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snarpI haven't had a dream I'd really term a nightmare for a couple of years. I have scary dreams all the time, but on some level my subconscious must be pretty optimistic, because there's always some kind of escape route or task to complete to get rid of the bad thing.
But last night I decided to skip my before-bed Benadryl. I've been taking it pretty much every night recently, because I've been having really bad insomnia, but I'm not exactly thrilled about the idea of getting dependent on it, so. I didn't fall asleep until about five AM, and when I did I apparently dropped straight into this really long nightmare where I was trying to get out of this evil multistory Japanese department store, and I could never find the ground floor, and each floor had some new awful obstacle.
One floor was full of ghosts of people I knew just sitting quietly and looking sad in this dark cluttered hoarder-house room full of broken or dirty Christmas decorations, where the only light came from another floor where a party was going on. Another was sort of a competition where four people got infected with horrifying parasites and had to figure out how to cure themselves before they died. There was a movie theater that was just showing this endless of loop of the trailers for a set of ill-advised new Pixar movies, one of which was basically an extended sequence of close-ups of little kids tied up and screaming as needles come at their faces. I passed through that floor fucking twice.
There was sort of a JRPG with a suicidal shinigami for a protagonist, who looked alternately like a short albino guy, a cat, and a grasshopper, and the goal was to show him so many horrible deaths he finally kills himself in despair. One was World of Warcraft, but your character's dead and can't be revived and is running from something, and there are signs you can't read everywhere.
One floor was just straight-up a Dwarf Fortress. Apparently that game doesn't require improvement to meet this dream's thematic needs. I need to stop playing Dwarf Fortress.
I can remember like six other specific floors, and I know there were others that I've lost over the course of the day. This was a really long goddamn nightmare.
Also, a couple hours ago I was out driving, and for a second I saw some kind of floppy-limbed monster-thing dancing frenetically by the side of the road. To repeat, this was not part of my dream; my brain spontaneously generated a waking-life monster hallucination for me as I was driving home at nine fucking o'clock at night. Fuck my brain.
So I took the fucking Benadryl tonight, because Jesus Christ.
But last night I decided to skip my before-bed Benadryl. I've been taking it pretty much every night recently, because I've been having really bad insomnia, but I'm not exactly thrilled about the idea of getting dependent on it, so. I didn't fall asleep until about five AM, and when I did I apparently dropped straight into this really long nightmare where I was trying to get out of this evil multistory Japanese department store, and I could never find the ground floor, and each floor had some new awful obstacle.
One floor was full of ghosts of people I knew just sitting quietly and looking sad in this dark cluttered hoarder-house room full of broken or dirty Christmas decorations, where the only light came from another floor where a party was going on. Another was sort of a competition where four people got infected with horrifying parasites and had to figure out how to cure themselves before they died. There was a movie theater that was just showing this endless of loop of the trailers for a set of ill-advised new Pixar movies, one of which was basically an extended sequence of close-ups of little kids tied up and screaming as needles come at their faces. I passed through that floor fucking twice.
There was sort of a JRPG with a suicidal shinigami for a protagonist, who looked alternately like a short albino guy, a cat, and a grasshopper, and the goal was to show him so many horrible deaths he finally kills himself in despair. One was World of Warcraft, but your character's dead and can't be revived and is running from something, and there are signs you can't read everywhere.
One floor was just straight-up a Dwarf Fortress. Apparently that game doesn't require improvement to meet this dream's thematic needs. I need to stop playing Dwarf Fortress.
I can remember like six other specific floors, and I know there were others that I've lost over the course of the day. This was a really long goddamn nightmare.
Also, a couple hours ago I was out driving, and for a second I saw some kind of floppy-limbed monster-thing dancing frenetically by the side of the road. To repeat, this was not part of my dream; my brain spontaneously generated a waking-life monster hallucination for me as I was driving home at nine fucking o'clock at night. Fuck my brain.
So I took the fucking Benadryl tonight, because Jesus Christ.
no subject
Date: 2013-01-19 05:01 am (UTC)Except when I was pregnant, when this is exactly the kind of dream I had, except tailored to pregnancy-related fears. What fun we had together, me and my brain.
no subject
Date: 2013-01-19 05:40 am (UTC)I had a period of having pregnancy-horror dreams in middle school, I guess because that's when I started on the pill, but the dreams always presented me with a solution to this "problem." I was fourteen and considered it a problem; people got expelled for that, and such. Solutions presented by my subconscious included the baby turning out to be just a translucent bubble doll-thing in the shape of a baby, made of bright fuchsia glycerin soap, which popped out and dissolved in the shower one day. (I found this image unsettling once I woke up, but in the dream it seemed fine.) Another time I gave birth to a dragon which promptly flew away, which my dreaming self found far preferable to the expected baby, though I was sad that I didn't get to ride around on the dragon. I did actually get an dream-abortion once, but generally my imagination found that too limiting.
I actually think I've only ever given birth to alarming nonhuman objects in my dreams. My subconscious is packed with enough symbolism to lift Freudian theory from the ashes of discreditation.