What is the scariest dream you can remember having?

Does sleep paralysis count?

I thought I died.

The thing about me is that the really scary dreams aren’t what scare me the most. I did have a really scary one before about a house being possessed by a demonic presence (clearly Amityville-influenced) and it was very realistic and quite terrifying.

Usually what happens to me is that I have “night terrors” where I’ll be having a normal dream or a creepy one and then something will happen, anything, it doesn’t even have to be scary, and I’ll just be overwhelmed by the sensation of fear and it feels like I am falling into a vortex and things are clawing at me and I cry out and I usually wake up right afterward breathing rapidly and with my heart pounding. I know I make audible sounds because I’ve been told…it’s embarrassing. It’s very strange and very scary. It’s like something just electro-shocks the fear section in my brain and it goes haywire with a really intense feeling of fear without a clear cause.

My brother told me about a dream he had about my mom giving him a yellow flower and spoke in an evil possessed voice saying “this flower will give you good luck”. In the dream, my brother went to bed and heard all kinds of noises and voices coming from the closet and his bed started shaking and then in the “morning” he encountered all kinds of creepy apparitions and noises and felt they were somehow connected to the flower, so he tore it apart and then woke up. Told me it was the scariest dream he had ever had, along with the one about the disembodied children’s heads floating around his room.

I also had a dream where this creepy looking guy looked at me and then a few seconds later, I felt him grab me and cover my mouth as I tried to scream. My only kidnapping dream and very freaky. It only lasted a few seconds, though.

I think I’ve posted this somewhere else on Fluther, but here is the scariest dream I’ve had that I can remember.

I did not want to go back to sleep after I had this dream because it freaked me out so much. I was at my house, but it wasn’t like my real house. It was a wooden cabin out in the bush somewhere. I was home alone but I was waiting for my friends to arrive, I must have been having a party or something. Anyway, a car load of my friends pull up the drive way and get out of the car. Suddenly they get sucked through the fence punching a huge hole in it and get chopped up, body parts flying everywhere, the car goes too. This happens every few minutes with new carloads of my friends. I get really freaked out and follow the road round to my grandparents’ house which is nearby. I go in and sit down in the lounge room which is the same as normal. Then suddenly Lucius Malfoy walks in and somehow I know he’s killed all my friends and he’s after me too. Then he takes of his mask and It’s my pop! I run out and my gran is after me too. This is the bit that freaked me out the most: I run out the back and can see my house through their back fence because it has a big hole in it. It’s dark and I can’t see where I’m running but I realise that it’s the same hole in the fence where my friends were being sucked through and chopped up. Then the horrible realisation hits me that I am running over my friends body parts. I get back to my house and hear voices so I hide in a bush outside. It’s my mum and sister, they’re in on it too and they’re talking to my gran and pop. “Don’t worry, she won’t be far away, she can’t survive in the bush for long either, we’ll get her”. I sneak into the house to get some supplies then run away into the bush. The end.

In the dream, I fell asleep next to my boyfriend, and woke up later to him not there. I walked around the house trying to found him and ended up finding him dead. He was hanging from the side of the house, gutted and had needles his worst fear sticking out of random parts of his body. It was really gruesome, and I kept trying to wake myself up, but instead I kept seeing my dream-me trying to wake up.

I woke up and sat up, breathing heavily and shaking.
I guess I had woken up my boy from that, because he asked me if I was okay.
I just threw my arms around him and broke down.

We fell asleep again and I was okay.

I have nightmares like this every night.. but this was the worst I can remember.

@Grisaille sleep paralysis is terrifying. i’m assuming you’re talking about when you’re in the middle of consciousness and unconsciousness and you can’t move. i felt like i was going to be stuck in limbo for the rest of my life and no one would ever know what was wrong.

i have recurring dreams of an attack i survived when i was 16. that’s just ptsd though… i can’t remember any non-attack-related nightmares that are particularly terrifying.

@smack

I hate sleep paralysis. I especially hate it when it takes longer than usual for me to “snap out of it”. I also have definitely “hallucinated” in that state before. I thought I was having a seizure (I’ve never had a seizure before, but the idea of it terrifies me).

I was half asleep and half-awake one Saturday night. I guess you can say Sunday in the morning. (: I couldn’t go to sleep at all and was aware of my surroundings. Funny thing is…I was dreaming and I can still remember my dream.

I was at this church in Whatyoumightcallitland. After it was over, I needed to go pee really badly. There was a house that I didn’t quite knew and the door was open; I went inside. When I went in the bathroom and finished peeing, I heard some voices, they sounded quite familiar and I was trembling with fear. It was Robin and his brother Jake. I didn’t know I was in their house. The dudes found out I was inside hiding in the bathroom. I had to explain to them why I was in their house (that I had to pee). They said it was a good enough excuse(they thought I was stalking them~) and that they were having a party/rave and if I wanted to stay. I responded with the obvious answer, “hell yea!” Then my friend Twinkie, friend’s nickname, was there and a lot of teens. It was so weird. We played Twister, video games, monopoly, poker, and there was a movie playing (Star Wars). After the rave we decided to go to the movie theatre. I could still remember the damn movie I was in the movie and so were some of my friends. The movie was about the Jurassic Park’s old man with white clothes, er, remember? But instead of dinosaurs, it was about zombies. The dream took place on an island, just like Jurassic. :) There was about thirty people who volunteered to go to this island to see how it was. Only about 35 fit in the plane all in an assigned seat. The old man was planning into turning us all into zombies, but all of us didn’t know why/for what we really were there for. The old man only had one potion to turn one person into a zombie, since a human can turn into a zombie after it was attacked by another. Well after one turned into a zombie, the other turned into a zombie and soon the rest were running for their life, lost in the island and soon became zombies. Robin and I were the only ones who didn’t turn into zombies, but we had to pretend that we were zombies. When it was time for us to go back inside in our assigned seat in the plane, I heard the old man say that our mission was to turn people in urban areas into zombies and that we were flying back to our city/home. I still remember the old lady sitting four seats right from me, her name-LUCILLE. See how creepy that is!? Anyway, the movie ended by city people being attacked by zombies.
I don‘t remember turning into a zombie.

Worst dream I can remember having:

My mum gets ovarian cancer—the bad kind, that kills very quickly. In the dream, she dies within hours of the prognosis.

Try waking up and going to class after that.

@smack Yes, I am.

I first fell into sleep paralysis one night when I was first starting to lucid dream. The only way that I can describe it was that I felt a “dark” pressure on my chest.

I was able to see from outside myself – that is, I could “see” my room, my body, from every possible viewing perspective at once (odd, omnipotent, almost). I tried to regain a semblance of consciousness and told myself to calm down – it was then that I felt a shadowy figure enter the room and sit on my chest, strangling and suffocating me. I felt as if my heart had stopped, and I was suddenly looking into the “shadow’s” face. Half conscious, half unconscious, I was terrified. I then felt my mind release from itself and… well, I thought I died. My consciousness just stopped, and I stopped thinking, feeling and hearing. I legitimately thought I was dead.

I know now that I just simply fell back to sleep.

It happened to me frequently as I continued practicing lucid dreaming, but thankfully I had read up on the phenomenon and knew how to combat it. In fact, it became a bit fun (especially considering the “shadow” isn’t there anymore) when I realized that my mind was awake but body was shut down.

Still makes me anxious, but in a better way than before.

@Grisaille

What is the deal with the whole sitting on the chest thing? Isn’t that the whole thing behind the concept of the “incubus”? The demon sitting on your chest? Obviously this is something that happens to many people.

Yep. That’s what the olden dolts thought sleep paralysis was. A demon sitting on your chest, sucking the life outta ya.

@Grisaille

It’s stuff like this that makes me think more and more that everything “paranormal” can be explained by the “normal” in some way; it might just not be easily realized.

If I’m not mistaken, most of what we know about neurological science has come about in the last 60 years or so. Can’t blame them for thinking they were visited by something evil (hell, I thought so, too).

That being said, give it another 100 years or so; most seemingly inexplicable paranormal phenomena will be explained by then.

Just don’t think the e—GYA

…Okay.

I had Merriam-Webster’s site open in the background, and an autoplay video just started up while I was typing this. I nearly had a heart attack. FFS.

And now I’m laughing hysterically.

@Grisaille

Yeah, luckily I’m a well-lit room with lots of other people right now or I’d be pretty freaked. Walking back in the dark is gonna be fun… >.<

@Grisaille Thanks for naming something I experienced a couple of years ago (I asked around but no one could tell me what it was), just like you I was freaked out, it’s good to know this happens to a lot of people.

@markyy It’s fairly common. Also called night terrors, as someone above said – but that term usually alludes to a frequent, consistent happening, and not a lone or rare event.

@Grisaille It happened only once (and hopefully never again). I remember being trapped in my body like it was a prison and hearing dripping water increasing in frequency until it was a steady tone. I don’t believe in alien abduction, ghosts or whatever, but all those possibilities briefly passed my mind as it happened.

To answer the actual question, I rarely have nightmares anymore. Sure I have unpleasant dreams (where I feel anxious, trapped or nervous), but not really nightmares where I constantly get chased by murderers, dinosaurs and the space police (I’m sure I just described someone else’s nightmare).

Hmm…I experience some paralysis at least once a month (hasn’t happened in a few months, though, this time). It isn’t scary, usually I just doze off in the morning after waking up from hours of sleep and after that doze of a few minutes or so, I wake up paralyzed and take a few seconds to snap out of it. When it starts happening multiple times in a row, I realize it’s time to get up.

Actually, @DominicX, if you don’t have high dream recall (say, remembering two dreams per night), chances are that you experience them more often than you realize – and perhaps truly terrifying examples of such.

All of us here have had wonderful, beautiful, horrifying, ephemeral, etc. dreams weekly – if not daily. All are more vivid than you could possibly imagine.

If you don’t have high dream recall, you just don’t remember them, sadly.

I’ve had many terrifying dreams, but one of the scariest experiences I ever had was similar to what @Grisaille mentioned. I was trying to fall asleep one night, just laying in bed. I fell asleep without realizing it – because the dream that I started having was identical to everything right before I fell asleep. So when the semi-transparent, evil looking man started pushing down on my chest while sitting on me, I think I almost died. The fear was indescribable.

The only time I realized that I was dreaming is when my perspective changed and I was watching him do this to me from the corner of my room. But then I wasn’t sure if I was dreaming anymore, because while I was watching him do this to me from the corner of my room, he slowly turned his head to look at me, with the most evil smile on his face. I have possession dreams all too often, and fear took complete control by this point.

So when I actually, finally woke up and I couldn’t move my body, I thought something about the dream may have been true at the time, and I started hyperventilating. Once I was able to move I got up, left the room and refused to go back to sleep in there.

INDESCRIBABLE

:D

@Grisaille

Huh? I’m confused. I didn’t say anything about dream recall…I remember plenty of dreams.

I know, I was commenting not necessarily on your personal recall, just on our memories in general, and how little we actually remember.

@DrasticDreamer Wait you can see that? That sounds so scary, I would never go back to sleep. I might even have called for my parents like toddlers do :P

@Grisaille What is a high recall? Two dreams? I only seem to remember the dreams that come to me close to waking up. Like in the last two hours of sleep I get, especially if I get up during the night to go to the bathroom. As long as I don’t remember it I don’t care, if a tree falls in the woods does it make a sound?

@markyy It was extremely scary. I would actually say that, despite the fact that I have lucid dreams, my possession dreams are scarier. Because even though I know I’m dreaming at the time… The physical feeling that is associated with the possessions doesn’t equate to any waking feeling or sensation that I know. It’s something of it’s own.

@DrasticDreamer Being lucid in a dream like that would only add to the terror I would feel. Not being able to control that part of the dream would make me feel the demon was a part of me, some physical manifestation of my subconscious. Let’s just say I’m glad I just woke up, all of you still have to go to sleep, good luck with that :P

The whole possession dreams are completely new to me, I hope you find a way to get rid of them.

By the way, since I’m already spamming this thread. One dream that often repeats and might be the closest thing I have to a nightmare, is where I have no ribcage and my heart is exposed. The dream usually consists of me trying to protect my heart, I wonder what a dreamreader would say of that.

Dreaming that wild dogs ate my daughter in front of my eyes and I couldn’t save her.

Man. You guys have violent dreams. I don’t remember ever having a violent dream.

@markyy “if a tree falls in the woods does it make a sound?”

Well, is there someone around to hear it? :P

Considering most of our dreams occur during the REM portion of the sleep cycle, and that happens around every 90–100 minutes – in an average sleep period, you will have 4–5 REM periods. That totals to a potential 4–5 dreams per night. Most adults generally forget most – if not all – of those dreams by the time they wake up (side note: we actually wake somewhat frequently during the night, often times right after REM sleep, and, therefore, a dream. However, we don’t remember this by the time we wake up in the morning). You can liken this someone calling you in the middle of the night, speaking to them, and having no idea what the hell they are talking about the next morning when they call again and ask, “so, what time are we leaving?”

Typically, good dream recall is about remember about 2–3+ dreams a night. Oneironauts try multiple tactics to improve that recall. One example is purposely setting your alarm clock to ring during times you’re most likely to be exiting the REM phase of the sleep cycle. Another is to keep a journal next to your bed, so when you wake up in the middle of the night you jot down everything you remember from that dream and fall back to sleep. When you wake up in the morning, reading what you wrote (often times it’s completely illegible… well, for me. :P) helps recall tremendously.

But that’s all babble.

Most important thing is that, yes, we’ve all had dreams more beautiful and frightening than we can ever imagine. We just don’t remember them.

@Grisaille You just reminded me of an old dreamjournal I used to keep! I’m going to the attic tonight and look for it. I used to write down my dreams when I woke up years ago, mostly because some of them were pretty interesting idea’s for novels, tv, film. It’s hard to do anything with them though, a dream is often more about how you feel and experience it rather than what happens. Thanks for the reply!

@markyy

Exactly. I write down dreams for fun, though, because some of them are quite cool and I like to read about them and remember them.

I can’t wait until I event the dream video recorder (also known as DVR—hmm…that’s a catchy acronym). It’ll translate dreams into video/audio footage exactly as the dreamer sees it and hears it.

@DominicX Don’t know about the name, I have a DVR already (Digital Video Recorder, meaning it has a hard disk). As for the device itself, that’s the ultimate machine for jealous girlfriends ;) Can we share it with friends? I would be more interested in seeing other people’s dreams than mine I think.

About the dreamjournal, I said dreams, but if I recall correctly, the nightmares and thrillers were the most interesting to write down.

@DominicX I will love you forever if you create that. I have wanted one of those since I was a child. You’d make my dreams come true…......

Pun not intended at first, but left behind for goofy purposes. ;)

I keep a dream journal too. Haven’t written in it for a while, I don’t sleep well these days, probably don’t even get to REM sleep or something. But I have a few stocked up from earlier this year and last year. I wrote some of them on another thread but I can’t find it…

@markyy No problem. Re-reading dream journals are the best.

Also, give it about 50 years or so. You’ll have your DVR (albeit a rudimentary one).

We’re already starting to understand how to control electronic devices with our minds (a man was able to use his mind as a computer mouse – I can’t remember where I read that report, but a quick search should provide some hits. They essentially slapped some inputs on his brain and let the synapses do the work). Once we map out how the brain creates imagery, I’m sure a dream recorder is soon to follow.

So in 50 years everyone sits at home all day connected to a DVR, it might even replace all drugs. Kind of reminds me of ‘A scanner darkly’ and ‘Surrogates’.

If we’re going down the cinematographic analogy road, might as well mention Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, that disappointing piece of crap.

Well, that depends.

If by DVR, we’re speaking about a purely record-playback device, then that’s just reliving a movie, in a very vivid way. However, if they find a way to perma-induce strong consciousness in a subconscious reality, then we’re talking.

I imagine a psychedelic drug that we consume, making us fall asleep awake.

Hell, why would you want to disconnect from your world?

@Grisaille exactly! and yes my movie analogies always suck.

I have had a couple of dreams where my boyfriend died. On both occassions I woke up in floods of tears. In one of the dreams I remember telling someone that my boyfriends death was my worst nightmare.

@markyy you are forgiven, my child

I dream about going to the loo quite a lot but this was by far the scariest:

I’m in a bar and need a wee so I go looking for them and can’t find them… the place is a bit like a chapel with lots of corridors and strange empty rooms that smell musty, anyway… I ask someone where they are and this tall guy, with long hair, dressed like Jesus shows me where they are, just round the corner… There is no door on the entrance to the toilets, the room is quite big and they look dirty and off-white, very cold and hard surfaces everywhere.

I turn to him and say, “is this it?” and he replies, “you’ll see” and leaves me.. So I walk in and there’s some very strange feeling in the room. The toilets are on both sides at angle of about 45 degrees, as I walk towards the toilets slowly I can see some blue feet sticking out of the first toilet on the right as if someone was led on the ground inside the cubicle and as I near a bit closer there is another pair in the next cubicle along. I’m absolutely desperate for a wee so I go and sit down on the toilet in one of the cubicles on the left, leaving the door open I notice that the feet have bodies that are half buried in the floor, all skeletal and blue and white, veiny, they have no hair and bulging eyes, they are like miniature people without flesh just skin and very small bones… I know that they are quite evil and dangerous and as I’m sat there another woman comes into the toilet and gives me a funny look and I say to her… “they’re strange aren’t they!”, obviously meaning the ‘dead’ things on the floor…(for some reason I think that they are asleep though and presume that it is something to do with drugs…)

Then as I’m sitting there they start coming to life and crawling out of the floor but can’t leave the floor and can’t use their legs… They are dragging themselves out of the floor turning over, pulling themselves out of the cubicles… I’m still peeing and can’t move just yet and they start crawling towards me making growling, hissing and slurping sounds…I stop and get up and start running which is when the fear grips me like mad, I’m struggling to get away from them as they grab at my ankles and start biting me, they’re still half buried in the floor but are gaining energy and life, I feel their fangs in my ankles and their sharp nails scratching me, I don’t think I’m going to get out of the room before they’ve eaten my feet or have enough strength to stop me from leaving and pull me into the floor.. my body feels heavy and slow…and then I wake up

Maybe 5 years ago I (VAGUELY) remember this dream about a huge gigantic ball of clay with a lot of spikes in it rolling towards me and it had something to do with terrorists. I woke up extremely petrified and I recall running downstairs and asking my mother “If there were terrorists in this country, we would get rid of them, right?” I don’t know what the fuck that was all about, but it scared me so bad. I wish I remember more of it but I don’t, only being really really scared and that big ball of clay somehow being associated with terrorists.

I’m not sure if it was a dream as much as it was my mind releasing a memory of an abusive event I’d dissociated from and pushed to the nether regions of my brain when I was 10.

But it was about a year and a half ago that I had this dream. I’d been in therapy long enough to get a real handle on what I’d gone through as a kid and young adult, and when got to the worst bit of it, I bolted awake and upright in my bed. The memories seemed to keep coming. I started sobbing after a few moments, because I realized that though I’d been dreaming, it was of something that had actually happened and that I was finally well enough to deal with it in my conscious mind.

pretty much all of them. Thankfully, the meds I’m on keeps me from remembering most of the damn things. I’d like to remember the good ones, as they are few and far between.

For a while all my dreams were scary. I would be having a normal happy dream and then something dangerous would appear or things would get out of control and I would wake up terrified. I was having these dreams several times a night sometimeswaking every 30 minutes and be exhausted the next day. I went to the Dr and she referred me for a sleep study. Apnea. Now I sleep with a mask blowing air into my face and I can’t remember dreams. My nights are not so exciting but I’m less likely to die in my sleep.

Last night I dreamt that I was walking down the street and a bus crashed into a lake right beside me. I just stood there. It was scary.

I have had 2 that I can recall. They were recurring and I don’t have them anymore. The first one was…I’m in a house and there are windows everywhere. I’m trying to hide, so I run room to room to find new hiding spots. I’m hiding from death who is outside, and if he sees me through the windows then I will die. The second one was…I’m the president (lol) and I’m traveling by train to California. the rest is sort of hazy so bear with me I don’t remember if the war has happened already like months or so, or if it just happened, but the train is going over the San Andreas fault when these zombie like people start coming up out of the fault and climbing on the train. They are after me because I supposedly, maybe started the nuclear war that destroyed everything. I didn’t but this is what they think, and they start killing everyone and I’m watching and screaming, but when they get to me they don’t kill me they drag me down into the fault with them and the fault closes and we are crushed.

Several years ago I was hit head on by a car that crossed over the line. It totaled my car, and I began having terrible dreams.
One dream involved a car crash, my spinning out of control, and sinking backwards into a swamp or lake. In this dream, I could feel the air pressure increasing, and I could smell the funk of the water. It was terrifying, and I began seeing a therapist again directly.
The therapist was a good idea. Got me right again.

The worst dreams that I can remember having always have something to do with the end of the world…
One particularly frightening one happened several years ago, so the memory of it is a little sketchy, but from what I can recall, I was at this ice cream shop with my family at night. I’m pretty sure it was in summer and there were a lot of people around because there was some kind of parade/festival going on. The TV was on in the ice cream place and someone on the news was announcing that something (I think it was a meteorite or something) was careening towards the earth and that it would be big enough to destroy the world. As they announced it, I went outside and looked up and saw the moon and there was something next to it that was even bigger and it looked like it was getting closer. It was huge and blood-red. I remember looking at my dad and saying, “Don’t let it hit us! Don’t let this be the end!” and all that anyone could do was look at the sky before it was too late. Nobody ran or screamed or anything, they just stood there waiting for it to hit. I woke up right as it smashed into the ground. I couldn’t get back to sleep after that, I just cried until it was morning. I was probably 15 at the time…

That was definitely one of the scariest and most memorable nightmares I’ve ever had…

I was being followed by myself and no matter how I tried to kill me I just kept following.

That is called a shadow, and you weren’t dreaming.

@Grisaille shhh, how are we supposed to convince him he is insane if you keep helping him?

@Psychedelic_Zebra . . . i always fancied myself more murdoch than b.a.

It’s way to scarey to even tell here. Sorry.

mine was when i was a little kid. the only part of it i remember was i was in my friends pantry hiding from this pet elephant they had who wanted to trample me to death. I was peeking through the crack between the doors and the elephant was sitting next to my friends dad while he was at the sink washing dishes. I was thinking, ok i have to make a run for it. So i did, and he started RUNNING after me. I was scared for my life and running to the stairs since the elephant wasnt allowed upstairs. I heard him shout “I’M GONNA CRUSH YA!!!!!!!” then I got to the stairs, but the first step was extremely high and i barely was able to get up but i made it. Thank god the elephant wasnt allowed upstairs.

I have a recurring nightmare where I am trapped in a moving coach/single decker bus and it’s careering down a busy street, I have no control of it even though I am sitting at the wheel. Then when it crashes at the bottom of the street, I am in a locked van, Screaming.
I have this dream fairly often and I hate it. It upsets me and frightens me too.
Would love to know what it meant.