Death Dreams

[cannibal cop]

Had an interesting death dream yesterday that was quite unlike any of my previous experiences in that area. (I understand that many consider this general area of discussion an unforgiveable bore, and on the whole I tend to agree. Nevertheless, I shall continue.)

Interestingly, the dream occurred while I lay in a sunlit room resting my eyes in hopes of at most a ten minute nap. Not exactly conditions conducive to deep and vivid dream states, at least not in my experience. It seems, however, that barely had I closed my eyes when the dream began, and the faint light visible through my closed eyelids was suddenly overwhelmed by a profound darkness.

Indeed the entire dream took place in this state of complete darkness. But perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the dream had no visual aspect to it whatsoever, something I have no memory of experiencing previously in a dream. For a simple analogy, it felt a little like watching a TV with a broken screen, but with sounds continuing to emerge from the speakers. I never actually could see what was happening, but all the other physical or mental impressions of the dream were strikingly consistent with each other.

Despite this lack of any visual component, I knew I was on a moving bus, and fairly certain the bus was mostly full but by no means crowded. There was a general buzz of voices, a sense that most of the seats were taken. I was standing in the aisle. The bus was clearly moving at a pretty good clip, too, which might have struck me as odd during that very short interval before all hell broke loose.

Then the bus struck something, or something struck the bus. Or both, maybe something big hit the bus hard and sent it flying into something else big. I have no idea. There was an enormous shock of impact and just like that the front half of the bus was compressed accordion-style down to about half its length. That was my vague impression of it anyway. Roughly simultaneous with this development, the voices of the passengers around me were raised as one in an ungodly collective wail of terror just before a great mass of bodies and things was hurled with incredible violence towards the front. I too went flying along with everyone else. When I came to, so to speak, I learned two things right away: I was very badly hurt and I couldn't breathe. I also became aware that I was being crushed and mangled by a terrible weight of impacted flesh and bus parts. There were still, remarkably, screams of the most extreme terror ringing out at this point too, but probably fewer of them, all told. And amidst all this the realization vaguely dawned on me that I was still on the bus, and the bus was still moving.

Since, again, I could not see what was happening, the best I can guess is that the bus had somehow broken through a high cliffside wall, because first it slowly began to topple forward, attaining an alarmingly precipitous angle with what seemed deliberately cruel slow motion, and then all at once it was plummeting in free fall through empty space, spinning and turning sickeningly like a busted Tilt-a-Whirl. And at this point something curious happened. As if in anticipation of whatever dreadful shock of impact lay ahead, my already tormented mind went into some sort of heavy shutdown. One second I was there on the falling bus, fully aware of my situation and even kind of hoping for a quick death blow to put an end to this nightmare. The next, well, I was still there, but I now thought and felt absolutely nothing, a disinterested observer at a full remove from the carnage.

And that's when I woke up. The whole thing couldn't have lasted more than ten minutes, but was far more intense than most of the lengthier dreams I enjoy in the depths of a decently sound sleep.

[A Defrocked Academic]

No one needs to be told about what is weird. It is something that becomes known in the early stages of every life. With the very first nightmare or a childhood bout of fever, an initiation takes place into a universal, and at the same time very secret society.

-Thomas Ligotti

Quote Originally Posted by cannibal cop

Had an interesting death dream yesterday that was quite unlike any of my previous experiences in that area. I understand that many consider this general area of discussion an unforgiveable bore, and on the whole I tend to agree.

Your description was very well written and far from boring.

I have experienced five different kinds of nightmare. I will categorize them as "benign" or "malign" depending on my ability to escape from the nightmare.

1. Benign nightmares

1.1 Lucid nightmare

The suspension of disbelief is not absolute, and the dreamer can end the experience seemingly at will when the action gets too unpleasant or improbable.

1.2 "Classic" or "Jump scare" nightmare

The nightmare ends abruptly when the monster finally appears in the window or when the dreamer begins falling to their death.

2. Malign nightmares
These involve some awareness of the external environment and the inability to end the nightmare at will.

2.1 Sleep paralysis

The presence of "someone" is very real. While unsettling, my experiences pale in comparison with the encounters described by Dr. Cardin.

2.2 Layered nightmare with out-of-body experience

I woke up from a nightmare and jumped out of bed only to realize that I was still trapped within a nightmare. I woke up and jumped out of bed ... This culminated in an out-of-body experience where I saw myself sprawled on the floor next to the bed. The street light shone on my body through the window blinds as an inimical presence -- whose visual perspective I had assumed -- mocked me from above. I don't remember whether I ultimately woke up on the floor.

2.3 Fever-induced delirium

As my fever rose during the night, I awoke from sleep into nightmare. I knew the Earth would explode unless I carried out a specific sequence of magical actions. But I didn't know what those actions were. I ended up shuffling around the house like an agitated (but very slow) zombie, whispering to myself and trying to deny the reality of the terrible things I knew were going to happen. The visceral sense of wrongness experienced during a high fever is very memorable, and Ligotti's description of the initiation into the weird certainly resonates with me.

The death dream that you describe does not seem to belong to any of these categories.

[cannibal cop]

Thank you, Academic. It's good to see you back here again. My "ordinary" nightmares as far as I can recollect have always tended to be some combination of the benign and the malign. That is, typically their content is wholly fantastic and lacks any clear connection to my external environment, and thus they could be considered benign, but these wholly fantastic nightmares also have a tendency to continue unfolding past the point where I want them to end, revealing ever more dreadful sights that I have no wish to see, as if operating in accordance with a whim that can only be described as malign. The dream I described above seems to be something of an outlier, but your introduction of the topic of sleep paralysis has brought to mind another instance of a death dream that might shed some light on it.

I too suffer intermittent bouts of sleep paralysis, but my experience of the phenomenon differs significantly from many of the reports I've come across. In my case there has never been a "presence" of any kind involved, no threatening figures or looming apparitions making themselves manifest. Instead of the external possibly supernatural oppressor we are presented with in many accounts of sleep paralysis, the only thing I struggle with during these episodes is trying to regain control of my own recalcitrant body and mind.

My first encounter with sleep paralysis, which would have occurred around 1993, coincided with what must be the most striking example of a death dream, if that's indeed what it was, that I have any recollection of. Much like the dream I described above, I was sleeping at the time in a fairly sunny room during the mid- or early afternoon. The dream itself appeared innocuous enough at first: I was in a familiar place, a friend or friends of mine were sitting around on the other side of the room, there was a TV set playing something nearby, and I moved to join them.

And then, completely out of the blue, catastrophe struck.

I was halfway across the room in my dream when something in my brain snapped, or exploded, and everything seemed to fill with static and it seemed reality itself began to judder and tremble like a film being played on a failing projector. All of a sudden I was falling forward, slowly, as if through water, but I couldn't seem to move my arms or legs to halt my descent. And in the fragmentary muddle of my thoughts one thing seemed absolutely clear: the moment I hit the ground I would die. In a way, this realization almost felt like a relief, but somehow, through some effort of will that seemed tremendous at the time, I managed to force myself to snap out of this cerebral cataclysm and wake up. Only to find, upon waking, that I couldn't move a muscle. And for a brief but terrifying moment I feared that I had suffered something like an incapacitating stroke while asleep.

Since then I've learned to accept the occasional reoccurrence of sleep paralysis as a fact of life, and I find that the best way to deal with it is simply to go right back to sleep, if possible.