Faces in the night

Sometimes my sleep is just restless for no apparent reason, and I have a kind of nightmare that doesn't go anywhere. Instead, I briefly see huge, still images in the dark, experience short, scary scenes, and am awakened by loud phantom noises. 

The noises are often loud banging noises, as if someone is rapidly knocking on the side of my dresser really hard. Other times, I hear a panicked voice screaming something over and over, usually a protest of some kind but sometimes my name. Sometimes, instead, it's some kind of hysterical rambling in which the speech is too fast for me to understand most of the words. Once in a while, I hear a loud boom, like a bomb has gone off, or it'll be the sound of metal crashing into metal and glass breaking. That one I can identify as a remnant of a past trauma - as a child, I was in a car accident with my Mom. She was severely injured, and almost died in the car while we were waiting for the EMS to arrive.


The still images can be anything from a scary face or monster to strange landscapes. They are only there for a few seconds before I am on to the next thing, or awake, depending on how startling the image is. One recurring image is a huge reddish monster face with horrible, pointy teeth. It often appears closer to my feet, and if I wake from seeing it, I usually also jerk my knees up to my chest as I wake.
Another is the face of a long-dead relative (who I never met - this is a face from a photo) seen just by itself, as tall as a person, right next to my bed, and looking horribly angry. From the stories I've heard, she was psychotic and extremely abusive of others.


The short scenes are worse. Those usually involve something coming after me, something trying to bite and/or eat me, or something doing something terrible to someone I know. These are always over from start to finish before I get a chance to respond. 

Usually, they wake me up, and most of the time, they're accompanied by one of those loud noises. There are a few that are recurring scenes or themes. One, I've come to think of as looming faces. 

These are usually scary human or monster faces that come at me out of the dark. Sometimes that wakes me. If not, I usually get bitten. Often, the faces are making noises, ranging from an odd whine or growl to nonsense syllables. 

One that happens a lot is a rapid, repeating "Na-na-na" that gets louder as the face gets closer to me. It's spoken in a sharp tone, as an adult would do with "no-no-no" to a little kid about to hurt herself on something she's not supposed to touch.


Another is faces that change after they appear, seeming to melt, or go through rapid color changes. Sometimes they turn into other faces, from human to monster, or from monster to nastier monster. 

The weirdest short scene dream, a rare one that really messes up the rest of my night, is the blasting dream. It starts with this huge booming sound like thunder, close by but not right next to me. Immediately following the boom, everything in my sight is ripped apart and starts flying toward me. That includes people if the scene includes any. As everything gets close to me, I see smoke and sometimes flames behind the flying debris. 

I wake when the blast hits me. It always feel like when you accidentally belly-flop into a pool, and all of your skin smacks at once, except this is a hundred times worse. When I wake up, my skin where the nerves went off in response to the dream always feels tight and sore, like after a sunburn, for several minutes, as if I really did smack into a pool of water.


I think these dreams are a product of high levels of stress, and sometimes of other normal causes of sleep disturbances (like noises outside, illness, or pain from fibromyalgia) because the pattern of them happening seems to follow times when those factors are in play.

Brain Eater

Its dark outside. Very little light comes in through the window, even though there is a full moon, and there is a street light right outside. I've heard a shuffling noise, and I'm going down a hallway toward a room where I think the sound originated.

It's even darker there. I don't want to go in there in the dark.... too scary! I search for a light switch. It takes a couple of minutes, and during that time I hear the sound again, like someone standing in one place, but moving his or her feat around restlessly.

I find the light switch, but as I reach for it, it occurs to me that if I turn on the light, I'll lose the element of surprise. If someone has broken in and is looting that room, he'll know I'm out here as soon as light comes pouring in through the door. I make a mental note of where the switch is, then I tiptoe down the hall to the door.

I peek through the crack between the hinges. I can see the feet and legs (up to the knees) of a man laying on his side on the floor. The feet are twitching, and every so often, his whole body moves as if something is pulling or pushing on a part outside my vision. That's when the shuffling sound happens, as if the sole of a shoe is moving on a wood floor, but the man's shoes aren't making that sound.

At the same time, I can hear a sloppy wet sound, like someone with a really runny nose sniffling while trying to find a tissue. I move a little, trying to change the angle of my view. I can see further up the man's legs to his waist.  There seems to be some kind of thin, lightweight gray fabric laying across his upper body.

Leaning closer to the door and moving further to my right, I can see that the fabric is some kind of covering worn by a bald, really pale figure bent over the body. I can't see much of it, just the back of the head. The fabric starts halfway up the back of the head, and continues on down, flowing like a cloak, or a graduate's robe.

I lean forward to try to get a better look, bringing my cheek into contact with the door frame. The snuffling sound is louder now, and sounds more like someone slurping soup. I can see the man's head. Something I can't get good focus on is holding onto the top of it. It seems to be covered by more of that fabric. His hair is soaking wet, and there is blood on his neck. A white, bony looking appendage is sticking out of the back of his head. I gasp with horror and take a step back. When I do, the thing hunched over the man looks up, then turns to face the door.

I'm immediately nauseated by its appearance, even though it doesn't look incredibly horrifying. Something about it makes me feel just wrong, like having motion sickness or being dizzy from a drug. My limbs feel heavy, and the air around me feels dirty and somehow drippy, like there's some kind of poison in it. I don't want to breathe this. My stomach lurches, and I gag.

The bony appendage I was seeing is the thing's elongated face, which looks like someone grabbed the end of it and pulled, stretching it to a point. It looks solid and hard, but the end is definitely flexible, because it's moving back and forth. I hear sniffing sounds again. It turns its vacant, hollow, beady eyes in my direction, and I see that blood has dripped from its... beak? ... and stained the front of its robe. I hear a hissing sound coming from it, and the door swings open to reveal the rest of the room.

At its feet, the man's body falls forward, showing a hole in the back of his head, where the skull meets the spine. I can see bone, not just the edge of the skull, but the inside of it. The brain is gone, the fluid is gone, even the top of the spine is gone.

A thin, whiny moan comes from the creature standing over the body. It moves smoothly toward me.

Finally, my fear breaks and I run, as I realize that it intends to do to me whatever it has done to this man. I head for the light switch, hoping that the light will scare it away, but the switch is gone. During the second that I pause looking for it, I feel something soft graze the back of my other arm. I scream and bolt down the hallway. There is a door at the end. I'm working my muscles as hard as I can, but I feel like I'm moving under water, fighting the resistance of the dense substance around me and odd currents that pull me off balance. I can hear a heavy, low sound, like one long toot on a low brass instrument, with the pitch getting lower, and lower, and lower, as if the sound were intended to imitate a liquid running down a slope.

Behind me, I can hear the thing shuffling rapidly along the hallway, as if its feet don't work right, or as if it's moving on something other than feet. I am afraid to find out how close to me it is. I just have to get to that door. Twice, I feel something warm on the back of my neck and swing my arm wildly behind me to bat it away. The second time, I come into contact with something cold, hard, wet, and rubbery. I hear a high, thin wail, and I realize that the thing was right behind me. I slam into the door at the end of the hall. It feels heavier than it should as I shove it open and stumble through. Turning, I slam it behind me, right in the monster's face. I hear a thud as it runs into the door. I turn the lock, then push a chair in front of it. Even that feels heavy, and it's just a simple little wooden dining chair. I can still hear the brass sound, but now it is so far into the bass area that it is like a low growl. I can feel it vibrating in my chest.


I turn to run out the kitchen door and almost run into the monster. Somehow, it has gotten behind me even though I heard it run into the door. It knocks me down into the chair. I feel something like hands, but without the solidity of having bones, grab me through the thin fabric that hangs down over its body. I am thrown to the floor. I kick my feet to turn myself over. It takes monumental effort just to move my leg, but I make it happen. To do that, I have to actually look at my leg, even though I'm horrified of not keeping visual track of what the monster is doing. In what seems like slow motion, I kick upward and feel my boot impact against something solid. I hear a crunch and a horrible sound, like a really loud train whistle, but higher pitched. I look and see that I've hit it in the bottom of that beak, and there is a crack along the... jaw? ... where my boot heel landed. The sound makes my head vibrate, like the time I had the really bad sinus infection and sat in with the choir, only it's not just my sinuses. It's my whole head, and the vibration hurts terribly. It feels like my skull is going to split.

I'm crawling toward the door, still intent on getting away, even though I know that the only way to escape this thing is to fight it and break that beak. The nauseous sensation is creeping into my chest. My hands and feet are freezing, but my belly and chest feel hot. It's hard to breathe. The air has taken on a thick, clinging sweetness that tastes almost like bubble gum. There is still pain from the effects of the monster's scream. My vision is messed up, too. It's like I can't get my eyes to open all the way. I feel lightheaded and kind of sleepy, and my whole body feels heavy. It's so hard to move that doing so is taking nearly all of my concentration. I get glimpses of the thing sitting back and watching me, but most of the time I can't see anything but a blur. I can feel that I am almost to the door. If I can just open it, I can escape and fly away. I just have to reach it.

Then, suddenly, I can see the monster's weirdly shaped, deep set and bulging black eyes an inch or two in front of my face, and I feel something grabbing at my shoulders. Adrenaline shoots up through my chest like a lightning bolt.

I have suspected for a long time that this dream is influenced by the time during my childhood when I got sick from a mosquito bite. I contracted a virus that caused swelling in the brain and nearly killed me. The virus made me very sick, causing vertigo, lethargy, nausea, widespread inflammation and pain, extremely high (up to 107º) fever, vision and hearing difficulties, and vivid full-sensory hallucinations, but the symptom that to this day (over two decades later) sticks out the most in my memory is the terrible, crushing headache that it caused. Had someone asked me during that ordeal if I wanted a hole drilled in my head to relieve the pain, I would have agreed to it. Since then, I've had rather a vindictive fearful loathing of mosquitoes.

The earliest I can remember having this nightmare is during the experience of that illness, and I remember it more as a waking nightmare (hallucination) than an actual dream. The house I'm in during the dream is an odd conglomeration of parts of houses I've been in during life, not a real place. The kitchen is the living room to a relative's house, but with appliances and a dining area instead of living room furniture. The hallway is the hallway outside my old room at my parents house, but with a door to the kitchen instead of the closet door at the one end, and who knows what at the other. The room the man was killed in is a friend's father's den, but the man was no one I know. It's like my head just put a bunch of elements together to make up a setting to house the nightmare.


I always wake up at this same point, in a cold sweat and with my heart pounding madly, usually still nauseated, and often with a splitting headache. After having this dream, I do not feel rested, I usually have kind of a foggy/clumsy day with more than the usual muscle and joint aches, and I feel oddly "off" all day as if there is something really important I'm supposed to take care of, but can't remember it. Normally, that does not end up being the case, and there's no disastrous "oh, crap I forgot (insert vital factor here)" moment, but it still feels that way all day.