Children's Common Nightmares

I had the opposite of the attic dream. I think it probably stems from getting lost in a department store once, but I often dreamed about being in a large building (a store or a hospital) and finding a staircase down into the basement. But once I got down into the basement, I couldn't figure out how to get back up again, and there were scary things in the basement I needed to get away from.

Los Pollos Hermanos said:

I'd hate to wake up whilst supposedly under general anaesthetic - that must have been terrifying.

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I was 5, and my mother had said that we were going to get ice cream. But instead, from my 5-year old perspective, we pulled up outside a large white building and inside, two guys in white separated me from my mother. I remember being terrified right then, and my mom wouldn't look at me or talk to me, then they whipped out this gigantic needle (an IV line). I threw the biggest fight my little 5-year old self could manage, which lasted about 45 seconds before they had me pinned down. I remember hiding my hand in my mouth, thinking they wouldn't be able to get to it.

I lost, of course, and they knocked me under.

I woke up completely unable to move. I could hear the doctor talking with my mom, and with all the force and all the strength in my little body, I cracked my eye open just a sliver, and I could see them peering down at me, discussing me like I wasn't there. I still can't decide which was worse - not being able to move but being fully conscious, or the betrayal of "Let's go get ice cream..." and having my mother be in on it.

I should mention that as an adult, I realized that my mother clearly had a case of Munchausen by proxy. There was nothing wrong with me, that time or for any other doctor's visit. But she liked the attention, even reveled in it.

A few minutes later, a nurse or a tech must have noticed my eye was open, because I remember them saying, "Fuck, she's awake." then everything going dark again.

Strangely, I don't remember anything else from that day, or the days after. But I bet I never got that ice cream.

And my mother never got my trust back.

Geez Dark -- I actually knew someone who I think had Munchausen by proxy -- I can't imagine going through that. I'm sorry that happened to you.

The very first nightmare I can remember (4 or 5 y.o.) was being chased around the house by Ronald McDonald, who had a butcher knife and was trying to kill me. I still hate clowns to this day.

Multiple tornadoes. As in, five or six of them drop out of the sky all around me at the same time. I'm pretty sure that had something to do with growing up in Tornado Alley and spending an extraordinary amount of time in a bathtub with a mattress over me.

Vampires. And not the pretty sparkly ones. I blame that on watching too many Dracula movies late at night with my Dad.

Getting to middle-school and realizing I had my bra and panties on. Likely caused from being a self-conscious geek.

Geesh...nighttime during childhood was brutal!

My kids have the dream about the out of control car a lot. It is mostly about driving off the road into the water. There have also been dreams about killer vacuums.

Once I had a dream that I was being drug under the bed by a demon. A about bad characters coming out of video games in the night and one where every time I looked through a hole in the wall someone would shoot me in the eye.

My 3-year old woke up one morning and said he was scared of the glow-in-the-dark stars on the wall near his bed. Think this started after his night-light went out earlier this month...I don't know if he had a bad dream about the stars but I'm still hoping he'll get into astronomy one day. Fingers crossed.

My bad childhood dreams largely came from pictures I saw just before going to sleep. Some kids books have very well done illustrations in them - but if they are big, bad, scary wolves, or dangerous pirates not helpful. (MUMMY!!)

Fascinated to read all the "out of control car" that people had as children. I never, ever dreamt about cars until I learnt to drive - now every so often I have a dream (usually after a tiring/stressful day) where I put my foot on the brake and nothing happens, still rocketing forwards.

Question to people who had car dreams as kids. Were you driven by people who liked going fast, taking chances? It was just occurring to me that both my parents were safe, sedate, take no chances drivers and being of a scientific mind I was wondering if there was a simple correlation - that people with scary childhood dreams about cars had scary car experiences when awake.

I was one of those kids who had horrible, horrible recurring nightmares.

But there are the two most frequent:

1) Fire. I even had one where the clouds caught on fire and as they burned, little pieces of cloud would fall to the ground and catch whatever that touched on fire.

2) Home intruder. I would dream that if I didn't cover my head or something, that someone would come and get me. If they didn't, I was the only person in my family to make it (though thankfully I never saw them killed in my dreams).

My daughter is horribly afraid of spiders right now. She says she dreams giant pink and black spiders come crawling down the ceilings to sit on her tummy at night. *shudder* No wonder the kid woke up screaming the other night!

Bolero said:

Fascinated to read all the "out of control car" that people had as children. I never, ever dreamt about cars until I learnt to drive - now every so often I have a dream (usually after a tiring/stressful day) where I put my foot on the brake and nothing happens, still rocketing forwards.

Question to people who had car dreams as kids. Were you driven by people who liked going fast, taking chances? It was just occurring to me that both my parents were safe, sedate, take no chances drivers and being of a scientific mind I was wondering if there was a simple correlation - that people with scary childhood dreams about cars had scary car experiences when awake.

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I read once that the "out of control vehicle" dreams represented how the dreamer felt about their life at the time. That they were being carried along for the ride and felt powerless to stop or change the direction of their circumstances. Depending on the individual situation, this could be frightening or exhilarating or both.

This theory could, of course, be total hogwash, but it's certainly an interesting idea.

Tazlima said:

I read once that the "out of control vehicle" dreams represented how the dreamer felt about their life at the time. That they were being carried along for the ride and felt powerless to stop or change the direction of their circumstances. Depending on the individual situation, this could be frightening or exhilarating or both.

This theory could, of course, be total hogwash, but it's certainly an interesting idea.

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My mother wasn't the best driver, and I know just where mine came from. We used to live in California, and a few times every year, we'd pile into the family motorhome and go up and down Highway 101 (which is a beautiful scenic cliffside highway along the coast, that, in the 1980s, had no guardrail for most of the hundreds of miles it spans). My mom wasn't the safest driver to begin with, as I mentioned, and there we'd be, speeding along Highway 101 in a motorhome, doing 60 or 70 (which is insane on that highway to begin with, much less in a motorhome), AND there would be dense fog so thick you couldn't see more than 15-30 feet in front of you.

That's what I'd dream about -- except I'd be the one driving, all alone in the big motorhome, and I couldn't even reach the brakes, much less see the road at the same time.

And somehow, in my dreams, the road was always going downhill.

Shiver.

I kinda like the "out of control life" idea as an explanation. I'm not sure it'd hold true for everyone, but as an adult looking back, I can see how that would apply to the years I had that particular reoccurring nightmare.

The earliest nightmare I remember (I was probably three or four) had these geometric shapes appearing on the ground, sort of like drawn hexagons or octagons, but with dashed lines and dots. They showed up mysteriously all over the world, and if you touched one or stepped on it, you had to be "put away" . . . stuck in a closet or under the bed, so you wouldn't infect anyone else.

Tazlima said:

I read once that the "out of control vehicle" dreams represented how the dreamer felt about their life at the time. That they were being carried along for the ride and felt powerless to stop or change the direction of their circumstances. Depending on the individual situation, this could be frightening or exhilarating or both.

This theory could, of course, be total hogwash, but it's certainly an interesting idea.

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My parents are pretty good drivers.

No child has control of much. That's part of being a child, so this may make sense.

I could change the direction of the car in my dream (right turns around the block), just not to pull into the driveway and stop. Sometimes I wonder if I didn't subconsciously like the idea of driving, but I may have been older once I could control a little. These dreams repeated for years.

Occasionally, I have nightmares about being in a car that I can't control. Sometimes I'm in the driver's seat, but the brakes won't work. Other times, I'm in the back seat and no one is driving, so I have to try and climb up front to stop the car. I've read the idea that these dreams represent your feelings of being unable to control your life.

I also used to have frequent nightmares about losing my teeth. They would either fall out or break off. Often, a new tooth would start growing underneath, like when I was a kid. That's how I learned to tell I was dreaming--if a new tooth was there, I knew it was just a bad dream. Of course, my subconscious soon figured out how to stump me by changing the details of the dreams.

To my horror, the dental nightmares came true when I actually had a tooth break. The filling had fallen out of one of my eye teeth, weakening it, and before I could get into the dentist, the tooth broke in half. Let me tell you, it was the worst feeling in the world to experience one of my own nightmares come to life.

Thanks for answers on car dreams. Interesting.

In general terms on dreams I have heard (but don't have a link) that these days dreams are being considered as effectively "end of day filing" - your brain dealing with things that have happened during the day and the Freud (was it Freud?) level of reading meaning into them is no longer current.

I know it's believed that dreams might have some relation to your mind sorting through your short-term memories and storing them in long-term memory, but I don't think your actual dream content is related to your daily memories. Granted, it is possible to dream about things you've experienced. I've had flashback dreams, where the trauma I survived as a child was as clear as if it had just happened. But regular dreams can't be based on your actual memories, because I've never gone to school naked, or kissed an alien whose ship crashed in my backyard, or any of the other weird and bizarre things my mind comes up with when I'm asleep.

I have a very active imagination, from which my subconscious no doubt draws the imagery for my dreams. I've had dreams that were so clear and detailed that I wrote them down and used them as the basis for a short story, or even a novel. I don't just dream random fragments, but fully fleshed-out scenes and subplots!

I used to get nightmares as a child, as I suppose all kids do. But around age 9 or 10, I read that Dr Jekyll and Mr Hide originated in a dream. After that, my dreams developed plot lines. I immediately dreamed a Superman story. Then when I was 16, I had a couple of dreams that were really interesting sci/fi adventure stories, based in the town where I lived. I woke up, wrote them down, and they still made sense in the morning.

In one, a brother and sister - maybe 12 or 13 years old or so - were helping their scientist uncle explore some inaccessible haunted houses on high on a steep wooded hillside across a deep ravine, using a Thought Helmet that he'd invented. It gave them telepresence, and also made them aware of ghosts.

As their investigations continued, the uncle discovered that the one child was going mad. He stopped the experiment, but the dream ended with the realization that it wasn't soon enough. The second kid was also going mad.

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I stopped having those kinds of dreams after my teens. I still occasionally had entertaining dreams afterward, but none that were so detailed or that felt so real.

Most of my nightmares involved being in public places without pants. But as far as monsters or typical scary stuff? I remember several dreams about something or someone outside the house stalking me or my family. As long as we stayed inside, we'd probably be all right; however, we needed to get to the shed about a hundred feet behind the house for some vital reason and there was a time limit (basically forcing me outside with the monster).

Driving into a lake, before I could drive, and just seeing the world turn black as the car sank and it filled up with water. And then, just knowing, that I was going to die. That there was no way out. And that THIS was not a dream.

I dreamt that several times as a child.

featherpen87 said:

My son (6 years) has nightmares about spiders and wasps. There was a time he used to wake up and tell us that there were ants all over his bed as well.

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Those were mine as well. Usually it involved me falling down dark stairs or into some pit full of either ants or bees/wasps. As much as I would try to kill the wasps they wouldnt die but stick to my hands and try to sting me.

Same with ants.

I can often point to exact triggers for my dreams. Dreamt we were getting ready for Passover the other night. My father in law was due to attend. Since he's dead and all my dreams take place in my parents' house, I knew I was dreaming.

At dinner, the kids had asked how my husband and I met and what some of our early dates were. We are also getting ready for Rosh Hashanna. That adds up to one Jewish holiday and one father in law who came to one Passover. We don't have company for Rosh Hashanna.

My partner's little brother had a recurring nightmare in which dinosaurs were looking into the house. They never did anything, just LOOKED. And he would run around desperately trying to find a room with no windows, so that the dinosaurs would stop LOOKING at him. Apparently it truly terrified him.

My own little brother had nightmares that seemed to be triggered by Wizard of Oz. So, he dreamed a lot about tornadoes and evil witches and, yes, flying monkeys. He was always terrified of witches. He's also always been very religious - I don't know if there is connection, though.

When young, my partner constantly had nightmares about the house catching fire.

Personally, I have never had the naked/pajamas dream, or the car dream (I didn't even know that was a thing!), and maybe only twice dreamed about falling. If I had nightmares, they were of the disaster sort (freak weather, evil magic, demons, invading soldiers, etc.), where the terror came from the possibility of people I cared about getting hurt or killed. Very rarely were the nightmares focused on my own safety. A lot of children are like that, I think. The nightmares that would wake myself or my siblings up in tears were usually about family dying, and friends have reported similar experiences.

I grew up in the 50s and 60s. My nightmares were of thermonuclear war. Movies such as "Fail Safe" and the like didn't help much. The ridiculous "duck and cover" drills at the grade school gave it added horror. We kids used to laugh, because if the Bomb was going to drop on you, what earthly good would it do to hide under your desk? I'd have bad dreams for days after one of these drills.

It also didn't help that I lived (and still do) under one of the main final approach glide paths for O'Hare Airport. I remember dreaming and waking up thinking that one of the big prop planes they had at the time was actually a Soviet bomber come to drop The Big One on Chicago.

My kids, now -- they dreamed of wolves. Why I don't know, to the best of my knowledge neither of them ever saw a live one. So I repurposed one of my mother's "room potpourri" sprays into Wolf Spray. We sprayed their rooms most nights. Just one tiny shot would do it, because of the distinctive fragrance. It was never used for a lesser purpose, and my kids swore it kept the slavering beasts out of their rooms.

Deb Kinnard said:

My kids, now -- they dreamed of wolves. Why I don't know, to the best of my knowledge neither of them ever saw a live one. So I repurposed one of my mother's "room potpourri" sprays into Wolf Spray. We sprayed their rooms most nights. Just one tiny shot would do it, because of the distinctive fragrance. It was never used for a lesser purpose, and my kids swore it kept the slavering beasts out of their rooms.

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You know, I recently read about someone who actually produces and sells "Anti-Monster" and "Anti-Nightmare" spritzes. They're just scented oils, but it makes your kids feel like you're doing something to protect them. (And possibly, the different scents help calm them.)

Oh, and I forgot, I used to dream about lava. It would be approaching slowly, and I'd have to try and warn my family that we had to escape before it got there. Or it would be on the ground and I'd have to climb over the furniture to escape.