I had a dream that my cousins and I were having a get-together at my aunt’s house, in the yard. My cousin, John, was the last to arrive and his car fell into a ditch as he was attempting to pull into my aunt’s driveway.

We all ran to his aid. He got out quickly and yelled “I’m okay!”

We all laughed. I said “Wow, this is just like old times! Everyone is here, even (my other cousin) Jane! … wait, Jane is here?”

I look at Jane, and time stops. The color fades from the background, but she is still there in full color, smiling at me. I wake up crying.

Jane (not her real name) died a couple years ago, and I have variations of this dream still.

I remember a bunch over the years that I can still close my eyes and replay, so this is a harder question than it may seem on the surface.

The actual most unforgettable is a recurring nightmare that I’m not willing to talk about because fuck that.

But number two was a doozie. Heh.

Back in high school, I had one of those bonkers dreams that fucked me up bad for a while.

In the dream, I met a girl, fell in love, had kids and grandkids, grew old together. And I’m not talking about just those events and nothing else. There were entire days taking place, from waking up to going to bed in the dream. Entire birthday parties, vacations together, sitting on swings and swinging while holding hands and watching the kids play.

I lived an entire fucking life in a dream.

And I woke up from that still a fucking kid. And I immediately started crying because my family were gone, my dream family. I lost them just as sure as if they’d died. It was both beautiful and horrifying.

It fucked me up. Not that I wasn’t already pretty damn fucked up, what with PTSD already kicking my ass at that age. But that dream was brutal. Well, waking up from it was, the dream itself was amazing.

I’ve told the story of this many times online because retelling it tends to take the sting out of it a little more each time.

Not that I haven’t had a great deal of joy in real life, I have. And I’m happier with my wife and kid now than I ever was in the dream, plus it’s real. But that dream has sometimes made it difficult to be fully present in a relationship in the past. It was one of those things where knowing that the person I was with wasn’t the right one made it easier to end things before they went bad. But the fact that I would have to constantly compare reality to the dream meant that I could never be certain how much was a genuine incompatibility and how much was holding reality up to the lens of a dream.

But the older I got, the less that factored into things. Now, it’s more of a pleasant memory than a bad one. The dream has lost its sting from being only a dream, and reality is better in terms of having a fulfilling and real partner.

Nice try hackerman

I had a dream I was within the blast radius of a nuclear bomb. My skin vaporized and it felt very cold for a very split second then it felt like all of my body just split apart and went everywhere all at once. Too quick to hurt.

I became sand and my awareness was everywhere in a pile. I had no bodily awareness and nothing felt like anything. I just felt an odd sense of calm and coziness. Time went on maybe but sand just shifted and moved. Peaceful and weird.

I woke up feeling weirded out.

This is a long one. I used to have very frequent, intense, vivid dreams when I was younger, and this one stands out even among those. I had this dream when I was in my mid-20s, and 30 years later I still remember it like it was yesterday.

I dreamed about these monsters called blood-bats that were ~3’ tall, squat, red-skinned, winged monsters with 3 big black claws on each hand. They would claw people and leave long, white lines on their flesh, draining them of blood and also the will to live. I dreamed I had gone to Marrakesh (for some reason) and the streets were filled with people who all had these marks on their arms or chest or whatever, and they were all just shuffling around like they were zombies, staring at the ground, etc. They were all kind of moving in one direction, so I pushed through the crowd in that direction and eventually discovered a palace that appeared to be their destination. Inside the palace was this long, wide great hall that was lined by these little booths that each had a priest of some religion or other in it. The people were all lining up to go into the booth of their choosing where they would kneel on a small carpet, the priest would bless them, and they would collapse and a pair of orderlies would put them in a body bag and carry them away.

I was determined to find out what was really going on here, why all these people appeared to be grimly shuffling off to their ultimate demise, so I skipped out of the line and found myself in an elevator. As the elevator started going down one of the creatures came in through the hatch in the ceiling and attacked me, but I managed to fight it off without getting clawed and it fled. Pretty soon the elevator stopped and the door opened and I found myself in this vast open warehouse-like structure filled with thousands of hospital beds, each one with one of these creatures on it. There was an old man pushing a cart around from bed to bed checking on them. I approached and asked him what the shit was going on and he explained that these creatures were from another dimension, that they traveled between dimensions hunting sapient life to drain as a food source. The way they hop dimensions is they make someone where they want to go dream about them - usually only a few at most - and then when that person wakes up the ones they dreamed of would exist in that reality.

As soon as the old man finished telling me this I realized that I was dreaming and was about to wake up, only I wasn’t dreaming about 3-4 of these guys, I was dreaming about the entire race. In those hazy few seconds between being fully engaged in the dream and fully awake I was frantically searching around both the dreamscape and my bedroom for anything sharp that I could use to kill myself before I woke up and brought all of them here. Fortunately reality reasserted itself in pretty short order, but that handful of seconds might’ve been the most scared I’ve ever been.

Even weirder, several years after I had this dream a friend of mine described, without having heard about mine, a dream he had once had that featured virtually identical creatures, but in his dream they were torturing people in dentist’s offices and shit. Kinda freaked me out.

When I was four or five I had this blue and yellow striped shirt that was my favorite, I dreamt I was in a space of infinite white facing myself but it had on a red and green stripped shirt, it said “I’m not making a dream tonight, you do it” then disappeared. My first lucid dream and it was just a dream sandbox of doing and imagining what ever I wanted… was pretty neat. The only other lucid dream I’ve had wasn’t lucid from the start but I was probably 14 or 15, I was shooting a crossbow at a target in the yard when I spotted our violence prone mentally handicapped neighbor behind a tree starting to aim a crossbow at me so I shot him with mine but when it shot it didn’t animate and still was loaded so I thought “really? My dream can’t even animate a crossbow?” Then the dream started to melt from around me into a white space so still upset I decided to just wake up.

Plenty of very vivid nightmares of various levels of gore or death but those aren’t as interesting to me.

I was in my grandma’s house, but the place was kind of an office in that dream. Someone dropped a bag of flour into a trash bin. It gave life to a malign flour frog. I told the frog that it wouldn’t be able to blind me if I kept my eyes closed. It mocked me saying its powers were much stronger than that and proceeded to blind me. I woke up with sore eyes.

I dreamt of this in the first weeks i started to go to work by train. My route passes normally next to a cemetery city. There are literal skyscraper like complexes of in wall graves. I dreamt that my usual train stopped in te middle of nowhere, next to those buildings. I just got out of the train. Headed to one of them and got up the stairs of one of them. As i got in one of the levels. I heard a voce ask me “where have you been? It’s been so long.” as i turned to see who it was. I woke up.

The reason why it’s still sutch a vivid memory is when i woke up, i searched for how the levels were. And they were almost exactly how i dreamt them. It most likely was my mind just adapting what i remembered of the dream to match with the image. But it still kept it in my mind.

Running through the most golden wheat field I could’ve ever imagined (I swear I’m not a british PM), on the side of a hill that went on to the horizon. Behind me, hauling ass, was the mystery machine with no driver. On top of the mystery machine was Cliff Burton, Bo Bonham, and Jimi Hendrix playing purple haze. I woke up as I stopped running and just started floating.

Either that, or the time I dreamt I accidentally killed a romantic partner in my sleep in a huge hotel that looked like something out of Brazil. As I woke up (in the dream), the bed was covered in blood and the police was banging on my door. I pushed an armoire into the door frame, broke a window, and jumped out. Then I woke up.

There was this one fighting move in the PS2 game Enter The Matrix that featured a backwards leg sweep that would throw your opponent sideways off their feet, and then you’d spin forwards and punch them square in the chest, throwing them back quite a few feet. Anyway I must have been playing that game too much at some point because I had a dream where I was in a colloseum in ancient Rome, and I performed that exact move (though I can’t remember if I witnessed it 1st or 3rd person) twice in succession on Roman soldiers, and uhm, it was awesome.

I dreamt I visited Jurassic Park with my class from elementary school. Everyone got eaten except me.

My last actual nightmare,must have been about 11-12 I was walking through a dark car park and this shadow came out of a yellow car, I dropped kicked it into the door. That was the last time I remember having a nightmare ever since then my brain just lucidly says this is nonsense it wouldn’t work like that and the dream either changes or I wake up.

Mine is slightly similar. I’m back in school at playtime and in the sky you can see the planets lining up, each one slightly overlapping the next to make like a chain of them. The largest one like 3x wider than the moon, the smallest about moon size. I’m running around freaking out telling everyone and nobody gives a shit. The only person I can convince to even look up just tells me “yeah so what they always do that”. Then it gets nighttime dark really quick and I wake up panicking.