My 16 Scary Nightmares (Weird, Scary Dream Stories)

In this blog post, I’m sharing with you my scary nightmare stories — dreams that I’ve had during the last decade. I have a habit of writing down my dream every time I have an interesting one.

The following stories of my weird scary dreams include nightmares about zombies, supernatural phenomenons, black magic rituals, cannibals, giant spiders, wild animals, evil geniuses, and sleep paralysis.

All of them are authentic. Some of them are surprisingly detailed. But I promise that I only wrote down what I remembered — without making up additional details that could embellish a story.

Let’s start with the oldest nightmares and move to the most recent ones.

1. Zombie Apocalypse

I am in a murky room of a municipal building. It’s full of living dead, all or most of whom are already killed. One woman, still alive, is trying to bite me. I’m struggling with her. She has almost got my neck with her teeth.

I see large scissors lying behind her back. I’m reaching them with my hand and thrusting the woman’s neck. Blood is running from the wound and out of her mouth, but she doesn’t seem to feel pain. I’m cutting her arms, legs, and head off, and she dies.

I’m leaving the room thinking that I’m going to see a crowd of people who have already turned to living dead, like in a horror film with a predictable ending. Which happens as I thought. I’m thinking “I should run outside fast. They are slow and won’t manage to grab me”. As soon as I exited the building, I woke up.

2. Elevator

I’m going outside to throw a bag of garbage away. I’m entering the elevator. It’s going down, until the ground floor. But as it sometimes happens when it’s broken, its door fails to open completely, shuts immediately, and the elevator is going up. Once the elevator has gone a few floors up, the cable holding the booth breaks and the elevator is falling down with me inside. I realize that in a few seconds I’m going to be dead.

I hear a very loud squealing noise of friction of metal against metal. The elevator reaches the ground and crashes with me inside. At this moment, I see darkness devouring me instantly. Probably, this darkness was what I saw after waking up but before opening my eyes.

I open my eyes and feel tingling in my whole body like the one you feel when your arm or leg has just been released from being numb. I was surprised to find myself alive because I had already believed I was dead.

Later I learned that it’s impossible for an elevator to fall down. Elevators are equipped with brakes that are activated if the cable breaks or if the booth starts moving down faster than normal.

3. The Show

I am at the technical college (the one I studied at in real life) with my classmates (the ones from the dream weren’t my real life classmates). We are fighting an evil organization that aims to enslave, or probably even kill, everyone at the college. We are hiding from this organization whose members know about our resistance group.

They are holding an event, a meeting. Me and my comrades are walking along the corridor, in a crowd of students. When we see a member of this organization, we kill him with a knife. I don’t remember if I killed someone myself, but my comrades did. This scene is smoothly transfering to another one.

A grand public event is about to begin. Me and my comrades are attending it. This is going to be something like an extraordinary cinema session. We are walking through a long corridor on one of the highest floors of the college, in the crowd of the people going to the show. Little by little, I’m losing my comrades in the crowd. I only see one of them near me.

We are exiting the corridor to enter a large square on the roof of a castle. There is a large crowd of people around us. Now it consists not only of students.

I’m saying to my comrade: “I can’t see any of our guys nearby. There is something wrong here”. He agrees. I know: we must get out of there. Then the guy gets lost too.

I’m alone among a large crowd, on a square on a real old castle’s roof. It’s a big square containing about one and half or two thousand people. It looks like I’m the only one who knows something is wrong here.

There is an enormous screen in front of the square. Multiple giant metal dragon heads on long necks surround the plaza elevating above the public.

The screen starts showing something, music is playing. The people are excited. They get even more excited seeing the dragon heads starting to move. They are screaming and applauding.

Suddenly, the dragon heads turn towards the square and start catching people. Immediately, the crowd starts panicking and screaming. Everyone is trying to escape the mechanical heads that are pursuing people and eating them alive.

One of them is chasing me too. I manage to escape and hide under a small structure built on this castle roof area. The dragon’s neck lacks the length to reach me. I jump down and fall through all of the floors of the building.

I find a way to the basement. It looks like any other floor, but contains technical rooms with equipment serving the building. I find a small room with an electrical console responsible for powering the castle. I think that I can turn the power off, but in this case everyone will understand where I am. And I know they are looking for me.

And someone does find me. It’s the chief of all this evil enterprise. He is a short, aged man of a weak body type. I don’t remember what we talked about. But later, I found another room with old junk among which there were books with old European tales, like the ones by Brothers Grimm. I understood that this was his hobby — he wanted to be a famous villain like the ones from children’s tales.

4. Animals

In the following scene from another dream, I was an observer rather than involved in what was happening. Like if I was watching a film.

On a lot surrounded by a metal net fence, I see a few soldiers. They wear pants (probably military style) and T-shirts. The soldiers decide to play American football. They aren’t Americans, but they have a special ball for this game.

One of them says: “I’m going to show you a good site, and we will play there”. The group follows him. But when they come to the place, they see that the site is full of steep hills — it’s almost impossible to play there. But they start playing anyway.

Behind the net fence, there is an enormous crowd of wild animals: bulls, bison, hogs, and other species. A little farther from the fence, there is a river with large crocodiles.

One of the soldiers starts teasing the animals behind the fence. This is a big mistake. A hog manages to rip the weak metal net, and the whole crowd of animals throws itself onto the soldiers. The beasts start tearing the men apart and eating them. The bulls are throwing the soldiers in the air with their horns. The beasts are also fighting each other. It’s a savage, ferocious bloodbath.

Huge, strong dogs come from somewhere. They weren’t wild but purebred. As I understand, the dogs are on the humans’ side. But the wild beasts are greater in number, size, and force.

Two soldiers manage to silently get away. They get to the river, find a floating object, and use it to sail away, along the river bank.

5. Demonic Creature

I’m going somewhere by bus. A young boy, about twelve years old, enters and sits down next to me, to the right. A man sitting near us asks: “What is your name?”. The boy answers: “Natasha”. I laugh and tell him that it was a funny joke. But the boy says he didn’t mean his name. 

I look at the man and notice a little girl he is holding. She is the size of a newborn and is bald. But she is not a newborn. The girl is so small that she is sitting just on the man’s two hands. This weird child is talking with him, pronouncing words too clearly for a toddler.

I realize it’s the boy’s sister, even though it’s the man who is holding her and though I saw the boy getting inside the bus alone. I think that at such a young age children can’t speak yet. I ask the boy how old she is. He answers: “Ten”.

The man is trying to pass the girl to me, and the boy tells me to hold her. I refuse. But the man gives her to me anyway, basically imposing her on me. Immediately, I feel a huge, powerful supernatural force coming from her. It terrifies me, almost throwing me into panic. The only thing I want is to get rid of the girl. I realize that it’s not a child but a demonic being.

Inside my head, telepathically, I hear her demonic scream. It doesn’t sound like a voice of a child nor a woman, a human in general, not even of an animal. This feels extremely unpleasant and horrifying. 

A few seconds after taking this creature in my arms, I place it in the arms of a person sitting to the left of me. I get up and go towards the exit door. I see, meanwhile, that the man starts passing the creature on to another person. I understand that he felt the same as me.

I woke up heavily breathing, with my heart pounding.

6. Egyptian Book

I am at my fellow’s home (in reality, I’ve seen that guy only one or two times in my life and was almost unfamiliar with him. And the apartment is the one where I lived in my real life when I was 3-7 years old).

The guy has an ancient occult Egyptian book. It explains how to collect human souls to make them your slaves in the afterlife (this idea comes from a film about a serial killer who did just that by murdering people — Zodiac — that I had watched some time before the dream. I even remembered about this similarity in the dream).

The book isn’t large but pretty thick. It has a brown hard cover with Egyptian hieroglyphs on it. I feel scared but at the same time curious to take a look inside.

When I open the book on the first page, a sudden wind, coming out of nowhere inside the room, starts blowing in my face. It disappears when I open other pages.

Inside, apart from the text, there are drawings, magical schemes, and hieroglyphs. I’m only throwing a glance at each page that I open, without looking at the content attentively: I beware of accidentally learning even a tiny amount of its forbidden knowledge.

On the first page, there is a note written in an arrogant tone. It’s a warning about the danger this book presents for the curious but unworthy. Weirdly enough, it’s written in Russian. The warning also strictly prohibits using the book for “individuals who haven’t reached 19.3”. I don’t understand what this means exactly, but I suppose this means 19.3 years old. I don’t think the fellow is worthy, but he surely uses the book for supernatural practices.

7. Tram

Another dream where I died. This time, I got under a tram. I woke up an instant before being hit by it.

8. Film from Beyond

Another one of my really scary dreams.

I am at my grandmother’s home. I found a vintage device for playing films. It’s so old that it isn’t even electrical.

I’m randomly clicking buttons and turning knobs trying to turn it on. And finally it works: there is a black-and-white movie running on the screen. I’m watching pieces of senseless horrifying and repugnant scenes. This looks similar to the video cassette from the film “The Ring”.

There is a beautiful naked woman with an evil grin looking at me. She is sitting on the floor. Behind her, I see a partially decomposed body lying on the floor. It’s performing disorderly, chaotic moves with what rests of its limbs.

I see other disgusting things I can’t recall now. The sound is as terrifying as the image. This feels like a video from the afterworld.

I want to turn it off, but I don’t know how. I can’t even pull the plug as the device isn’t electrical. Finally, I wake up.

 

9. Mantrid's Arms

May or June 2012

I had this dream at the steel plant where I used to work, during a day shift (which must have fallen on Saturday or Sunday, so the management and most of the staff wasn't at work, and I could sleep).

The dream was about Mantrid's mechanical flying arms. Mantrid is a villain from the sci-fi TV show Lexx. 

So Mantrid’s mechanical flying arms were attacking me at that workshop where I slept. They had “TV” written on their shoulders, and there were many of them.

The arms were breaking into the workshop by flying in from the street through the small window above the bench I slept on.

I ran out of the workshop, down the metal stairway, heading to the ground of the large premises where the crane would pick up scrap metal to deliver it to the furnace upstairs.

While I was still on the stairway, I heard a noise (like giant feet stomping) coming from downstairs, and I understood that in that premises, and everywhere else, there would be other similar threats because those, and perhaps other kinds of creatures, must have already invaded everything.

10. Mutant Creature

Spring 2016

There is a crazy scientist. He looks more like a working-class Georgian or Armenian, unshaven, wearing an old leather coat. He created an enormous mutant entity, still inanimate, in a huge open-pit. Its amorphous, disgusting body occupies the whole size of the pit. (At first, the pit wasn’t huge. The creator dug it himself. Then, at some point in my dream, it became huge, like a quarry, without me realizing this change).

The scientist manages to bring the creature to life. He triumphs crazily.

In the center of the creature’s body, it has an eye and a mouth. They appear from time to time from under the yellowish-white slimy liquid the pit is filled with.

The creature has sharp hearing and feels the presence of other animals and people nearby. It’s intelligent and talks with people threatening them. When it senses a human close enough, it quickly releases one of its long tentacles, grabs the victim, and eats it. The being has numerous tentacles. They resemble guts — pink and thin. The length of each reaches about a hundred meters. The being is very prompt and skillful in operating them. With time, these tentacles spread farther and farther invading the area around the nest.

Finally, local people, including the scientist, decided to destroy the harmful creature. The scientist, myself, and probably someone else come to the pit and install explosives (I don’t remember the very process of installation, I just know we’ve done it).

We suppose that the creature surely must know about us approaching. But it prefers to play with us instead of eating immediately.

During the explosion, while running away, I’m grabbing tentacles hanging from above using them like monkeys in the jungle use lianas for transportation. I’m hanging on the edge of the pit, but someone helps me to get out.

11. Zombie Apocalypse 2 

December 2017

A disease infecting people and animals killed almost all people on earth. It made them mad and aggressive, trying to infect other people and animals.

A surviving company of three men comes to a building to stay there defending themselves from infected animals and humans. The building looks like a bunker. It has large rooms with heavy, thick metal doors. In these rooms, diseased people are gathered and locked.

Suddenly, one member of the company appears to be diseased too. He is aggressive and dangerous. Two other men are running away from him trying to lock doors on his way in order to isolate him (similarly to a scene from one of the films from the Alien franchise). The infected man has an axe. The disease made him abnormally strong, so he breaks the doors.

I appear in that place too and try to escape. There is an infected white cat. It’s chasing me, wanting to bite and infect me too. I am trying to run away from the cat along the power cable trays under the ceiling. It’s following me, first running along the floor, but then trying to climb onto the cable trays. I throw the cat down many times.

12. Zombie Apocalypse 3

January 14, 2017

There is an epidemic among people, beasts, and even plants. It makes them aggressive, wanting to spread the disease by biting other living beings.

I am at my grandma’s apartment. There are animals — mostly cats and dogs — who are infected, mad, and dangerous. But the disease made them sensitive to direct light: either sunlight or bright artificial light can cause strong damage to them. So they are trying to keep themselves in the shadows in a limited area of the room. I’m using a flashlight to defend myself from them.

A few animals are coming through the window in the kitchen (although it’s on the 4th floor) and start chasing one another (I think dogs were chasing cats). I tried to prevent them from entering, but they were too quick. They are only starting to show symptoms. There is even a horse trying to come into the kitchen through the window. (If I remember correctly, I didn’t let it in).

There is a plant, like an ivy, in the room. It’s trying to reach and infect me spreading its branches under the carpet, hiding from the light. It’s reaching the hallway where I’m retreating trying to escape from the apartment.

13. Depths of Venom

January 21, 2018

I am in a vegetable garden. Probably, it’s late spring or early summer: the plants aren’t fully developed, and the ground between the rows isn’t covered much by their leaves.

Between the plants, I see spiders’ holes. A species widely spreaded in this region (South-Eastern Ukraine) — South Russian Tarantula. In reality, it’s a small spider living in the ground — the biggest of them are slightly larger than an egg, including legs. You can usually find a few holes in a small garden. They even live within cities in my region. 

But in my dream, their number and size are abnormal: at least one hole near each plant, and each of them is as large as a rat, a cat or even a mid-size dog. Some spiders are of a different species created by my dreaming imagination: hairless, looking more like a black widow (that in reality doesn't live in the ground). 

They are sitting inside, closer to the surface, looking at me with their double rows of black marble eyes, ready to hide in the depth of their holes as soon as they feel a threat. I know that they beware of me more than I do — I am a bigger threat to each of them individually than one spider is for me.

In reality, a bite of such a spider can be compared to a bite of a wasp or a hornet — unpleasant but not lethal unless you are allergic. But as each of them is larger than a real-life spider, the dose of venom is a few hundred times higher, which is likely deadly.

I understand that even though this species tends to be aggressive, spiders won’t attack me unless they are forced to defend themselves with no way to retreat. The garden owner and I are lucky that spiders aren’t social animals (except for some other species). Otherwise they would definitely attack us defending the territory or hunting, realizing they have an advantage in numbers. Nonetheless, it feels very uncomfortable to be there walking between tens of venomous predators sitting inside their holes, considering the nearby territory their property.

I’m trying to imagine a possible way to get rid of them. It wouldn’t be a problem to deal with each one by one. But I don’t feel comfortable killing someone, even such a creepy and dangerous animal.

Speaking about venom and nightmares, my song Nightmare (Venom cover) and the music video I filmed for it come to my mind. This is partially a parody of the original Venom's music video for their song Nightmare. If you like heavy metal, I suggest that you make a musical pause before reading the rest of my dreams:

14. Sleep Paralysis

April 2021

I partially woke up. While lying in my bed on my back, still between sleeping and being awake, I feel cold winds blowing at me. I feel them with the part of my body uncovered by the blanket (from my head to chest). The winds are coming from different sides. 

I’m thinking “It’s a supernatural phenomenon”. Some entity, probably a phantom, is in my room. I can’t (or almost can’t) move.

I wake up completely and realize it was a sleep paralysis. Sleep paralysis had happened to me before. But today was the only time that I felt cold winds. I also remember reading about cold areas in haunted houses. Places where the temperature is different from the rest of the house.

I turn from my back onto my right side and try to fall asleep again. Suddenly, I feel something touching my left shoulder. I immediately wake up. I decide not to try to fall asleep again and rather use this opportunity to get up earlier and have more time for working on the recording of my cover of Boule de flipper by Corynne Charby.

15. Ulrike Butz

April 24, 2021

I am in a romantic relationship with a girl who has the appearance of Ulrike Butz (the brunette girl biting the blonde in the GIF. She was an actress of European exploitation b-movies).

Ulrike is under the influence of an occult sect who treats her as a goddess. They are planning a magic ritual in which she must be sacrificed. This will also cause the death of her followers.

We are in a building. The interior consists of a narrow passageway with rooms on both sides of it. It looks very much like an interior of a train, but the rooms are on both sides of the passageway.

Ulrike invites me to the room where the sect is going to commence their ritual. I say I prefer to stay outside.

At some point, my dreaming mind starts imagining that Ulrike is my girlfriend. I feel like losing her to the crazy, evil religious fanatics and want to do my best to get her back.

I feel she became involved in the sect because for a significant period I’ve been too busy with my work failing to give her the attention she needs. Our relationship lacks the passion it used to have. Feeling abandoned, she compensates for the lost joy with the black magic practices in the sect.

They’ve completed part of the ritual, and Ulrike is going out of the room to have a rest. She has started her spiritual transformation into another entity. A serpent goddess. Her eyeballs are now totally white. The pupils disappeared.

I decide to evoke the lost feelings in her hoping to return her human consciousness. I am kissing her and holding her hands. I’m talking to her tenderly about our now discarded plans for the future, notably living together in a house near a sea.

Fortunately, Ulrike doesn't seem to understand that I want to sabotage the ritual. She is nice to me. At some point, her pupils appear again which is a sign of my efforts being effective. I am worried that the other members of the sect can notice this, understand what I am doing, and kill me.

Ulrike enters another room, for the last stage of the ritual. I enter it too. She is in a room together with only two or three chief members of the cult. I start talking to her again. I keep her still unready to complete the ritual causing a delay.

Fortunately, rather than accusing me, one of the priests suggests that they postpone the ritual. He says that if they try to complete it now, at night, the rest of the sect members will not die: the right time (apparently midnight) for the magic to work has already passed (I know this happened because of me).

They agree to continue the ritual at noon — the next suitable time for the magic. I take it as a small victory giving me more time to convince Ulrike to leave the sect.

I wake up.

Interestingly, in the film Vampire Ecstasy / The Devil's plaything (the one you see in the GIF), Ulrike's role is very similar to the one in my dream. The girl was involved in a satanic ritual of vampire women worshiping the spirit of a witch executed centuries before. The sect used the body of Ulrike's character to reincarnate the witch in it.

If you are interested in films about black magic and devil worshiping sects, look at my list of the best movies about satanic cults.

Also, I made this T-shirt design with the aforementioned film. Ulrike Butz is on the left. Download it for free (as well as my 50 other b-movie shirt prints) and order a shirt from any print-on-demand service you like.

16. Cannibal Factory

April 29, 2021

I am in industrial premises that are, weirdly enough, one of the rooms of my family's apartment. There is a mess there. I’m looking for a coat that I can't find anywhere.

These premises have a basement. I go down there, after one of my parents (I don't remember who it is, or maybe it changes during the dream). There are no stairs, so I have to use industrial machinery items to descend (as well as to climb up to exit the basement). While descending, I am stuck having nothing to grip. I am staying in a suspended position, above the basement ground.

At this time, I feel the presence of an evil supernatural force. I only have matches to light the space around me. A storm starts, just inside the basement.

When the storm ends, I manage to reach the basement’s floor. It appears I wasn’t too high above the ground — less than a meter. It was enough to jump down to get to the floor without being hurt.

I start exploring the basement. It’s an abandoned, messy industrial space. A bit of daylight is coming from the windows or holes above, so I can see what is inside. I feel there is an evil mystery in this basement. I check a few storerooms that appear to be empty and go back climbing the machinery items to get upstairs.

At some point, the plot of the dream changes: now I am a little boy in a wealthy aristocratic family. My parents (who are now different people from my actual parents) are despised in the neighborhood. The aforementioned industrial premises with the basement are part of our mansion.

I go exploring the basement again. I have a feeling that my parents are hiding something from me. I find a door to a niche dug in the ground of the basement. It’s a tomb of one of my ancestors. My father appears there and takes a handful of soil from that niche saying this is what the ancestor became after his body decomposition. That handful of soil is rich in phosphorus (in real life, it’s one of the components coming out of a corpse. This makes tombs glow in the dark sometimes).

My father, together with my grandfather (who resembles my grandfather in my real life) takes me to meet my great grandfather who lives in the neighborhood. I haven't met my great grandfather before. I find him too young for his age. He has a partially black moustache (rather than completely grey) and a cunning smile. He almost doesn't look older than my grandfather, which is strange. I think there is black magic involved.

After the meeting, I go back to explore the basement. It has changed. Now it’s not a small abandoned workshop without working electrical lighting. It‘s a normal industrial basement.

Rooms are empty as always. But then I open another door and see a large room full of young captive people wearing collars around their necks with chains attached to them. One of the captive girls asks what I am looking for. She is about 18-20 years old, slim and with black straight hair. The girl doesn't look upset at all. My father is there. He strictly tells me to leave.

I go farther. I enter an upper level (strange enough for a basement). Now I hear the noise of large electrical engines working in other rooms. I wonder what they are used for. There is some kind of production going on. I imagine that my parents produce human meat and these engines are running giant meat grinders.

A Russian horror story for children I read in my childhood (in my real life) comes to my mind. It’s titled Red Cookies. (The story is about small children — a boy and a girl — who live with their mom, without a father. Often, their mom is visited by men. The children hear them laughing, having fun in mom’s room at night. But the next morning, mom bakes tasty red cookies for the kids, and they forget everything. One day, when their mom is out shopping, the children are playing the piano. The kids press a piano key that their mom forbids them to touch. The key opens a hidden basement room. In this room, the children discover mens’ decapitated corpses and a facility making those delicious cookies of human brains. This is actually the full story.)

I find a small hole in a wall covered by a steel sheet through which I can see the back of one of the engines. It’s throwing drops of fat around. I think it’s probably human fat.

Now trying to be careful and unseen, I notice my father and grandfather discussing something in another room. In their conversation, they are using the word "cattle". I understand that they actually refer to the captive people destined to become their meat.

In another scene, my father, seeing that I've already understood what was going on, acknowledges that the family produces human meat. Apparently, it’s not a commercial enterprise. It’s only for the family's personal needs. While talking with me about this, my father, proudly and with great satisfaction, is savoring a thick sandwich: two square pieces of bread and a thick layer of fried human ground meat of his own production.

I meet little girls from our family friends’ families. They know about this business and talk cheerfully about it, as little psychopaths.

My father says he is going to stop the business, apparently because it’s dangerous. There are rumors going on in the neighborhood — apparently this is why the family is despised. My father has a few last persons to grind, after which he won’t continue.

I go to the police and return to the basement with one policeman. I show him the room with the captives. Then we find my father and grandfather in one of the other rooms. The policeman is ordering them not to move, warning he will shoot. He is holding his gun at the ready. My parents aren’t obeying. They are trying to attack the policeman.

I shout to him: "shoot!" multiple times, but he doesn't do it. He just keeps repeating that he will shoot and ordering my parents not to move. I understand that the policeman isn't experienced enough and is probably afraid to injure the members of a wealthy and influential family. Finally, my father or grandfather stabs him with a knife.

I don't remember what was next. I think I woke up at this point or shortly after.

17. A Creature from Tremors 2

January 26, 2022

There is a military operation in a rocky desert. The soldiers shoot at their enemy's "building" that in fact looks like an egg of stone. It's located a few kilometers away, quite far.

The egg falls into a canyon. It gets broken, and a creature comes out of it. The creature resembles the ones from the film Tremors 2: Aftershocks.

Now I'm suddenly at my paternal grandma's apartment. The creature comes to it. It tells me and two other people (probably my grandfather and father) to follow it so that its master will turn us to its children. This means we will have to go through metamorphosis.

I think about how we could get rid of the monster. The only sure way I can imagine is to make it swallow a grenade. Attempting this would be dangerous.

I ask the creature if it could wait for us while we are getting dressed to go outside. It agrees. The dream's plot switches to something else.

I will be adding more stories about my creepy dreams to this post while having new ones.

I also have another blog post with more weird dream stories — interesting and funny dreams that aren't nightmares.

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