Nightmares that turn around?

Have any scary nightmares? Share them with us!
Post Reply
User avatar
gagaplex
Posts: 245
Joined: Wed Oct 09, 2013 10:32 am

Nightmares that turn around?

Post by gagaplex »

Well, considering that nightmare with the hole in my cheek was one of the few ones I can even remember, I don't think I'm the best source of info for this subforum. But I thought I'd use it to ask a question of you folks.

See, I actually do remember other dreams I've had that started out quite badly. Maybe it's because I play too many gory games or read too much pulp fiction, but I remember dreams about, in no particular order...

...a Lovecraftian cult "breaking out" in an office building, whereupon myself and a few others had to flee the building while most of the employees either died or joined the ritualistic murdering and self-mutilating club...
...a strange dream about people becoming infected by plant-creatures that live within them, spreading through skin contact and hiding as they do so, only visible through changes of the colour of the iris (to green, of course)...

...and other weird stuff that's surprisingly detailed at times.

Now, you've probably all heard about lucid dreams (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucid_dream) and the fact that sometimes we can affect and direct our dreams. I didn't list the above as nightmares per sé because - while they started out horrendous - things turned out well in the end. Not the typical way for a nightmare to end And I'm not sure why.

Perhaps they were lucid dreams where I directed my own nightmare to turn out as I wanted to (escaping the cult-office building before it got swallowed up by a rift of primordial chaos, for instance), perhaps I was already more awake than dreaming and "narrated" the conclusion of these dreams to myself half-way conscious (I doubt that would qualify as lucid dreaming then, but it seems difficult to draw a clear line when we can move in and out of sleep/various depths of sleep). But I think you can see what I mean.

So, long story short, what I wanted to ask you was whether you ever had nightmares that either turned themselves around or that perhaps you felt you yourself directed to a different ending or similar. Have you experienced anything like that? And if so, what about?
User avatar
Alina David
Posts: 15
Joined: Fri Oct 11, 2013 11:20 am

Re: Nightmares that turn around?

Post by Alina David »

Interesting dream that "...a Lovecraftian cult "breaking out" in an office building, whereupon myself and a few others had to flee the building while most of the employees either died or joined the ritualistic murdering and self-mutilating club..."
I'm curious about the resolve and how you managed to save yourself.

I had only one particular lucid dream:

I was hanging out and talking to a person,I do not recall their appearance or gender but I think we where friends in the dream, during the conversation I realized that is all a dream. I felt sad that I was going to never see that friend so I tried to tell them my name so if that person was another dreamer he might use that info and contact me in real life (yup my dream logic is very derpy) I managed to tell them my name in the end after I struggled to remember it.After that I woke up.
So in my opinion you must be 100% certain in the dream that you are dreaming.

I guess you have adventure dreams.I love adventure dreams because they are not all that scary and I can remember them very easily + in it you can do so many crazy stuff you can never do in real life and do adventurous and heroic things :mrgreen: . (every one wants to play a super hero/a super villain or a femme fatale/lady killer or something you find cool during some moment in their life <=> games satisfy a bit of that but dreams are better because only you know what would satisfy you the best or I'm crazy :D )
User avatar
gagaplex
Posts: 245
Joined: Wed Oct 09, 2013 10:32 am

Re: Nightmares that turn around?

Post by gagaplex »

Heh, good thing I wrote down some details shortly after waking up fully. I like the idea of an adventure dream! :D

It was actually quite curious, because in the dream I think I was part of that Lovecraftian cult myself. Not one of the highest in the ranks, but some sort of adept at least. And my memories of the dream start out with me in some middle management-type guy's office, angry at him.

See, it was like this: This guy was a relatively new but ambitious member of the club and had apparently been personally affronted by some enemy, a rival in the corporation, the business world, in research, academia or something like that. Obviously the details were hazy.

Anyway, it turned out that he had started some sort of ritual (that ended up causing this reality shift) to get petty vengeance against his rival and I was so annoyed and furious with him for wasting secrecy, resources, lives, opportunities etc. for something so minor and mundane when our actual plans were so much bigger and more glorious (not that I know what those plans were, but in my dream I somehow knew).

Anyway, he realized I was about to try and get him to stop/revert it, when he pulled a gun on me and threatened me not to do anything, mentioning it was too late anyway, it had already started. I backed out of his office - he let me go - and went along the corridor, realizing I had to get to the basement as quickly as possible if I wanted to stop the ritual from going through completely. But turning a corner, I came across the first of the people affected, a guy bent over another's dead body, carving runes into the poor guy's skin. He was so engrossed in his "work", that I could simply move by him, quietly, without hinderance, but at that point I realized I had very little time left if it wasn't really too late already.

I did what you aren't supposed to do in the case of an emergency, I went to the elevator. The floor was already bloodied, more blood dripping from the ceiling through one of those metal grates. Figuring that whatever had happened on top of the elevator was already over (it was very quiet), I stepped inside the elevator anyway, pressing the button for the basement in a vein attempt to get down there anyway. As the door started to slide shut, some other guy came around the corner, wearing what looked like a delivery serviceman's uniform with a cap and everything, raising his hand for me to stop the elevator so he could get on board. But his entire arm was drenched in blood, so I sort of decided not to oblige. He resignedly dropped the arm down as the door slid shut, a look of slight annoyance on his face - bizarrely not rage, hatred, hunger, anything like that; he looked exactly like a perfectly normal guy who just missed an elevator by a second. That made it worse somehow than if he had been yelling or screaming or threatening, because it seemed like whatever he had done appeared perfectly normal to him at that point.

Anyway, cue the usual elevator scene: The elevator ride takes way longer than you would expect, strange sounds start to emanate from the walls around me, the lights flicker, screams start, a buzzing from below etc.. So that's when I pressed the button for ground floor instead of basement, basically thinking "screw this, it's over, gotta get out".

The elevator actually did arrive safely in the lobby area, quite close to the front exit, but there were a gang of people gathered there, engaging in gruesome ritualistic things on those who hadn't turned. They hadn't spotted me yet, so I made a sharp turn to head into the back offices on that floor. This is where I encountered the first person in a while that was neither dead nor warped in some way. He looked pretty normal, like an office worker with his white shirt on, cowering in a corner. Kind of annoyed, I pulled him up and got him to follow me, with my goal being to get away from the front and to the delivery entrance, to leave that way. The rest was quite a haze, but we picked up some more people along the way, a woman, some other guy, I dunno exactly, and made it out of the building surprisingly easily because most of the warped people were congregating in the main lobby.

Particularly absurd was the way it felt, stepping outside of the office building, with all that craziness behind us, and a bright, sun-lit, warm parking lot right in front of us. As we got further away from the building, at some point the noises, the screams seemed to "shut off" and, looking back, the office building looked perfectly normal. It was like we had stepped outside a bubble and could no longer hear what was going on inside it. We didn't stop, though. We crossed the parking lot and moved away quickly while trying to avoid running (in case the crazies saw us, maybe), getting a couple of blocks between us and that building.

In a sort of epilogue of that dream, I travelled on a parallel street to that office building by bus on what amounted to the next in-dream day, only to see it stand there as if nothing was wrong with it.
I did so on the next in-dream day.
And the next.
I don't know when, because as dreams go, time is really warped for me usually, but at some point the building was no longer there, just a ruin, and I heard the news on the bus (I guess in my dream-busses they always have news radio on for some reason) that the collapse was supposedly due to natural causes, the clean-up efforts were underway, that surprisingly little rubble remained at the scene for a building of that size and that so far only a few corpses had been retrieved, horribly mutilated. presumably by the collapsing of the building on top of them (which didn't really explain the skinning and the runes and symbols, of course). Still, most people who had been inside the building at the time were still missing, as were significant amounts of the building's structure and material.

So I realized the ritual had worked. The rubble and the people weren't missing, they had gone elsewhere, to another place the ritual had sent them. All I wondered then was whether that middle management-type guy from the beginning had had the good fortune of dying before the shift happened (either killed by the crazies or by his own hand with his gun) or whether he had been so unlucky as to still be alive when they were taken away.

...and that concludes the story. :-D
As I said before, I'm not sure how many of the details were part of the dream or I filled in as I was moving out of sleep, filling in gaps and story-bits as I started to wake up, but that's what I remembered and wrote down, more or less.
User avatar
Alina David
Posts: 15
Joined: Fri Oct 11, 2013 11:20 am

Re: Nightmares that turn around?

Post by Alina David »

Great story :) It reminds me a bit of Legends Of Horror: Night Shift (a lovely little nightmarish story)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HeuExUPKAmU
Here is the link if you wish to listen to it.Take note this is not for the faint of heart.

Your mind created the dream so if you add it's still from your mind :D

I'm happy that you took the time to tell me (write) all the story. Thank you!

So here is one of my adventure dreams that I had some time ago:

"This was bad,really really bad.We had a fugitive with spells on our hands.To make things worst he was on a private air plane and I was at a family reunion with just a laptop.
While everyone was drinking and had a good time I entered an empty room do do my work.
I hate using curses but this time I had to!
I cut my finger and drew a circle on the screen that showed the air plane.I placed the cut finger on the plane and slid it to the bottom of the screen.After a few minutes the plane looked like it was loosing altitude, now it was going to crash so I called my superiors and told them to send a team to retrieve the body.
Back at the reunion my family decided we all should go on a mini vacation and my presence was mandatory.
The next day I was paired up with my father, uncle and grandmother.We where to take my car and go to our destination.
Dad told me he knew the road to the place where we where supposed to go to so I would listen to his instructions.
During the ride I got a phone call informing me that there was no sign of the plain or the fugitive.I could understand a missing body after all he could have survived the crash but the entire plane was missing.
We where getting closer to the place but the road was getting a bit difficult, it was a stiff mountain road with lots of curves.We took a turn and then the car just refused to cooperate and we went over the edge.
Everyone was screaming so I chanted an anti gravity spell. At first I used it at full power to keep us in the air but gradually I decreased it's strength so the car landed safely .
My dear passengers where going to question me after they calmed down.Dady's little angel is actually a witch and she works for the government,yup that sounds just about right.
Fortunately for us we landed near a town so off to the car repair shop.
The world has never seen a place like this.The people here recycled everything and nothing in it harmed the environment.I even participated in the unavailing of an air plain made out of a wreckage they found a month ago.
The fugitive was a time master."

This is where the dream ended.It ended where things just started to get good :(
:?: I'm not sure if I should make an ending for it or hope I have a dream with the rest of the story. :?:

p.s. sorry for any spelling mistakes
User avatar
matt
Posts: 2316
Joined: Fri Oct 04, 2013 10:48 am

Re: Nightmares that turn around?

Post by matt »

Man, I wish I remembered my nightmares as vividly as you guys! Those are really interesting. Thanks for sharing!
-Matt Gilgenbach
Lead Frightener at Infinitap Games
User avatar
gagaplex
Posts: 245
Joined: Wed Oct 09, 2013 10:32 am

Re: Nightmares that turn around?

Post by gagaplex »

Alina David wrote:Great story :) It reminds me a bit of Legends Of Horror: Night Shift (a lovely little nightmarish story)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HeuExUPKAmU
Here is the link if you wish to listen to it.Take note this is not for the faint of heart.
Oh, that was good. Although I must say... in a way, I find it more awful when it's humans that do something so horrific, not monsters (zombies). :o
Your mind created the dream so if you add it's still from your mind :D
I guess so. :-)

Also, thanks for your story. Magical government assassin? Weird. And cool.
I suppose the villagers found the crashed plane and recycled it, but what did they do with the corpses? And if the fugitive/target could manipulate time, was he even on the plane when it crashed? If I was him, I'd just travel back to before I even got on the plane in the first place.

@matt
I think - in my case at least - it had to do with the fact that I was already only lightly asleep anymore. My sleep-addled brain must've been filling in a lot of details and ideas, while in half-sleep or something like that.
User avatar
matt
Posts: 2316
Joined: Fri Oct 04, 2013 10:48 am

Re: Nightmares that turn around?

Post by matt »

I think you are right! Having your conscious mind filling in the gaps can certainly make things more interesting!
-Matt Gilgenbach
Lead Frightener at Infinitap Games
User avatar
Alina David
Posts: 15
Joined: Fri Oct 11, 2013 11:20 am

Re: Nightmares that turn around?

Post by Alina David »

The fugitive managed to escape after all he has the power to control time.He used it to freeze time right before the crash and then created a time rift to the super advanced town (sorry I have no name for it) but the rift is unstable (one day in real time is one month in the rift).So he had time to plan and find out information from the future time. He planed the escape and crashed assassin's car (he accelerated the time over the car so the assassin would lose control).
I guess the government would try to exploit magic/supernatural/mutations/psychic abilities if they could.After all there are movies where these powers are exploited.(ex : Minority Report)

+ I had this relay weird idea after seeing a video about Ouija Boards (link in case you wish to see it http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uWboMJ_Up10 ) :

The government makes Ouija Boards illegal because far to many people are using them.The path between our world and the spiritual world became so used that evil spirits could use it and all Ouija Boards sessions where plagued by demons.
After the banning and some time the paths where no longer present visible by the evil spirits and the government started to research and develop this method.
The result was a round Ouija Boards that would encircle the user and give it full access to the knowledge of the other world.The users of this new board would start to display deformities (the growth of lumps or bone formations) if they spent two much time using using it.Some generation later a human child (if you can call it that) was born of one of the users,it was a hideous thing resembling a tree with three faces , three pairs of arms and countless legs.This thing became the sole user of the Ouija Board because of it's power to use it and the fact that it did not suffer any mutations from extended use of the board.(I wish I could draw it but I'm 0 at drawing)

P.S. : I never used a Ouija Board and I plan of never using it.
Sorry if I bored you with all that. TT_TT

@mat

If you are having trouble recalling a dreams try to clear your mind when you wake up and question your mind (yup sounds silly) about the dream.

Ex: Where there familiar faces? Was I being chased by someone/something? Was I inside or outside? (usually simple stuff so the mind can provide some answer)

Sometimes it might not work but when it does it could be a spark or it could be the entire dream.

I hope this helps.
User avatar
matt
Posts: 2316
Joined: Fri Oct 04, 2013 10:48 am

Re: Nightmares that turn around?

Post by matt »

That's an interesting story and good advice for trying to remember your dreams. Thanks for sharing!
-Matt Gilgenbach
Lead Frightener at Infinitap Games
Post Reply