To Sleep, Perchance to Nightmare

Have you had a scary dream recently?

Like, not necessarily a nightmare that you wake up screaming from, but a dream that's unnerving enough that you do end up waking up from it?

Me? I've had two in as many months.

Which is weird, considering I don't think I've had a disturbing dream of any capacity since December 28, 2004 (when I had a vision of Hell itself).

What's even weirder, though, is what the element of fear came from.

It came - for the most part - from the lack of a consistent location.

O_o

Let me try to elucidate. The first of these dreams occurred a few weeks back. I'm not exactly sure when, but I know it was sometime this semester. Basically, the dream involved me in my room. And it kept involving me trying to leave my room. However, when I opened the door, I didn't see the hallway on the otherside. Instead, it was a completely unfamiliar place. I would then realize that the room I was standing in was a completely unfamiliar one. When I'd open the door again, I would suddenly be standing in another room. And again. And again. Occasionally, it would go back to my normal room, but because I got in the habit of closing the door almost as soon as I opened it, I kept missing my opportunity to leave. Also, as the dream progressed, the room began spinning slightly, and then faster and faster.

Eventually, the dream ended when I collapsed (in the dream) and woke up in a cold sweat. Why was this dream so terrifying? Hard to say. It's a very Twilight Zone-esque concept, to be sure, but it was really making me unsettled (in the dream; after I woke up, I realized it wasn't bad at all).

So then that takes us to this past Wednesday. And with this dream, I honest-to-God woke up in the middle of the night, startled.

Or did I?

You see, even when I "woke up" I was not sure that it was a dream. That's because I was only in some sort of half-sleep. I know this because my position in the dream was dependant on my position in the real world. Meaning that night, I was sleeping face-down in my bed and in the dream, I was sleeping face-down in a bed. There were some differences, though. For one, in the real world, my legs were lying on the bed, one of top of another, yet straight. In the dream, though, my legs were bent so that they stuck up into the air. And try as I might, I couldn't put them down. In fact, I couldn't move at all.

Another difference. In the real world, I was in my room. In the dream, the room...kept changing. You see? It's the same! And what's more, this was terrifying me for some reason. Like, I would switch between my room and my parent's bedroom and some random bedrooms.

How did I know I was switching? Well, even though I was lying face-down on the bed, I could see the ceilings of the rooms. Almost as if the rooms were topsy-turvey. Cah-razy!

Oh, it probably bears mentioning that there was another element to this nightmare. Every time I appeared in my parent's bedroom, there was a presence that kept coming closer and closer to me. And each time he came closer, he let out this, I dunno, laugh-moan that kind of sounded something like a really, really fast "houhouhouhouhou" noise. Yet it wasn't laughter, nor was it malicious or anything. It was just the noise it was making, no different than the sounds we make when we breathe.

So, anyway, this presence was getting closer to me, and each time I heard it, I got a feeling in my stomach. A kind of painful tickle, as if a bunch of long-nailed fingers were groping at my belly. And each time, I told myself that there was nothing there, and that I should just look to confirm that. Unfortunately, as I mentioned earlier, I couldn't move at all.

What I could do, though, was see, and right before I woke up, I saw (for a split second) a figure in my peripheral vision. I guess you could describe it as a shadow person. There was no identifiable facial traits. (One thing that did stand out in the dream, though, was that it seemed to have the same head shape as my middle sister).

So, that got me jumped back into the real world.

Now, I think I can understand what's frightening about having a shadowy presence approaching you when you're in a state of immobility. But I honestly can't understand why, in my dreams, that whole teleportation business seemed so unnerving to me.

Any dream experts out there? What say you?