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They’re not necessarily threatening, but there’s something about the look in their eyes that bother me. It’s probably the sentience or the ‘not knowing what’s behind the exterior’ look, but… *shrug.* I’ve had dreams like this since being exposed to Pet Sematary 2 back when I was eight or nine. I’ve been having them off and on ever since.

I’m roused from my sleep, someone is yelling, but it’s all muffled. I see lights flashing red and blue out my window. Things are fuzzy until I look down at my hands and the world comes vibrantly to life with color and sound.

There’s blood on my hands, and officer standing in front of me and one at the door. They tell me my family is dead and ask if I have weapons, before cuffing me and pulling me through the house.

I see my wife and child dead in the living room. Despite believing I didn’t harm them, I’m filled with guilt, shame and fear. Then I wake.

However, whenever the stress levels in my life get to be too high, I have the same nightmare, over in over: that, not only did I hallucinate the divorce and that we’re still together, but that I come home from work one day to find out he’d gotten drunk, gone on a rampage, slaughtered our two children and the pets, then burned down the farmhouse where we lived out in the country…and was waiting for me in front of the house with an axe.

The last thing I see before I wake up is inevitably the blade of the axe, descending onto my face.

I have this nightmare around two or three times a year. I always wake up screaming.

It’s pretty simple, really. I was riding in the back seat of a car with my wife and parents. We rounded a bend in the highway and came face to face with a huge tornado. It took up the entire road and was spinning an uprooted tree like a blade in a blender. There was no way we could stop in time, but the driver slammed on the brakes anyway. As we began our slow, inevitable slide toward what I knew was certain death, I accepted the situation, said a quick prayer, and told my wife that I loved her. I awoke just as we plowed into the tornado.

It’s an old dream, but I’ve never forgotten the sence of acceptance and clarity about what should be done in my final seconds. Should I be given the opportunity to see my real death coming, I hope I face it with the same aplomb.

It begins with me walking on an old wooden bridge over a shallow pond in the middle of the night, the moon the sole source of lighting. As I walked over the bridge, some of the wooden planks in front of me suddenly exploded into shrapnel as several octopi-like tentacles rose up and out of the pond. On the end of each tentacle was a large eye; each eye looking blood shot, sickly, and directly at me. They stared at me in for a moment, then swiftly and in tandem they reached and wrapped around my legs, quickly pulling me into the water with them!

It makes no sense that they could do this as the pond was shallow looking and would have probably only come up to my waist as I recall it. However, in my dream they pulled me completely underwater. I can remember the muted sounds of my screams underwater and watching the bubbles rise to the surface around my flailing arms as I tried to claw my way to the surface. I could see the surface; it was mere inches out of reach from me. I could feel the collective grip of the tentacles around my legs and another one joining in to wrap itself around my waist. They made no attempt to pull me farther, they were content and cruel enough to keep me just out of reach of the surface.

I don’t recall looking down just what exactly was grabbing me, but I did have this sudden “3rd person view” of looking at the scene from the edge of the pond, as if I could watch myself drowning from the shore. But there was no sign of my struggle under the water. In fact, the pond was eerily still, no ripples, no bubbles breaching the surface; it was as if a plate of glass was placed over the surface after I went under. This respite eventually ended and I was back to being terrified and uselessly fighting to escape, still underwater.

This went for an abnormally long amount of time, or at least in my mind it did. I should have drowned long before I threatened to. I never made it to the surface.

Finally I woke from this nightmare, and was so spooked by it, I could not only sleep the rest of the morning, I didn’t sleep well for the next few nights. I never looked into any dream interpretations as to what this dream meant exactly; in fact I think I’d be afraid to know what it means. Nor did I ever dream of it or something similar to it again. But nearly twenty years later it still lingers in my memory, haunting me just enough to remind me of just how scary it was.

I was running in an open field, and as I ran I began to lift off from the ground. But then I became aware of something chasing me. A witch. In panic, I started to descend and became ensnared in a barbed-wire fence. The fence turned into a web, and the witch turned into a giant spider.

I don’t think I wet the bed, but I definitely woke up in a cold sweat that night.

I can hear her breathing, but it’s a wet, almost gurgling sound, like her chest has been crushed. I can almost see her, but I can’t lift my head enough to see more than the peripheral outline. I know her hair is white, and her scalp is the grey-pink of mouse feet. She never moves, never speaks. I always feel like she’s going to say something. That’s the worst part of the dream.

I’m terrified that someday, she will.