Worst Nightmare!

Most of the bad dreams I have, or at least the memorable ones, are the reality-defying kind.

The most recent was just this weekend. I was driving home with my girlfriend, or maybe my friend, or someone. You know the friends and acquaintances you have in dreams that are amalgamations of people you know in real life? Some of them. I was driving down one of the major roads in my town when I passed the retirement home (really there). There was a sign by the side of the road that said "Road closed due to cold weather anomaly." I shrugged it off and kept driving, when all of a sudden everything went blindingly white and snow appeared, feet thick, seemingly out of nowhere. The engine of the car choked and died and it was extremely cold outside, rapidly chilling everyone in the car. I felt an indescribable kind of dread and a sensation of freezing and smothering all at once as my eyelids froze. I reached for the gear shift and threw the car in reverse. The engine started and ran just fine as long as I was driving away from the "cold zone."

I then remember being at a sporting goods store and stocking up on winter coats, boots, the works for enduring cold weather. I also went and put cold-weather oil and cold-weather gas in my car so it would run in the cold.

We went back to the "cold weather anomaly" and drove into it. The blinding white came back, accompanied by the same feeling of freezing to death, but I kept driving (blind) and the fear/dread/death went away. Across from the retirement home, where there's normally a strip mall and a bank, there was a graveyard and a forest of bare trees (think the graveyard in Xenosaga...dunno if that's where the image was from or not, I'm thinking more Twin Peaks). Standing by one of the graves there was a witch and she talked to us about solving some kind of mystery or discovering some kind of secret. That's about as much as I remember.

I guess it says something about what scares me. Really out-of-place or inexplicable shit that runs counter to established laws of That-Which-Is. It's never really been monsters or kidnappers or even my own death that terrifies me in dreams. Rather, it's been something abstract, nebulous, far bigger than me such that it challenges me to even try to conceptualize it.

Reminds me of another one I had wherein I was standing on top of a pillar of rock. A stalagmite reaching hundreds of feet high, and looking out over a huge flat-bedded canyon full of these rock towers. The sky was a bright yellow-orange as the sun was setting, it was all very Western-looking but it had a very end-of-days feel to it. I remember someone saying something about the coming "Age of Sadness" and that it was going to be upon us in days, if not mere hours. Like the Y2K hysteria only it was proven true and it was far, far worse. I had feelings of despair and, again, like I was about to be a victim to something far beyond my ability to realize as it snuffed me out along with everyone else in the world. Of course the nature of this "Age of Sadness" was never revealed to me, much the way I had no idea where the "Cold weather anomaly" came from, but dreams have a way of letting you know what's important, and the important thing was that in some way or another, the world was quite fucked. Stuff like that scares me, feelings of being powerless against fate, change, what-have-you. And what-have-you is always something I don't understand, or worse, can't understand.

This is weird. My eyes are tearing up and burning just typing this. It's like remembering it is making my subconscious want to cry from the terror but my higher mind is aware that I'm just sitting and typing.

Maybe I should get some sleep.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Originally Posted by Encephalon

When I was in high school I used to have a recurring dream where in I shot myself in the head and I'd wake up in a cold sweat. To this day I still have no idea what caused it and I have never had it since.

So...

...

...played Persona 3 yet?

I haven't had any nightmares since the aforementioned weather-weirdness, but then my dreams are seldom memorable. Usually only a few times a year, and then it's really fucked-up stuff like I described before.

I've never experienced sleep paralysis, but then it's hard as a bugger for me to fall asleep on my back. I sleep wonderfully when I manage, but the process of actually entering a sleeping state is nigh on impossible without the assistance of alcohol or a major caff-crash about 20 minutes before I turn in for the night.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

A recurring image in Persona 3 is that of someone with a gun (therein referred to as an Evoker) pointed at his/her own head. A bit of morbid humour on my part.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.