horrible, recursive nightmare

[ratcreature]

As background info you have to know that one of my recurring nightmare elements is my teeth crumbling and falling out. It usually appears as part of other dreams and slowly gets worse, but happens so often that whenever it gets bad enough, i.e. more than one tooth breaking and crumbling, I become aware in a dream that it is a dream because I recognize the "symptom" and try to wake up.

Anyway, the dream as far as I remember actually starts with me having just woken from a dream in which my teeth crumbled as part of it and I remember that dream within the dream. What I recall from the dream within the dream was that it took place in feudal Japan, something with Samurai and war anyway. Maybe fantasy Japan. So I "wake up" from this dream within this dream, and my whole family is there. I think I'm still a teenager, in any case my mother is still alive. Shortly into it I notice that my teeth are still crumbling, even though I'm not in the Samurai dream anymore, so I panic. I realize that this must be a dream too, and talk crazily to my family trying to convince them that this is a dream. They think this is real and that I need to get my teeth fixed.

Meanwhile the teeth crumbling gets worse and worse, yet I won't wake up. My plan now is to fall asleep again, to have a chance to wake up "right". But that doesn't work, I fall asleep to teeth crumbling and wake up in "reality" (the dream one) yet it persists again and again. Though for a little while after each "waking up" it gets better, so I think I'm alright for a little while, only to start again and get worse even faster. So then my plan changes to get back to the Samurai dream specifically. I'm not sure why that was my plan, I think the idea was to backtrack and "reset" so that I could wake out of the dream that was clearly fantasy and started all. So I try to find some historical fiction tv set in Japan to fall asleep to, so my dreams will be like that.

I try to recruit my family to find this kind of thing to watch, but at this point for some reason they don't believe me anymore that I'm me, and show me videos that are supposed to remind me of something? And I'm supposed to answer their question right (I don't remember that part well, but it was also panic inducing, because half my family accused me and the ones still helping me that I was some sort of impostor, there was running around and hiding and fleeing too.) Keep in mind that the teeth crumbling is still going on, resets or not, at this point so bad that I actually don't just spit out broken teeth and fillings and crowns, but these things have morphed into strange, steampunkish medical-mechanical contraptions that break, so I'm spitting out broken metal parts mixed with blood and teeth, still trying to wake up already.

And eventually I do, though it left me disoriented for a while.

Comments

[astridv.livejournal.com]

Eeeeh *shudders* That's an impressive nightmare. I mean, some people pay money at the movie theater to get that kind of hardcore horror.

I had teeth-related dreams once or twice that I can remember, and was always extremely relieved when I woke up. Though mine sounded way less drastic than yours... not so much with the crumbling. Ghastly! (Makes for a fascinating read, though.)

[ratcreature]

Sadly this dream was in no way ghastly or impressive for one of my nightmares. In the worst recursive nightmare I recall I was threatened by some nameless unclean thing, that on the surface was just a guy with no eyes but depressions but *felt* like Lovecraftian horror, and then "woke up" only to find myself paralyzed in my actual bed unable to scream, with my mind supplying that I must still be in REM sleep because you can't move then, with the thing still threatening me from somewhere in the room I couldn't see, so it was the most awful lucid dream ever, because I basically had a panic attack while I was paralyzed and that went on for some time before I woke up. Though the absolute worst are nightmares about bureaucracies.

Frequently my nightmares also combine several horrors, e.g. I once had one that was a family anxiety nightmare (the kind where you are berated by your family for being such a looser and so on during a family dinner) but that actually happened while there was some kind of catastrophic flood that damaged tower structures we were in (my nightmares also frequently feature oppressive, byzantine architecture I'm trapped in) and I had to scramble over waterlogged bloated corpses, and nearly drowned in the dream. Because one horror just never is enough for my subconscious. Another time I dreamed of a sort of fuzzy cactus thing that invited you to pet it, it felt so nice, but as soon as you touched it, you got some kind of horrible disfiguring disease, and the rest of the dream my skin deteriorated with pustules and worse in ever more disgusting ways, which then was the reason why restaurants wouldn't let me in to eat delicious smelling food, so I wandered around hungry. But even that wasn't enough, but the skin disease started to hurt and then I was attacked by some swarm of crawling bugs until eventually the imaginary pain woke me up. Yeah, kind of OTT, I know.

On the bright side, when I have really cool dreams, like fannish dreams or just nice dreams like where you can fly and such, they are equally vivid. I get great crossover dreams sometimes too, like steampunk versions of universes. Once I dreamed a steampunkish Gotham but with HP style magic present and the dream had the coolest aesthetic and color scheme, only marred unfortunately -- once again -- by family members appearing to berate me, I could have done without that, or a Terminator/HP crossover (the premise was that SkyNet was originally build by muggles to protect them from the wizard war and John Connor had to fight both evil wizards and the computers), and once I dreamed of Sheppard hooking up with Ray Kowalski from Due South to solve crimes...

[astridv.livejournal.com]

Man, I honestly don't envy you those nightmares... they sound awful. But I must say, they make for really good reading. Have you ever tried to channel some of that stuff for fic?

On the bright side, when I have really cool dreams, like fannish dreams or just nice dreams like where you can fly and such, they are equally vivid.

Now, for that I am envious. I love flying dreams but I rarely ever remember them, if I have them at all. I did have the one dream which I still remember vividly, in which I could fly and was invisible at the same time. I wish that was a recurring one...

[ratcreature]

Dreams of flying are very rare for me too. I wish I had them more often. I tried keping a dream diary once a long time ago, in part to maybe control the nightmares, but also because I was hoping that I might be able to induce nicer ones like flying and such. That never worked out. Though I had some success in that during that time I remembered my dreams even more, and in greater detail.

I've never tried turning them into fiction, mostly because unfortunately my conscious minds completely sucks at plot and dialog. As a teenager I once started to draw a really vivid nightmare I had as a comic, because even after writing it down in the dream diary I mentioned it wouldn't let me alone. Once I had finished two pages though (quite fast too), the nightmare was gone, and I lost the motivation. But I've put the two pages on my website, together with a summary of the rest of the dream, because I have no shame and online publish even drawings I did decades ago. *G*
http://www.ratcreature.net/comics/dream_1.php

[astridv.livejournal.com]

Wow, that is one bizarr-o dream. I can't believe how many details you remember. Mine fade away within seconds.

I tried keping a dream diary once a long time ago, in part to maybe control the nightmares, but also because I was hoping that I might be able to induce nicer ones like flying and such. That never worked out. Though I had some success in that during that time I remembered my dreams even more, and in greater detail.

For a while I tried a few techniques for lucid dreaming. I did some basic research on the net, and the simple tips I found really worked pretty well. I remembered my dreams much better, and at least twice, while dreaming, I tried one of the tips to check *if* I was dreaming and found that indeed I was. Once you realize you're dreaming, you can take the dream in any direction you like, and I really wanted to fly.

Unfortunately the one time I was so excited that the trick actually worked that I woke up. ;)

Anyway, I gave it up after a while because of the negative influence on my sleeping patterns. Sleep was more fun but less refreshing.