding was to anger a hive of bees and unleash them, and predictably, it all went downhill. I got out of there fast, but I turned to see that one of the rebels was cowering. I yelled at him to get out of there. He said that he was allergic to bees. I got annoyed and somehow picked him up, and I ran for the hill. Of course, a large, aggressive bee was hot on our heels, and it was catching up fast. It was so terrifying that, the moment I felt its head bump up against my back, I woke up. To almost bolting off the bed, headfirst into the wall next to the bed, before I stopped myself in time. I had never done that before, or since.
The true nightmare is the existential crisis of conscious thought. Just kidding. Spooky stuff though... Recently had a dream where this girl (that I properly fancy) was all over me and asked me out, but I was all like, nah, that wouldn't work out and sort of rejected her. For some reason that dream was really unsettling, felt uneasy the whole day after it. Oh, as well I had this proper weird dream where I was part of some sort of police raid on a warehouse where people got like brutally tortured in Saw style machines and stuff - interestingly this was quite a light-hearted dream, formatted like a really shit reality TV show (had interviews with the cast and all.) does anyone else go through really intense patches of dreaming, remembering like three to four dreams every night for a week, followed by no dreams for a good few months?
For a long time I suffered from nightmares and still occasionally do. I suppose it's something to do with my anxiety, or stress, or something else. And they were nightmares: I was awoken every night at around 3 or 4am. Often they ranged from the truly disturbing (trapped in a dark room with a throng of huddled, red-eyed shrivelled corpses at one end and myself at the other) to the bizarre (sexually molested by a sharks while drowning in a beautiful ocean) to the clichéd (abandoning a sinking ship, falling and landing on jagged rocks, awakening just before I strike them) At one point, a fire alarm turned itself into a sort of night-terror. In the early hours the fire alarm (a hideous nee-naw sound) went off in the building. My partner was next to me, and he had started screaming. I wasn't able to comprehend anything, so my only reaction was to assume the world was ending and began screaming too. It took me about five minutes to stop and shake him into sanity before we got ourselves out. When I get these nightmares, it does have a profound effect. There is the exhaustion from disrupted sleep, but there is also the heightened anxiety when it comes to sleeping. I dread going to sleep, as I know I am going to suffer for it.
I had a dream where I was in gray scale town, much like that of a child's drawing. The buildings weren't quite real, they seemed more like cardboard cut-outs that were crudely outlined and colored with pencil strokes. Amidst all this, a big creature of black smoke would throw me around, and I vividly remember trying to fight it, but I just couldn't do anything. It is one of the few nightmares I can remember.
I have all the very typical nightmares/bad dreams marked by someone who has an anxiety disorder: Teeth breaking or falling out? Check. Tornados? Check. Driving your car off a bridge? Check. Intruder in the house you can't see? Check. Falling off cliffs? Check. Showing up naked? Check. I think the worst are the dreams where my teeth are falling out/breaking. In one of them, Jim Carey was chasing me, and as I was running away from him my teeth started shattering. Why was I so scared of Jim Carey? I dunno. Maybe because of his performance in The Mask.
I have an anxiety disorder but I've never had any dreams that match them descriptions. Though, the 'showing up naked' one sounds fun. I've only suffered from anxiety for a year, though, so many they are still yet to come.
I have a poor memory when trying to remember dreams and whenever I do have a nightmare I was always pinch myself awake before anything horrific happens. More or less I try to avoid nightmares at all costs, because if I did stay asleep while having one it wouldn't be pretty considering I watch videos with titles such as "5 Disturbing Deep Web Stories" usually before going to sleep. In other words if I forced myself to experience a nightmare I can imagine it will end with me being dragged into the woods by a insane middle-aged women while struggling to breath inside a burlap bag. If you want to have a dream though here's a tip. Wake up in the morning and then fall back asleep. For whatever reason the second time I fall asleep in the morning I always have a dream, and usually those dreams are happy ones!
Therein lies the horror of nightmares; they have the ability to turn even your favorite things into tragedy.
The second one is a recurring dream for me. I've had them occasionally ever since I was a little girl. Funny thing is, they're not really bad dreams. Sure, they're exciting and intense, but never leave me with a bad feeling.
I definitely get the ones about teeth, about being in public naked/in my underwear and the driving/bridge ones. I have a lot of dreams about bridges. It'll either be that I'm driving on a bridge that goes up higher and higher and gets narrower and more rickety the higher I go, or it'll be a bridge that crumbles into the water as I'm driving over it. We have a lot of bridges here, and I always get anxious if I'm stuck in traffic on a bridge, especially if I'm on the Skyway. It's very high, and the original bridge collapsed in the 80s. That Wikipedia article has a picture of the collapsed bridge and it's definitely nightmare fuel.
I also get the teeth ones occasionally. I've had sleep paralysis once, but it was very brief and could have been a lot worse than it was. I used to have really terrible nightmares all the time when I was a kid, but they've happened less and less as I've gotten older. Sometimes I still wake up in the middle of the night feeling terrified, but I usually can't remember the dream. I'll frantically turn the lamp on and cool down, not even realize what I'm scared of, then eventually shut the light off and go back to sleep. I haven't had nightmares about going over bridges per se, but I have had dreams about sitting in the passenger seat while the person driving (typically my dad) is trying to drive up a really really steep hill. Like, nearly vertical. I think I had these because he used to take me hill climbing in his truck when I was pretty young and I was always scared.
