Wreck

This was one of those really short ones that gets to me when I have it. I've had it before, and every time, I feel creeped out all day afterward. It makes me nervous about being in the car at all.

I'm riding with a colleague to a meeting. We both work for the same department of the same company. We're heading across the state for this meeting, which is about something we did that the company wants to expand to things other people are doing. The meeting is really important, and we're dressed in suits. Mine has a skirt, and I'm wearing a moderately frilly blouse with it.

The driver is one of those medium-height, (around 5'7" to 5'9") energetic, positive attitude guys. If he was a woman, I'd say perky. He's fun to work with, and I'm really glad I'm riding with him. We're enjoying the trip. We had a good lunch at a place we both like, and now we're laughing and joking as we drive.

Suddenly there is a huge, unavoidable accident in the road ahead of us. I can't tell what started it, but there is now a several car pile-up around a tanker semi. I can't see what the semi says it's carrying, but I'm worried. The driver hits his breaks and turns the wheel to avoid hitting the cars in front of us, but we still end up crunching into a little sporty two-door that is just off the right side of our lane. We aren't badly damaged, but the two-door is really crunched up. The people inside are moving, and I don't see blood, but that doesn't mean they aren't badly injured.

We are ok. We decide we should get out and see if we can help anyone. Before we can, another vehicle slams into the middle of the mass of cars all ready crashed. This vehicle is larger, but I can't see it well enough to identify what it is because I'm not looking in that direction.

The tanker truck explodes, sending cars flying. The little two-door lifts up off of the pavement, taking the front end of our car with it, then forces us backward. We're flying back, then falling as we go off the edge of the road and into what looks like a quarry. It feels like we flip over twice. We land kind of on our side, with the driver's side down. All of the glass in the car is broken, and dirt comes pouring in. I hear a sick, wet crunching sound and a scream from beside me.

Then, it's quiet except for the pattering sound of dirt falling into the car, now more slowly. I have dirt up to my knees. I look over, and my colleague is covered up past his chest. He is very pale, and his eyes are red-rimmed with anguish. On his face is an expression of grim determination. He looks at me, and his face bears an intensity I can't fathom.

I'm terrified.

He struggles to speak.. "I'm dead. See if you're buried."

Somehow, I know that he means for me to see if I can get out of the car. Before I can look, I see his eyes kind of glaze over and lose focus, his face loses all expression, and he starts quietly repeating that line over, and over. "I'm dead. See if you're buried. I'm dead. See if you're buried. I'm dead. See if you're buried." He speaks rapidly, and with no emotion, as if trying to remember a list instead of to communicate, or as if he's stuck on that one line and can't move on to the next thought. He is extremely pale.

For a moment, I am confused, and a little afraid of him, and then I realize he's dying. The crunch I heard was something under the dirt damaging his body. The pattering noise I'm hearing is not the only sound in the car. There is a trickle of liquid somewhere that I can't see. He's bleeding to death. He's repeating that line because he is stuck on it. His brain isn't getting oxygen, and he's losing consciousness. His last words were his way of telling me to get out of the car before the dirt traps me in here with him. I want to escape the sinking car, but I don't want to leave him. It's an awful feeling.


He is still repeating that line when I wake up. It's the last thing I hear before finding myself in the darkness of my room.

Every time I've had that dream, I've always awakened with a feeling of sheer terror, sure I'm trapped in that car, horrified at what has happened to my colleague, and filled with dread over the fact that I cannot do anything to help him.


The parts of the dream that I experience are so vivid and feel so real that I can't seem to shake it off when I wake up. I still feel that sense of dread and horror, and kind of a sense of guilt over having to save myself and leave my dying colleague behind. 


One of the weirdest things about how real this dream is, is the fact that the "colleague" and the job are completely nonexistent. The person in the dream is not anyone I've met in real life. He's not anyone famous, or anyone I remember seeing on TV or in movies, either. I've never worked for a department of a company in a capacity like in the dream, either.


The closest thing I have to relate to this is that I was in a terrible accident as a child. My mother, grandmother and I were traveling across the state to see family. I was sleeping in the back of the car when the accident occurred. My mother was severely injured, and nearly died of her injuries. I wasn't hurt, but it was only by chance that I wasn't killed. The only reason I survived is because of the way I was laying. Had I been facing the other direction, the car that hit us would have smashed my head.

The memory is traumatic, but not in the same way as this dream. No one actually died in that accident, and I was young enough to not understand a lot of what happened. There were only two cars involved, ours and the car that hit us. There was no semi, no explosion. It was just a really bad two car accident. They did have to use the jaws of life to get my Mom out of the car.
Some of my memory of that accident is distorted (like the way the car looked after the accident; I remember it looking much worse than I'm told it actually did) but I grew up with Mom & Grandma both very much alive afterward, so I'm pretty sure the death in this nightmare didn't come from that experience.

Childhood nightmare; lethal injection

I was still a kid when I had this one. It happened during the time my parents were building a room onto our house. I remember that it was built around the time I five, before I started kindergarten, but we also used to call the daycare I occasionally attended "school." That is probably what I was thinking of in the beginning.
This dream upset me enough back then that it has stuck with me for over thirty years, and I remember a lot of details. I can still see a lot of it in my mind's eye when I think about it.

It's the middle of the night, and I'm in my bed. I'm supposed to be sleeping, but I suddenly realize that I haven't laid out school clothes for tomorrow. I get up and quickly grab a few things and lay them out on the chair by my desk . Everything is really quiet, but now I can't sleep. I think I will get a drink of water.

I head to the kitchen, get a stool, climb up and get a glass out of the cupboard. Then, I'm standing at the sink running water when I hear soft footsteps behind me. I think that maybe my mother has heard me and has gotten up to tell me to go back to bed, but when I turn around, no one is there.

Maybe my brother is sleepwalking again. I go into the living room to make sure he's not in there. When he does that, I can usually get him to go back to bed by taking his hand and just guiding him there.

He's not in the living room, though, so I decide that while I'm finishing my water, I'll check the doors to make sure he hasn't opened the door and gone outside. He's never done that, but he's done other complicated stuff, like putting his toys on the kitchen table, so I figure it could happen.

The porch door is closed, but then when I go into the kitchen, the sliding doors are open. I go over to the door to look outside, and a tall man jumps out from behind the curtain. It's the doctor my mom took me to for an allergy shot when my doctor was out on vacation. I remember that unlike at my doctor's office, when he gave me the shot, he stuck the needle in a different part of my arm and it hurt really bad.

He has a huge syringe with a long needle on it, and he is grinning at me. It's not a normal grin. He doesn't look happy, he looks kind of confused and angry and over-excited all at the same time. His eyes are opened too wide, and his smile is, too. The stuff in the syringe is really nasty, thick gray sludge. I'm pretty sure it's poison, and if he catches me, he's going to give me a shot of it and it'll kill me. As I back away from him and he advances, it occurs to me that maybe he's come here to kill my whole family. I don't just have to get away from him. I have to wake everyone up and get them all out of the house. If we can just get out, we'll be safe.

I run down the hall back toward the bedrooms, but it doesn't go where it's supposed to, and I end up in a different set of rooms. After a moment of wandering, simultaneously trying to find my way out and hide from the killer doctor who is following me, I recognize the layout of my friend's house, except no one is there. Every room is empty. I remember then that she moved, and doesn't live in that house any more. I head out the door, turn, shut and lock it behind me. I look around, and I'm back in the kitchen.

I head down the hall to my brother's room again. This time, I keep my hand on the wall so I don't get lost, and I end up in the right place. I notice my his door is open, which is kind of unusual. Normally, he keeps his door closed. I look to see if he's in bed. He's there, but something is wrong. It takes me a minute to figure it out, then I realize his skin looks funny. He's kind of gray, and there's no movement at all. His eyes aren't moving, and his chest isn't moving. I touch him, and he's cold.

This is very bad. I slam open the door and run to Mom and Dad's room, yelling that something's wrong with my brother. Standing beside the bed, I reach out to touch Mom's hand to wake her. Her fingers are cold, and her skin is the same gray as my brother's skin. She is not breathing, either. I notice a tiny red mark on her arm. There is a drop of dried blood. The light in the room dims until I can only just see her silhouette, but I know I'm too late, and she's dead.

I run around the bed to wake my dad, and slam into something solid but soft. I yell for Dad, but he doesn't answer. A hand grabs at my arm, and something sharp grazes my skin. I pull out of the grip and back up. In the darkness, I can make out a tall shape that is not my Dad. It's the doctor. He's gotten out through the door that I locked. I don't know how, but he got to my entire family before I could wake them. They are all dead, and I'm next.

I panic and run. I can hear a high pitched whining noise, and it takes me a second before I realize it's coming from me. I'm so terrified that when I run out of the room, I run face first into the hallway wall right across from the door. At the same time, the understanding that my whole family is gone and they're never going to come back hits me, too. I turn my back to that wall and sink to the floor, horrified and filled with grief. I feel something touching me, and I know it's him. I'm not afraid any more. I don't try to get away. As I feel the needle poke into my arm, all I can think is that in a few minutes I'll be in heaven with my family instead of here with my heart breaking over their deaths. The needle poking me is really painful, and whatever he's shooting into my arm burns like acid.

That dream ended there. I don't remember if I woke up, or lapsed into another dream, but I do remember that when I got up for the day, I had to hug everyone in my family because I was so glad they were alive. 

I remember that when I got my shot at that doctor's office, I had a worse than normal reaction to it. My arm swelled up like I had half an apple up my sleeve, and had to be iced down. I was given a shot in my butt that made me shaky and hungry. It could have been an epi shot, but I think it was more likely cortisone to counteract the giant "hive" that had broken out on my arm. I remember making Mom promise that she'd never take me to him for another shot again. It didn't take much effort. 

Shots have never really bothered me, aside from at that one doctor's office. I began receiving them as a toddler, and continued to receive weekly injections until I was in college. I got very sick once in elementary school, and was given a spinal tap to test for meningitis, and had no problem handling that needle. 

I am not really sure what caused the nightmare, but a little online research tells me that the term "lethal injection" may have been uttered in the news several times that year, because there was discussion about instituting the use of it, and there was controversy. I may have heard the term on the news and associated it with my allergy shots because I know I had heard my doctor use the term "injection" when speaking of them, too.

This is the first nightmare I ever remember having in which I feared for someone other than myself.