Am I the only person who actually enjoys having nightmares?
Not the kind of enjoyment where you think, while it's happening, "Oh, this is so great! I love this!". (Then it wouldn't be a nightmare!) I mean the kind where you wake up in the dark, think your dream over, and say, eventually, "That was a cool dream. Awesome premise!"

Let me tell you my awesome nightmare.

I don't remember how it starts (of course), but I find myself shocked to learn that a tribe of people from Africa (or somewhere; they are all really dark) is being held in pens, treated like animals. No, worse than animals. Their captors are experimenting with using them for cannonballs. I keep seeing the people being catapulted overhead. Also, they are apparently being used for food. I see fleeting visions of someone cracking their skulls to get at the brains. There are other visions that I do not remember, nor can I put them into words.
I go to look at the people where they are confined, and see them trying courageously to go on with a normal life. The women are washing clothes, comforting their children, etc. Then the evil captors come back and grab more people for cannonballs.
Overcome with horror, I run around, trying to find someone to tell, to spread the news. Finally, I find out that the evil captors are running a restaurant. I run into the cafe, find some nice looking ladies enjoying their lunch. "Do you know what's going on out there?" I cry desperately. In halting words I tell them the atrocities. They smile, look concerned, nod politely.
Then I hear that the owner of this operation is coming. He probably doesn't know what's going on. If I tell him, he'll make everything right.
I see through the window that he is climbing the stairs to the back porch. I bang the door open, come face to face with him. "Guess what," I shout, about to tell him everything.
Almost too fast to watch, he whips out a pistol and shoots me in the chest.
I find myself lying on the porch, gasping, trembling with shock.
"Don't move," he says, "or I'll shoot you again."
Slowly I take a breath. Then another. And everything goes dark.

I woke up, and I realized that this was my reaction to hearing about what happened to the Aborigines of Australia when the white people came. Scientists declared that the natives were lower on the evolutionary scale than Caucasians were, and because of this, in the words of the speaker I was listening to, "Unthinkable things happened to the Aborigines." He did not need to say more. Apparently my horrified imagination filled in what those things were.
What made my dream awesome was the wonderful thrill it gave me. (I almost never have nightmares.) And it was focused not on myself, or ridiculous scares, or even a movie. It was about something real.

So, does anybody else have an awesome, thrilling dream to share?

That was an interesting dream. I immediately thought of the slave trade between Africa and N. America when you started telling it.

eruheran

I only have one dream I count as a nightmare (but yes it did help to teach my characters about terror) and I didn't like it. It really had nothing to do with fantasy at all which was part of the reason it was a nightmare...

Other than that, I have the craziest dreams. My favorite was when I was flying and could feel my wing muscles pulsing against the air. *gets a glazed look and smiles*

You and Brendan (aka Inesdar) should get together and chat.

It amazes me to think, How does my brain come up with that stuff? When that guy whipped out his gun, it surprised me. I totally thought he was a good guy. My own brain surprised me! How did it come up with a twist like that?

I've written three stories off of dreams. Dreams like that are very, very rare for me. I do get nightmares, but I don't usually remember them, and they are horrible, horrible experiences. *shudders*

Let me see if I can remember my dreams...
The first one involved some kind of war. I was a character under the command of Morgon, who was also a healer, and his eyes changed color. I got bit by a snake and went to him for help, but overheard a scheme to have him assassinated (I think). I went to find him and warn him and the dream diverged into something weird, involving Myst-like puzzles, and I don't even remember it. This dream later became my fourth novel The Last Wizard, and my part in the dream became the now-obsolete character of Tal, Morgon's best friend.

The Isle of Dreams is almost exactly what I dreamt. The cool thing about it is that I had the dream, almost woke up, fell asleep and had the exact same dream all over again. Then when I did wake up I wrote down what I could remember, and an hour later had a complete story.

I'm pretty sure I had another one just recently but I haven't a clue what it was.

I don't know to feel bad for you or say that you have an epic imagination....

I don't get a lot of full blown nightmares like that, but I do tend to be just about asleep than hear a sound or see a shadow and get some sort of scary story or image in my mind. Makes me jumped ten feet in the air every time. But I get a lot of stories that way...and a lot of my stories have dreams...

I would hate to have a nightmare like that. But then, most of my nightmares are similar. I'm usually running for my life from the law.

The last nightmare I can remember having, I was in a house that, on the inside, everything was completely white, like a snowstorm had blown through it. As I was walking up the stairs, I saw fresh blood staining the stairs in a trail. That was kind of freaky.

Yes, I can tell that this forum is inhabited by fantasy authors.

Some of my best story ideas come from dreams. I think it's amazing how the human mind takes a bit of information and instinctively builds on it. God's creation is awesome, isn't it?

In one dream I had a while ago, I was travelling through a white, snowy forest. I would occasionally hear eerie screams in the distance, and my travelling companions told me that they were from Ice Shards. Right then the branch of a tree snapped off, revealling hundreds of the ice shards (which look like icicles, with an iridescent indigo sheen), seconds before they shot off as if from a gun, taking different directions. My companion got hit by one and it completely passed through him as he crumpled to the ground. The shard screamed as it vanished, and my other comrade told me that when the shards hit someone, their spirit is attached to the shard itself, screaming in pain and despair. They can only be freed when all the shards from the same tree are shattered.

It was pretty creepy, but very inspiring. What amazes me is how all my other dreams have faded within days, but this one has stuck with me for years.

Weird, Ciela. But cool. I'll have to read your dream-story, Vanya.
And BushMaid? Your reminded me of another cool dream I had. This one wasn't a nightmare, but it was still weird/awesome. A little bloody.

Friday, the 26th of September, 2008
I am Luke Skywalker. I emerge from the dark fog of sleep and walk into a small room, lit as if by one light bulb. I find myself surrounded by maybe five men. They lift their guns and begin shooting me. As I return their fire, I receive one shot in the hand and several other shots in other parts of my body. I can see the bullets flying slowly through the air. My hand hurts.
All the men fall, except one. I turn around and face him. He is sitting against the wall, maybe he is wounded. He does not use his gun, but reaches for his large pocket knife. As he unfolds it, I try desperately to shoot him, but the bullets will not penetrate. One finally does, but he manages to throw the knife at me before he falls over.
I am now sitting on the floor. I see the knife sticking out of my foot. I pull it out and quickly take my boot off. I begin to crawl towards the door. I turn around and find that two of the men are not dead. They are crawling toward me, apparently determined to finish me off. I hold the knife in my hand, and I know I could stab both of them, but I can't bring myself to do it. It would hurt. Instead I cut and slash at them, hoping to slow them down before I make my escape. Then I get up and run into the hallway, to the door of another room. Before I enter, I pause and look down at my foot. I see my bloody trail on the floor. I hope the men will not see it. I then enter the room. I am joined by two children and a young man.
The room is a storage room, lit as if by fluorescent light. It is long and a little narrow. The children play in here all the time. I perceive some folding chairs, and, standing against one wall are some gray rolling wall panels. They will make a good hiding place.
It takes an agonizingly long time for everyone to choose a panel and get behind it. I lie down on my stomach behind my panel. I hear the young man's voice speaking calmly and soothingly to the children. Then the two bad guys walk by. The young man keeps talking. His voice has given us away. They will find me. They will shoot me.
I am afraid. The dark fog rolls over me.
The fog deposits me in a flower garden. It is night. To my left there is a small house. I kneel on the paving stones. Through the windows I can clearly see the two men. One is different. He now looks young. He is dozing in an armchair, apparently drunk. The other is sitting at a table. He does not see me.
As I sit there under the trees, I begin to use the Force to prevent them from harming me. I say something, he repeats it after me. I am pleased that it works and I wonder why I did not do it before. I am Luke Skywalker, after all.
And so I sit in the garden, whispering words of peace, calmed by the gentle night breeze. After a while I enter the house. I walk past the the table and over to the armchair, where the young man is starting to awaken. I climb onto his shoulders and try to wrestle him to the floor. Then the other man sees me. He wants to know what I am doing. I tell him I am showing the young man the tires. The man at the table says, "Oh," and sits down. The young man tries awkwardly to walk over to the magazine table with me on his shoulders. I do get off his shoulders...I leave the house and go out to the garden, where there is a squirrel who keeps a treasure in his tree...But the dark fog is slowly and surely descending, and it is not long before I am on the journey back to waking world.



Swapping dreams is so fun.

50% of my first book was written from dreams. Whenever I got stuck I'd call it a night, go to bed, wait for that last moment before I went to sleep then think EXCRUCIATINGLY hard about the book and where I left off, I'd go to sleep and the dream would take it from there.

The worst nightmare I ever had lasted for weeks, each night it would just go further, starting up where it left off. It climaxed where I was at some medieval inn, with several beds per room. Several others were in the same room with me. I heard stories about what went on in this inn at night but didn't believe them. That night I learned one very improtant rule:

When in a Fantasy setting, Rumors are always true.

I woke to find everyone else in the room dead, their bodies ripped open and their innards tacked to the walls above them. In blood above my bed were the words "Severence, Retaliation, Punishment."

Then I woke up.

Yes, my dreams tend to be very weird and strange. But they're rarely bloody or gory.

Wow, Whackem! Don't really know what to say about that one.
You must have some pretty scary villains.

I think this thread ought to have a note or something stuck to it, so people know it could be disturbing.

Y'all have some frightful dreams...I don't think I have ever had any dreams that are gory enough to hold a candle to any that have been mentioned here.

Me neither, Bethany. If I ever had a dream like that, I think I would have gone and woke up my parents. Usually my dreams consist of people tracking me down, and I'm a hunted fugitive and I wake up exhausted from running from my life all night. But nothing so gory as those ones.

Haha...I probably already would've woken my parents up with the screaming I would be doing in my sleep.

Most of my dreams consists of the story lines to my books...Like I dream about my finished books and the characters and my favorites scenes that I wrote. It's fun. But when I do have actual nightmares...I hardly ever have anything so...interesting.

Wow, Whackem, you have a very interesting dream system going on. My dreams are never connected, and I can't dream about something on purpose!

Hey, any of you ever heard about Lucid Dreaming? Check out the Wikipedia article.

Not really, They tend to be more embodied evil. Imagine corporate emperor/warlock.

Okay, you know what? Let's post about any kind of dream. Not just the nightmares. Tell the coolest, most fun dream you ever had. Or a nightmare. Whatever you choose.

Thank you, Eve.

Here is a strange one that I had.

Saturday, the 4th of October, 2008
I am standing in a small house. The walls are white, so is the carpet, I think. There is a table in the middle of the room. There are also some couches, somewhere. There are three or four people to my right. There are a few more people across the room. Apparently, the people in this room are kidnapped. I cannot tell who the kidnappers are. A small dog runs in. It is Benji. He is trying to save the kidnapped people. But he runs back out, and I do not see him again.
Now I know who I am. I am a young woman in her twenties, a little plump, with brown hair. I am trying to do something, and the kidnappers tell me not to. They are yelling at me. I tell them, "Tie me up if you don't want me to do it!" They ignore me.
The dream changes. I am in the same house, but now I am myself. All my brothers and sisters are with me. We have been kidnapped. Our captor is a man of about average height, with thick, wavy brown hair down to his ears. He has a beard. He has a nice face, and I do not feel afraid of him. I do not know how he took nine children, including a baby.
There is a small building next to the house. It has a few toilets and a shower. The toilets are broken most of the time. We are held here for a month and a half. What I remember most is the boredom. We have to stay inside all the time and there is nothing to do.
Toward the end of this time, the man tries to entertain us more. He brings in a T.V. and gives us some videos to choose from. I don't think that a kidnapper will have any videos we want to watch, but then we find one that we have seen before, and we watch it for a little while. Then our captor takes us to a playground so we can run around. I do not feel much like running. In fact, I feel pretty lousy. Having no exercise and only junk food to eat has taken its toll on me. I run one lap around the field, and then the man tells us to come with him. We walk the few blocks back to our house. The kidnapper is taking us home for a visit.
It is so good to be home again. Mommy seems glad to see us. "I missed having you around," she says. I know I will always remember my time in captivity.
The kidnapper leaves, saying he will come back for us later. When he is gone Mommy calls the police. The policeman is soon here and, with all of us to show him the way, we walk to the house where he kept us.
When we arrive, we find the front yard full of children. The police officer calls for the man to come out. He comes out holding a toddler.
"Where did you get all these children?" the officer demands.
"I just invited them in for soup," the kidnapper says.
Meanwhile, I am holding a whispered conversation with one of the older children.
"Is he telling the truth?" I ask.
From her reply, I get the general idea that my suspicions are correct: he has left us at home and taken more children. The police officer is going to arrest him, I think. The dream ends.

Strange, huh?

Am I the only one that doesn't have common sense when I'm dreaming? For example. One time I was locked in a room in one of my dreams and I had a Bobby pin and a key...but I didn't use them! I could've picked the lock or used the key. Instead, being my sleepy self, I simply banged on the door and asked to be let out. Of course than I woke up and my sister told me I had been talking in my sleep the entire night.

Anyways, was just curious if I'm the only one that does that.

No you're not.

*Checks Wikipedia for lucid dreaming



Yes. I've done this before, you can kind of control it, and it's cool. Usually I try to fly, but lately that hasn't worked. Quite often I remember having a subconscious awareness I'm dreaming, but never do anything about it.

Most the dreams I have are seem completely normal, but I wake up oddly disturbed. These are also the ones I can't remember hardly at all shortly after I wake up.

Also recently, I've been having 'jumping' dreams, in which I can jump really high. It's fun. This probably a stretch of a concept in my book.

Has anyone ever dreamed they were their characters?

- Terra

Alas, I have not.

Thank you for the merge, Eve! Wow, my post fit in with the topic at hand. Perfectly!

My main character being me I have dreamt that It was me living out my story.

One of the wierdest dreams I ever had happened night before last.

I dreamed I was on a marina with a harpoon I had made and was going spear fishing, when down in the depths of the water I saw a huge fish covered with bony plates. Somehow or another it had devoured my girlfriend's horses and I desperately wanted to spear it just for the bragging rights. But her mom wouldn't let me...

So we eventually determined that with the help of the write brothers: Orville and Redenbocher, Hippies, terrorists, an army of dancing hotdogs which had just broken the treeline (Which were actually giant leeches traveling over land) The bony fish and my girlfriend's mom were all planning to corner the glue market by creating a horse shortage using the bony fish as a disposal unit...

It was all one big conspiracy.

That was my dream.

I never dream that I'm someone else, but I have dreamt of going to my world and meeting my characters...that was fun...

I wish I could dream myself into the world I write about. That would be awesome.

I lucid dream very frequently. When I was little, I kept having disturbing nightmares which would haunt me and I couldn't wake up . . . the feeling of being trapped in a dream is terrifying. Lately, though, I'm able to control my dreams. Somehow I know if they're going to be disturbing; I'm able to wake myself up before I reach that point. Or I'm able to change directions in a dream, or be aware that I'm about to wake up and reverse it. I can't change my actions or the sequences of events in my dreams, though.

How weird is that???

I've lucid dreamt before...in fact, I usually do it when I'm having a nightmare. I'll realize about halfway through the nightmare that I'm dreaming and I'll shake my head frantically trying to wake up. I can't edit the dream once I start having it, though. That's the frightening part...

If you realize you are in a Nightmare try closing your eyes in the dream. That has woken me up more than once.
It has made me wonder if when your eyes are closed in real life they are opened in a dream and vice versa. Am I completely off base?

Or you could fall off something high. That never fails to wake me up.

That concept was also used in the movie 'Inception.'

- Terra

Hmmm...
I came up with the idea myself, with the experiences of a few dreams.

By day my imagintation is my greatest weapon. By night I am completely at it's mercy.

This one's for you, Beth! I had this dream a few days ago.

I am at my grandma's house. She likes to have books around for us to read, so there is a new stack of books sitting in the living room. It looks like six books, or maybe eight, in two boxed sets. Nice books, with dark hardback covers and sturdy binding.
I recognize the author name. This is the series Bethany Faith wrote! (Of course, in real life, she's just finished the first draft of the first book.)
"Look at this," I say to my sister. "Bethany wrote these!" And when I look in my grandma's TV cabinet, I find three movies, based on the books. (Gavin looks totally wrong.)
"This is so cool," I think, smiling. "Thirteen years old and already a published author."

Wow...I haven't even dreamt about me being published yet, but that would be an awesome dream. Anyways, that's so cool! Funny thing is, I would actually hope my series gets published on hard cover. Your dream has strange accuracy.

My "Dystopia Fallen" thread story-idea over on HWSF is based on a dream.

I've had a graphic dream, the only one I remember anyway.

I am the commander of the Science Island forces in the liberation of a city. We are advancing against the Dragon Island forces under heavy fire. We duck behind concrete barriers. A man is blown to pieces in front of me, like a mini-figure. I duck to the side and try to flank them and end up in a building with refugees.

This was from a long time ago, I've had nightmares, but I can't put them into words.

I am very glad we have this thread. Dreams are the other four thirds of our life.
Jay has a friend who is good at lucid dreaming. He once had a dream that he kept himself in for around twenty days, and woke up the same night he went to sleep.

Go to dreamveiws.com, the homepage has a very good and helpful explanation of lucid dreaming



I have had dreams of that sort, and I do not believe they are at all sacrilegious, unless you purposely do something sacrilegious in a lucid dream.

One of the most important ideas in Christianity is:
No one can be held responsible for something he could consciously predict and avoid.



Not until I read this thread. I thought Why do I not dream about the future? And I realized that I do not wonder about the future, or think about it in that way.

So I thought about it a little before I went to sleep, and that night I dreamed about eating beans and tortillas, and the day after the next we ate beans and tortillas.

once a long time ago I dreamed two nights in a row about red thorns growing out of various things, but they were not the same dreams. I think I often dream about the same things in very different dreams. But it is hard to tell whether or not I am simply confused.

Here is a dream I had when I was much younger. It is like a story.

A hollow in a land of everlasting sunset; a dust road comes down through it.

At the bottom of the hollow were four, cubicle, simple, wooden houses, two on each side of the road, which ran from north to south.
Up the north side of the hill on the west of the road was a fish pond with as many fishes as there was water, but it was still hard to catch them.
In the houses lived a weasel, a rabbit, a mole, and a badger, who caught the fish, and made stew for the others in his pot.

The badger had a tree that never had leaves. Once they saw something bright in it, and one by one they tried to climb up to it, but only the weasel was able to climb so high. It was a honeycomb, and the bees had come from the land of midday. The weasel asked for some honey, and brought it down. When they had all tasted the honey they wanted to explore, because the bees were from the land of midday.

They went up the west side of the hollow, and came to a rock with a hole in the middle of its side. They climbed through the hole. Inside was a cave, dimly lighted as if by lamps, but there were no lamps. It had a floor that sloped up to the roof, which arched gently over. Down the middle ran a path, and from the path up to the roof on each side was a dark pine forest.

Then they came to a cave lit with a light like moonlight. Here the cave was wider, and higher, and without a single growing thing; it was all gravel, and large stones, and rabbits that hid when you looked at them. Here the path, which was still made of dust, wandered about with many corners.

Then the path went straight on through a pine forest as before, but the cave was not lit anymore. The only light came from a large opening, and it was bright sunlight, but none of it fell in the cave, which now looked very black. Great, round eyes, as large as walnuts, began to appear in great numbers behind them, and chased them very fast (the eyes really belonged to very thin creatures around a foot high, which ran on their hind legs, but the four explorers did not know this).

They reached the opening and ran out. They saw a grassy bank, with a blue, wooden door in it. But before it there was a pond and a bridge of planks. The badger missed the bridge, and fell in the pond, and swam to the other side.

I have not changed the dream, or added anything, though I have probably missed some things that I do not remember now.

I had an onlookers point of view up to when they went into the cave. After that I saw things from their perspective (they all but vanished from my mind until they began to run). As they ran I had an onlookers perspective for a little, and then had the badgers perspective at the end, and woke up curious about who lived behind the blue door, and very happy that I had swam across the pond.

My dreams are too dark and foreboding to repeat...

Details!!! I demand details!!!

Of whom do you demand details?

I think he meant me.

I had a dream, and there was a book made of paper, and inside the front and on the first page it was full of glyphs from a "South American" writing system. I reproduced a few here from memory, but the four pictures in the box came to my mind the day after I had the dream. I repeated the two glyphs that I like best.

Ever have people tell you about dreams they had with you in them? My best friend has violent shoot-em-up dreams in which I drive the get away van but my sister dreams of being ticked off at me for planting house plants in the toilet.

My friend had a dream about me once... on our missions trip too

She dreamed at one of the guys on the trip had shot me ( ) and actually sat up in her sleep and shook me, yelling; "Vili! Vili! Vili! Oh good, you're okay..." (well, she said my real name, but yeah...) I didn't wake up, but our leader saw the entire thing!

Oh, goodness! That's hysterical, guys!

Someone had a dream about my Mom taking three of us four kiddos on a motorcycle, a vehicle she vowed never to ride. Two of us were in pockets on the side...

My mom's had dreams that she was grounding me before...

Of course...she said I was eight and known to "test the boundaries" a little too often.

Recently I dreamed that I was trying to get up some stairs to a villain's office (he was no very intimidating villain), but he was downstairs making the stairs vanish, and I would have to grope in the air with my feet, and will the stairs to reappear so that I could climb higher.

I've had wonderful dreams and terrible nightmares. So my best dreams have been about things that guys like to dream about.

I've changed dreams when I'm in the middle of them... My Mom says it means I'm not really dreaming...

My brother dreams about food. Once he dreamed about a food fight in the cafeteria in a school in Odyssey, and my Shawn and my Jay started fighting over names with another character (mine and my friend's) named Shawn and Jason Whittaker... They ended up challenging each other to a debate. Oh, and Whit was fined for throwing valuable pies... It was weird.

I had a cool dreaming experience one time...long ago...
I was trying very hard to fall asleep without losing consciousness, so I could go straight into a dream and stay aware. (Has anybody successfully done that?) I was in a dark room...an old man in a dark robe spoke to me, smiling. Then he pulled on a big handle, and swung open a thick, huge, heavy door. Iron and wood. Light streamed in, and I stepped up and looked out the doorway. A deep, clear inlet of water lay below, sheltered by towering cliffs on either side. The rosy cliffs, like walls of an ally, led out to the distant, tropical blue ocean.
"Step through the door," the old man said. Into the dream.
I stood, gathering myself for the long, glorious drop down into the beautiful water, ready to swim into a wonderful lucid dream.
But I hesitated.
And then I was back in my bed.
Awake.