Nightmares

[Dragon Master Mike]

Nightmares can be very scary. Do you have nightmares often? What was the scariest nightmare you ever had?

I haven't had too many scary ones, and most of the really scary ones I've forgotten, but I remember once a long time ago I had a nightmare that I was going into my basement, and suddenly I was aware that I was dreaming, and almost as though someone had asked me if I wanted to wake up or not, I began to consider waking myself up, but decided against it because it was a good dream so far. Immediately after my vision got dark and all I could see were eyes looking back at me, and no matter how hard I tried I couldn't wake myself up anymore. I couldn't even move. I felt as though I was slowly drifting downwards, and that is the last thing I remember.

[Neo Emolga]

The downright nastiest nightmare I've ever had was having to pull flesh-eating insects and larvae out of my arm. First, the arm was fine, and then next moment I know, bulges start appearing with mandibles tearing through the skin and grotesque insect heads popping up. I had to rip them out one by one and the gouges they left behind after getting pulled out were horrible as well. The worst part was not knowing how many were still embedded in there while self-mutilating my own arm just to get them out. And they weren't coming out easy.

Now that was some Colombian Grade-A horror material right there.

[Corey]

I don't have like, horror movie nightmares. Instead, I have nightmares about things going on in my life, dreams about people/things that cause me to wake up anxious or depressed. D:

[Suicune's Fire]

Occasionally I'll get nightmares, but they're rarely that bad. Mostly I'll just have stupid dreams which weren't good, but weren't that bad either, but are dreams I wouldn't want to have again.

One of my scariest dreams was centred around this madman who put me and some friends in this obstacle course and made us run through it for his amusement. One of my friends was killed and I remember waking up in tears. :c That was years ago though.

[Steel Lunpara]

Honestly, I spend more time sitting around at night being scared of getting a nightmare than actually having ones. Most of them aren't even really scary, they're just kind of... Bizarre and messed up, except it's not cool like regular dreams. I just wake up in that ever-familiar cold sweat, and about five minutes later realize "Why the heck did that scare me?"

Admittedly, those five minutes tend to always be confusing for me no matter what happened when I was asleep.

[Pokemon Trainer Sarah]

I have nightmares pretty often. Mostly people coming to kill me. Or things like all my teeth falling out. When I was really little I had a recurring nightmare about a man cutting a gigantic salami with a ridiculously big knife and I was always really scared he was going to cut off his fingers but I couldn't look away and even if I closed my eyes, I could still see. :P If I got through that part, I would make it to a clearing where a group of cute bunnies were kidnapping my best friend in a hot air balloon haha.

I'm glad I don't really have horror movie dreams. No gore or anything. Ick.

[Scytherwolf]

I used to have tons of nightmares as a kid, before I figured out I could use lucid dreaming to my advantage and fight back. Then I didn't have them very often for years, but in the past couple of years I've had them a lot. And for some reason I don't usually realize it's a dream anymore so I can't really fight back. At least they don't involve anything super gorey (it's strange, because there's occasionally a lot of violence in them, and in these dreams the injury or cause of death is usually something horrific, but there's very little or no blood (thankfully)).

What's weird is that my good dreams are usually really fantasy/adventure sort of things, most often out in nature and if not, somewhere interesting like a theme park or a cool dream-world city. The bad ones are almost always set in 'normal' places, like a neighborhood, a school, etc.

[Saraibre Ryu]

I don't have nightmares too often, though I'd like to blame that on my overly active imagination and that I have some control over my dreams. I'm a somewhat lucid dreamer but it doesn't always work out that way. Anyway, as I said, I don't have nightmares too often but when I do, I get Night Terrors. These nightmares basically have you feeling legitimately scared or afraid after you wake up and that can linger. It's not fun.

Now to the worst Night Terror I've had to date, and why Sabi's mind is a downright son of a biscuit.

I was at a pier for some reason and I was shot in the gut, about on my left side. I laid there while I was bleeding until an ambulance arrived and the paramedic mended me up on the spot. Now you might be thinking "Hey that doesn't sound too scary..." but that's not the scary part. I'm going to stick it in spoilers just in case some people find it a bit much, but I hopefully left it okay to read.

I could feel every single bit of agony the entire time I was in the subconscious land of 'how is my brain producing this'. I say that because I have never been shot, seen someone in actuality get shot that wasn't behind a TV screen. At the time, I had not watched anything related to being shot at a pier. Yet here is my subconscious, producing a burning level of realistic pain and writhing while I laid in helpless shock and bled out. Here's another weird part: I did not wake up at all. It felt like a combination of an eternity and mere seconds before the paramedic in my night terror actually showed up. The lucid feelings don't stop their either. The paramedic in my dream, as I said, decided to mend me up right then and there. This meant pulling the bullet out of my gut because apparently it hadn't gone all the way through. I felt that too. Cold icy metal pliers digging out a bullet out of my suffering wound. I don't recall much after that, but my guess was I passed out in the dream and then eventually woke up. I woke up to reality and this combined mental trauma that something was wrong with my abdomen, as it felt like something was there or had happened. Out of paranoia I kept checking it throughout the following day, as it was just that real.

So the scariest part wasn't what happened in the dream, it was how my own head produced such realistic feelings out of no past experiences at all, and I did not wake up from it immediately. I don't know if it was some weird empathetic episode I was having, but that's probably the most frightening thing I've had to endure thanks to my own mind.

[[Desolate Divine]]

I used to have them bad. I don't remember having any in recent years. When I was young, I learned how to wake myself up if I am in a nightmare. From then on, if I was in a dream that looked like it was about to get scary, I would just wake myself up, and usually forget about the whole thing in seconds.

Sometimes I do the opposite. If I know I am in a dream, and I enjoy it, I will purposely keep myself asleep. If I hear my phone buzzing, I won't think about it so I stay asleep and in the dream.

[illusdark8]

It's been a very very long time since I've had a nightmare and I probably would not remember any if I had tried. Honestly, to be frank. I haven't really dreamt in the last several weeks.

[Elbub]

I used to have a recurring nightmare when I was younger.

I think after watching too much dramatic television with images of burning houses and people trapped within, I developed a fear of being trapped in a burning building. And for several years, once every month or so, I had a dream where I was trapped in a classroom of my primary school whilst a fire slowly approached from the corridor.

I wasn't trapped because the doors were locked; I was trapped in the dream because my legs were so heavy and leaden that I couldn't escape under my own volition. I usually woke up just before the fire reached the room, with a renewed fear of my house catching fire whilst my family and I were sleeping.

After several years of this steady nightmare, I had it again one night, except the outcome was different. Despite my legs still being heavy and leaden, I pushed through my movement difficulty and managed to escape the building out onto the playground. The building promptly exploded and the aftermath was pretty catastrophic, but I remember feeling a great sense of relief in my dream that I had escaped the building unscathed.

I have not had that nightmare since that night, and my fear of being trapped in a burning building, or my house burning down, was gone. Don't get me wrong, I still wouldn't want either of those things to happen, but I no longer had a specific fear of it either.

Now the only fear I have left is wasps. And they occasionally show up in my dreams, to be generally ****ish.

-----

These days, I really don't have many nightmares at all. The only ones I really have are more grounded; tragedy befalling loved ones in the form of car accidents, diseases, sudden death, that kind of thing. If I ever end up in a dream with a crazed murderer, I usually end up with some degree of lucidity which causes one of the following; a) I wake up, b) I get some form of weapon to take on said crazed murderer, c) I change the dream to something completely different, the aforementioned crazed murderer forgotten.

[VeloJello]

My nightmares boil down to some recurring themes:

Death of a loved one.
Being judged for a false crime.
Me killing people.
Falling (lots less frequent than in past years).

Usually when I kill people in my dreams, it's pretty effed up, too - I don't think my subconscious recognizes the existence of guns, because I have never once (in my memory) had a dream in which firearms played a major role. As a result, I've poisoned my cats, choked my cats, and ripped someone's head off in grotesque and loving five-sense detail. Bizarrely enough, I love my cats, but the lattermost case is the only one I remember where I was actually killing in self-defense. The themes of being judged and loved ones dying at least make sense - everyone subconsciously worries about those around them dying, and frankly I take on guilt and stress pretty easily. DX

However, the scariest dream I ever had was being chased by a scarecrow with a butcher knife. Not because that's realistic or anything - it was so vivid. I frequently have dreams so vivid I feel like my mind is still stuck partway in them, and when those dreams are nightmares I often end up paranoid and jumpy for a day or more. Scarecrows unnerved me slightly until about a year ago and the dream was ~4 years ago.

[Dragon Master Mike]

Wow, some of the nightmares here sound like they came out of a horror movie. Especially Neo's.

[Silverclaw]

I remember my worst nightmare... I was in a store when someone stepped on my shoes new too I was ticked off.