First though… i want to ask…
Metagog: Was your metallic sky / shrinking nightmare one of those fever-dreams? it sounds very abstract like the fever-dreams i have (fever dreams are the worst… see mine below)
Anyway, I haven’t had my recurring nightmare in alnost 10 years, it started when i was 5 though so it occurred for about 15 years I’d say. The subject of my nightmare is Kermit the Frog. Yes that’s right, but he’s notsilly or nice he’s really creepy in these dreams. He runs toward me with his spindly arms shaking around crazily, and when he reaches me he tickles me. Tickles me… to death? It’s not clear because it’s at that point that I wake up. The very first one happened like this (keep in mind i was five).
I want a snack from the drawer in the kitchen which is for stroing bread but also goodies such as coffe-cakes and ring-dings. My mom says I may not have one. So in response to this, as I walk toward the bread drawer anyway, I say “poop”. (Remember I’m five). I’m calling my mom a poop. But I hear the word repeat back to me from far off. I say “stop that”, and the words “stop that” repeat back to me again from far away. I look toward the source of the voice. Far in the next room, peeking through the sliding glass patio door, is Kermit the Frog. When I see him he runs toward me and when he reaches me, tickles me and I almost immediately wake up.
The fear of Kermit the Frog probably originates from a couple things. When I was young there was a bizarre skit/episode of Sesame Street where Kermit is in the swamp, and a ghostlike version of kermit runs toward the camera wi8th arms waving wildly. There was some song that this went along with but I don’t remember what the point of it was, I do remember though that it was in fact real and quite creepy. Second, I had a Sesame Street record when i was very young (4 or 5) which I would listen to on my toy record player. There was a song that I beleive Grover sings in his scratchy voice about a lost dog. During this song on one occasion the record skipped, and it kept repeating in that strange voice “i lost my, dog/ i lost my, dog…”. It scared the crap out of me! Thirdly, Kermit while cute to some is honestly just creepy-looking. ultra-thin gangly limbs, freaky ping-pong ball eyes with oddly shaped pupils, that weird many-pointed collar around his neck… and most importantly, his weird muppet-like movements. The one that really gets me (even now) is that face he makes when he’s mad, and his mouth sucks inward and tightens, and then Kermit shakes in anger and turns to the camera… Yuck!
I have no idea what the tickling was about. Maybe just any kid’s “fear” of tickling, fear meaning the game of the parent saying “I’m going to tickle you / I’m gonna get you” and you running away from Mom/Dad/whoever in pseudo-fear and them catching you and tickling you “against your will” so to speak.
Anyway, that was my recurring nightmare for years and years until maybe early college (at that point I had told my roommates about it and they made a lot of jokes/pranks about it so I think the act of talking about it often erased the scaryness of it). The dream pattern always was: something strange would happen, and I’d test the waters so to speak and call out something ot look around, and I just knew that I’d turn and see Kermit in the near distance, or that he’d be about to barge into the bedroom. Then he’d reach me / the bed, tickle me, dream over.
In semi-lucid dreams in the past, I would actually conjur him up purposely to end a creepy or annoying dream (I knew I’d wake up after he got me). As time went on, I could escape Kermit, or defeat him somehow although by bizarre dreamly means. For instance, one time I defeated him by taking the lawn mower and running it through a puddle of water Kermit was standing in/by, which caused the water to rise somehow (in a vertical column) and drown him.
Also on this topic, the last time I definitely recall dreaming about Kermit was a hypnogogic nightmare I had in highschool. I was laying on my back, drifting to sleep. However, I never lost conciousness (obviously), I could feel and preceive the transition to dreamland. I could still see my bedroom, but i could hear slithery things approaching and I couldn’t move (sleep paralysis). the slithery things were like lizards that i could feel crawling on the bed covers. I looked up and saw Kermit, making an extra creepy face with really awful looking eyes. I woke up afraid to go back to sleep because I was worried the dreams would come before I was fully asleep again. Hypnogogic hallucinations are scary as hell! I think the “old hag” is a great name for those by the way.
Finally, here’s that fever-nightmare I promised. I had this while sleeping in my mom’s bed age 7 maybe, early evening, bedside lamp still on, sweaty hot and unconfortable with a fever… I dreamed of a completely white place, perfectly featureless white. There were black blobs on it, they were roundish and in 3-d , but very abstract, black objects. Here’s the best I could describe the “action” of the dream: there were big black things, and there were small black things. It was mostly a horrible sick sensation I felt during the dream, this horrible abstract thought of big and small things and feeling of things growing/shrinking but not sure which was actually happening or if they both were simultaneously. I don’t think there were any sounds except maybe for pseudo-voices which still seemed half in my mind and didn’t say anything intelligible, just echoey thoughts. YUCK
Very abstract like metagog’s shrinking metallic world, that’s why i asked if it was a fever-dream also.
So those are my top nightmares. I don’t have too many anymore thankfully, at worst it’s mostly dreams about highschool college where I have to take a test that I’m totally unprepared for, have something due that day that I haven’t even started on, late for classes / not knowing where my classes are etc. Sometimes there’s a rationale for why I’m back in highschool or college, but mostly I either just accept it or have a nagging feeling of why am I in school?
Sorry for the extra-long post, especially given that it’s my first!! (I just wrote down my first dream journal this morning…)
. After I woke up I was really afraid of moving my head and feeling the blood of the woman. “urgh”
If hell existed, it’d look way better than that.
i was wrong. I opened window, and saw scene from that nighmare. Everything looked in same way, but instead of fighting, those people were looking at me, like they were waiting, or like i could command them.