Off-Topic Dream and Nightmare Thread

General Off-Topic Discussion
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I usually don’t remember my dreams, but there was a particularly disturbing one a few weeks ago that I thought was interesting. I was trapped in an arranged marriage to a foreign singer I didn’t like. The singer doesn’t exist in real life, but in the dream was a rich and famous celebrity who was madly in love with me. The singer and both our families expected us to one day have kids and raise them. My family kept telling me how hard it was to get a rich and beautiful singer as a partner, and how lucky I was to be married to a celebrity. The singer’s many fans were deathly envious of me and wouldn’t let me say anything negative about the marriage or their idol. The few times I did, I got dozens of anonymous hate messages telling me to kill myself.

Our families went shopping together for our new house, a house both families would jointly pay for, where we would live together as a couple. The whole dream was characterized by inescapable dread.

I’m not trapped in an arranged marriage in real life, but I’ve been reading about arranged marriages in the early 20th century, so that must have been a factor.

Two years ago, I had a similar nightmare I wrote down. I was at home, but it kept turning into another home, a house on a snow-covered hill with bare black trees at the bottom. The trees were black and brambly, and against the blue-gray sky they somehow evoked a sense of pure horror. There was one big tree on the left side of the path you walked up to reach the house, and a brambly thicket to the right, black thorny undergrowth so thick that nobody could ever walk through it. In the dream, I went to various other places trying to escape, like the grocery store, but every place I stayed in gradually transformed into that house on the snow-covered hill.

Has anyone else here had vivid, interesting, or disturbing dreams? What are your best or worst ones?

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I had a recurring nightmare for over a decade, and got sick of it so I turned it into an IF game.

More recently, in the past year, I’ve been suffering recurring nightmares about an ongoing personal matter. However, the person it involves apparently reads the forum anonymously, so I won’t explain any specifics.

If you know, you know.

What’s more interesting is I used to also have frequent nightmares about the deep ocean, but lately the deep ocean has become a sort of home for me in my dreams, instead.

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I Am Prey, right? I haven’t played it yet, but it looks cool.

It’s funny how different dreams can be. A lot of my nightmares that would be horrifying in real life are oddly calming to think about when I wake up. One dream I had involved being eaten alive by underwater maggots, but it might have been a video game within the dream, so my primary reactions were resignation and thinking about how this dungeon was too hard and our adventuring party would never get past it.

Edit: I dream about personal stuff too, but won’t share it since it’s hard to do that without revealing too much about yourself. Don’t feel like you have to do it.

I will say that I sometimes dream about someone I knew who passed away. It’s jarring to wake up from those dreams. Here’s an example edited from a hastily written note a few years back:

I dreamed that (name) and I were in school together, again. A different school with long, sterile grey hallways, windowless corridors underground, florescent lights, and ugly green lockers. The city had a dark, misty, dismal atmosphere. Seemed to be perpetual twilight. For some reason, we were also detectives on the side and went around solving mysteries. (name) helped me find a dead body in a curious location: there was a section of the city covered with a metal mesh or grille, like the cage of a large aviary you’d use to keep the birds in, grid-shaped and curving extremely high above us, against the grey sky. There were lights hanging from the grille. They weren’t on, but they were shaped like large flat bowls with the curvature pointing up, a kind of u-shape. Hanging from the ceiling on poles, or wires. I knew the corpse was below the deactivated lights, but for some reason had extreme difficulty spotting it until (name) pointed out the exact location to me. (name)'s parents were also in the dream, and they didn’t like when we spent time together.

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Correct! :grin:

Thank you! :grin:

Sounds like either Half-Life or Galidor.

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well, I’ll follow this thread with a warning: I have the Gift of Joseph. (that is, what I dream sometimes actually happens…)

ex. April 1992 I dreamed of an US black policemen arguing with someone about the habeas corpus… and the next day (taking in account the timezone) the Rodney King riot started.

Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.

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Can’t recall any specific dreams worth mentioning, but I think it worth noting I usually still have a working eye in my dreams even 13 years after going blind.

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I’m born deaf, but in dreams I happen to actually hear.

Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.

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I’ve dreamed on very rare occasions of things that seemed to occur afterwards in real life, but I’m not a spiritually-minded person, so I chalk it up to coincidence. It hasn’t happened for many years now, which is good, because I’d be horrified if my destiny was to get eaten alive by underwater maggots.

I haven’t played either of those games, actually, though I’ve heard a lot about Half-Life. I have no idea what inspired the underwater maggot dream. I know I wrote it up in full, so I might paste the entry here when I get the chance.

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I’ve always had vivid and strange dreams and nightmares. Perhaps oddly, for most of my life I’ve enjoyed my nightmares like I would any decent horror movie. I have quite a few recurring dreams as well: not the same dream exactly, more like sequels with the same twisted settings or circumstances. There’s one with the town I was born in and surrounding area that doesn’t match reality, but is consistent from dream to dream. It’s very strange to think about on waking, but neat. There are places I’ve visited so many times in my dreams that I almost swear I must’ve been there in reality, when I know that no such place exists.

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Resurrecting my own thread in a fit of narcissism because I want to tell people about the horrific nightmare I had a few days ago.

Horrific Nightmare

I dreamed that an enormous red sun swallowed up the sky, filling it with searing red light. I was a kid again, and saw everyone I knew and loved burning alive.

Some divine force from the heavens, the same one that had caused this apocalypse, offered me and a bunch of other kids the chance to participate in a death game. We had to run across the burning landscape, over the cracked and bloodied asphalt, dodging flaming debris and bodies, to make it to a finish line. The first ones there would get some implied reward, maybe the ability to escape this whole mess.

I ran as hard as I could. The city was falling apart, the trees were leafless and all ablaze. It took hours until the finish line was in sight: decorated with balloons and a checkered line painted on the road, like the finish line of a marathon. We were stumbling by the end, exhausted.

I was in second place, and I saw the girl in front of me reach the finish line to be immediately vaporized by a column of light. The game was a cruel trick the entity was playing on us for its own amusement.

I also had another bizarre dream or nightmare the night after that, which involved being some NEET shut-in loner guy who lived in a lone house in a deep forest. My only hobby was breeding bugs that looked kind of like silverfish. Well, generations of selective breeding made the bugs hyperintelligent, capable of language and complex thought. Some of them escaped to space and started their own alien bug society, which was on the whole better than human society. I either accompanied them to space, or only realized what I had done once the hyperintelligent space bugs descended from the heavens and told me that I was their creator. Perhaps they took me on a tour of their society and then cast me out again. I just remember desperately begging them to take me back.

Later on one of my unsuccessful dates (where I was simultaneously this NEET loner trying to break out of my shell and get a love life, while being at the same time the girl he was dating, also a kind of oddball loner who had sympathies for him but was suspicious of whether he was really stable enough to sustain a relationship with), I told the girl, as the NEET, about the bug space aliens. She didn’t believe me.

The two people in this dream were both based on people I know, oddly enough.

I haven’t had any dreams besides those two. I haven’t remembered my dreams in a while, maybe because I don’t get enough sleep.

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Glad you revived this thread so I could talk about my weird dreams without me looking vain!!

Your nightmare sounds twisted! I actually have worse nightmares when I sleep less.

August 28 2025 - Plot of a feel good urban fantasy movie

Dream where a high school teacher is about to lose his job for not getting results for his kids on standardized tests when the devil appears to him and says he can get the teacher a new job at a magical high school (urban fantasy with the masquerade, teacher did not know magic existed). However, in exchange, at the end of the school year, he will turn into a monster too. Not realizing what he’s signed up for, the teacher says yes.

Over the course of the school year (which was elided over in the dream) he teaches an unruly class of monstrous and magical kids life skills and how to believe in themselves in a way no one has before (think Dead Poet’s Society but with monsters).

At the end of the year he’s proud as his kids graduate, though upset that the year slipped by so fast through his fingers. Then the devil (who he’d completely forgotten about) comes calling.

The devil tells him that he’s going to be turned into a werewolf. It occurs to him that he hadn’t seen a werewolf student in class, but thinking of typical werewolf media, he seems a little relieved. But it turns out, according to the devil, that werewolves are actually completely uncontrollable monsters that go on a rampage every full moon and eat swathes of people — most mundane missing persons cases in the city are because of them. The devil goes on to say that’s only a rare fraction of how many folks they actually eat, as werewolves prefer magical creatures. He chuckles and says the odds of the teacher eating one of his own previous students is very high.

The teacher pales and starts to bolt, but the devil promises him that he can’t run forever.

However, the teacher’s former students catch wind of this issue and band together to beat back the devil, saving their beloved teacher.

The end

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That turned from dark to more heartwarming by the end! Sad I never remember my dreams, I would like to be able to have dreams like this…

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I dreamed that Zarf tracked down an obscure bug in Inform 6 that led to the selfobj accidentally having a really huge property table. Fixing this would save precious RAM for retro machines.

…yeah, I have no idea either. I don’t even use Inform 6! Probably a sign I should spend less time on this forum.

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One of my first games written in Ink was based on a common nightmare. And I also wrote something a year ago about a nightmare where I had to sew a mysterious hole in my eyelid shut. I think nightmares can be a decent source of inspiration for short IF, particularly of the CYOA/branching narrative variety. They’re a good fit for the kinda-having-agency-but-not-really vibe of that style of IF.

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Ouch, sounds awful. I have a bad enough day when I’m on low sleep without having to deal with a nightmare from the night before on top of that.

I thought something truly awful would happen at the end of your dream, so I’m pleasantly surprised by the ending.

This is a really funny one.

One of the many ideas I have for jams that I’ll never run, since I’m not really the type of person to run them, is a jam that requires you to base the game you submit on your own dreams or nightmares. Or maybe a collective pool of them, something like what r/themallworld has. I guess there are enough Yume Nikki fangame jams that you could hop onto one of those, but Yume Nikki comes with its own narrative conventions that are somewhat restricting for fangames, the “no dialogue” one being the biggest.

Had another dream a few nights ago that’s IF relevant, so I’m sharing it here. I think it was inspired by reading the description for Crier on the Spring Thing page. But I had this dream before I played the game.

In my dream I discovered an obscure Twine game Porpentine had made more than a decade ago, one of their earliest games, where you played as an adventurer exploring a decaying forest on a coastal island. An aesthetic of flesh and slime, branches dripping with orange ooze, and monsters terrorizing the few villagers left within. Surreal fragmentary writing that was hard to piece together and made oblique references to then-current political events. Eye-searing colors on the game page to mimic discomfort.

There was a hardy old lumberjack who provided wood for the village, soon to retire, who said that when the village looked for a replacement lumberjack from the mainland, she’d vet them to make sure they would survive, or else some naive family of woodcutters would move in and die. If you provoked the forest too much or upset the villagers, you’d be driven into the forest and corrupted, trapped amid the slime and ooze, unable to ever leave.

Also, the adventurer was Frieren, from the anime show Frieren. I haven’t watched a single episode of Frieren and don’t plan to. I don’t know why I dreamed about it. The funniest part is that Frieren was only published in 2020 according to Wikipedia, so nobody could have referenced it more than a decade ago because it didn’t exist.

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I had a non-narrative dream where I was just coming up with a premise for a parser, woke up long enough to write a note, and went back to sleep. My note:

Detective lilguy

Hm squint story

Detective Lilguy is the character, he’s a detective and a li’l guy. “Hm,” “squint,” and “story” are your three most important verbs. I don’t remember what Hm was supposed to do. Squint was like some special form of examine? Story was launching into a long story to distract or annoy a suspect. Did I mention I watched an ep of Columbo before bed? Anyway, this one needs a few more dreams before it’s ready to become a draft, I think.

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This is a really funny one. “squint” I can see, but the other two are avant-garde to say the least. Makes me wonder about a parser game where all the verbs are actually nouns. You could do some weird puzzles with that.

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I had another disturbing dream last night, I guess you could call it a nightmare. It was fragmented, but I’m trying to put the parts together by writing it down.

I dreamed that I lived in a future Earth where the technology to transfer human minds into animal bodies had been invented. I had to transfer myself into the body of an emperor penguin to help film a documentary about emperor penguins. A camera crew would follow me around after the transformation and record my daily life.

This might have been the setting of a game or story that my real-life self was making. I remember “playing the game” as the penguin, diving into clear blue arctic waters, catching fish and swimming away from sharks. They were this specific species of shark, called “sawtooth shark”, that mainly predated on emperor penguins, and I was terrified of them. You were never fully safe from them in the deeper waters - they were enormous and might come out from the depths at any moment and swallow you in one bite. The only warning you had was a dark shadow rising from below, and then you’d have a few seconds to get the hell out of dodge before it ate you alive.

I saw other wildlife, unrealistically close-up and gorgeous. Among them were other penguins, families of octopi and a bizarre sea-snail made of worms. It might have been a colonial organism made of multiple worms that naturally formed into the shape of a large snail to deter predators. The species reproduced by making more worms and carefully weaving them into the pattern of a new snail. An incomplete snail or worm colony had a skeletal look to it, the partly-constructed spiral shell like a ribcage wriggling underwater. The shell was the largest and most time-consuming part of the snail to build.

As time passed, the water started heating up and becoming more shallow due to climate change. Towards the end of the “game”, there was no more ice and all the water was only a few feet deep. I was boiling alive in the hot sun. I think the film crew tried to save me, but they weren’t fast enough.

Probably inspired by seeing a news article some days ago about how the emperor penguin is now an endangered species and is heavily threatened by climate change.

The dream actually goes on after that. In real life, years ago, I was briefly part of a reading/writing Discord server full of awful people who eventually bullied multiple users, including me, into deleting their accounts. In my dream I was back in that server and telling the people in it about my game, or story, which might’ve just been an idea and not a full-fledged game I’d actually finished creating. They were utterly dismissive of the concept. They called it trash that would never compare to great art and great artists, like Joyce and Ibsen for example, and said I should be ashamed of myself for having such childish ideas and then proceeded to call me a loser with no life who would never amount to anything artistically and so on. Anyway, I woke up with unpleasant memories of those people and what they said to me in real life.

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