dude, that was messed up. I think I just had my first nightmare in years. The first big set of recurring nightmares I can remember having was when I was 8 or 9. For some reason, my parents let me watch Alien ... I had nightmares about those things for the next 3 months. After that, the movie Stephen King's IT contributed to my sleeplessness. I don't have an abject fear of clowns, but every time I see one, it reminds me of that damned movie.
The dreams I had tonight though seemed more realistic than in the past. I felt like I was right there (unfortunately). Read on for descriptions of what I could remember.
Dream 1
I was a low level soldier in some armed force. Our planet was apparently being invaded by aliens of some sort and our regiment was on the defense. The whole thing was totally surreal because now that I think back, I'm pretty sure it was based on Halo 2. Now I know what you're thinking, "Cool! you were in Halo ... did you see the master chief?". But no, it wasn't cool in the, "I'm in a video game" sense, it was fucked up in the, "fucking aliens are trying to kill me and my friends" sort of way.
See, these wierd monkey-like guerrilla troops were trying to infiltrate our base, and the feeling of paranoia is something that I hope I don't have to feel ever again. Details are kind of fuzzy at this point, but I know I ended up on some huge truck traveling down a highway with the enemy trying to jump on board. People were dying left and right (aliens too, but that didn't give me much satisfaction). And I'm not talking dying in the safe, movie way ... I'm talking dying like some dude ended up with his jaw ripped off, bleeding everywere. There were maimed arms all over the place ... it sucked. The last thing I can remember about that dream was the driver getting killed and me having to make my way into the drivers seat and stopping the truck mere inches from some vast precipice.
Dream 2
I don't know how it segued into this, but this is the next thing I can remember ... and it's slightly easier to remember since it was second. I was at some complex that had several pools with my family. Now that I think about it, the facility seemed much like the three pools at the RDV. Well, the pools started to fill up to the point of overflow. The staff had apparently thought of this and had a contingency plan ... they deployed out these big rafts so we could float up to the roof on them into some channels that would inevitably hold air pockets. We could then follow this channel through some tunnels and eventually out.
We were making our way through darkened tunnels when we started noticing that in the water below us, and in some semi-transparent roofing above us, the same alien fiends from the last dream were starting to infiltrate the complex. The marching came to a deafening thunder until all of a sudden ... silence. People start to get pulled under water ... in front of us, behind us. Now, I'm with my family at this point so the level of terror is pretty high. Thankfully, I was awakened by the cat or something, I don't think I've ever been this glad to be awake.
It was about 6:30 and despite the fact that I was pretty tired, there was no way I was voluntarily going back to sleep. I've never been of the habit of writing my dreams down, and I don't know why you'd want to remember something like this ... but I guess people say it's therapeutic? I don't know