I have found over the years that I have had the most horrible and bloody of nightmares. Some say that they are manifestations of our stresses, premonitions of things to come, or things we subconsciously truly wish for. The latter I truly doubt, as a peaceful person I have no wish to ever harm anyone in anyway, I couldn’t even begin to fathom it.

In one nightmare I had (or maybe this was just a dream) I knew it was a premonition of an event to come and it went like this. I was in a relationship with someone who was a very good man, a man I loved and who loved me back. One night I had this dream in it he was at the bottom of a stairway that was in the middle of a road, I was climbing the stairs away from the road and kept begging him to get away from the roadway and to quickly follow me up the steps but he would not move, a car was coming and he was hit and killed, and I was safe above the road on the stairs. Not soon after that dream our lives took on different directions, mine moved upward and his down and our paths became different.

Then come the ones I don’t understand the bloody and gory, the ones that involved me digging an enormous size ditch the size of a swimming pool in the back yard of this dilapidated house and seven bloody mangled bodies of men killed presumably by me and wrapped in sheets I am trying to bury.

How about the one where I am leaving the side door of a nice home, with beautiful white arches surrounding the entrance and behind me a wooden fence lovely and covered in Ivy. I am carrying a silver case, one that is usually seen carrying weapons or valuables. This dream so far seems nice right? Then from behind me a masked man slits my throat. What could that image and nightmare be a manifestation of? In fact that dream terrified me so much that when house hunting last year I made sure that every house I looked at had none of those features and bought one completely opposite. But what was in that case, and why did that person murder me for it?

Let’s get more recent. 3 months back I awoke due to a nightmare that showed me being zipped up out front of my home in a body bag. I don’t know how I died if it were natural or suicide or homicide, but I awoke quickly in the worse sweat.

Lastly there are the ones where you swear you are awake and not dreaming or sleeping and they are the scariest. About a week back I felt a man I could not see approach me from behind as I lay on my couch, fear preventing me from moving or screaming, he was shadowy and had a black linen scarf and was coming to strangle me with it. I felt it tighten against my throat and my body would still not respond and finally the grip of fear broke and I awoke screaming and struggling against, well, nothing.

So what are these horrid images that follow us at night and why? I admit to having stressful times in life and yet at those times my dreams, though weird as most are, are harmless. Why then do we get nightmares and do our dreams mean anything at all? Share your dreams and nightmares and thoughts with me and perhaps we can unravel the mystery together.