nightmare

Holy smokes. Sleep has been kind of fucked this year - baaaaad insomnia coupled with painfully vivid (and often scary) dreams - but, blimey. That was interesting. Usually if I wake from a bad dream there's that moment or two when you're still not quite awake when it stays with you, then I'm back to reality and able to review the dream with some interest, attempt to analyse where the hell bits of it came from. But that was a heart-pounding, sweat-drenched full on nightmare. The kind where I've actually had to make myself get up, turn on the light, get out of bed and do other things to take my mind off it.

So, the story. It's already starting to fade and is losing its coherence, but here's what I've got:

We're on a housing estate that brings to mind the Barbican or the Brunswick Centre - i.e. architecturally unusual (and seeing as I live 30 seconds away from the Brunswick Centre, it's not that odd that it should appear in a dream). There's a group of thuggish boys - I recall someone next to me wearing a black hoodie with the hood up, and feeling quite intimidated by it - standing in a group, talking (planning? plotting?), and I'm somehow mixed up with them, but I'm not sure whether I'm there voluntarily, or perhaps am just an omniscient (and invisible) viewer as can sometimes happen in dreams.

There's an overriding feeling of terror, torture and intimidation. There's something to do with chainsaws - one moment of light relief as one of the bad guys, revving chainsaw in hand, comments to his victim "You're a Republican? Vvvvrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr [insert own chainsaw noise, if preferred]".

Then somehow I've escaped the situation along with a partner (a boyfriend, I think). We're hiding in some kind of barn or garage or outhouse type building, and there's a pile of dead bodies and sacks. I'm trying to see if I can see where the bad people are; go back to check on the boyfriend and realise he's dead - just then the doors get pulled open and I get a glimpse of some of the people we've been with before - friends or acquaintances, people we thought we could trust - before a Guantanamo-style hood is pulled over my head and my hands are roughly tied behind my back and I'm dragged off, hearing someone whisper roughly "Take the money and run..."

Which is when I wake up, heart thumping; the betrayal of trust, the hood, the intimidation and the knowledge of impending torture/death feeling like they're strangling me and for a moment I'm scared to even reach out of bed to turn on the light.

Good times.