So chat got me curious so... anyone remember their first nightmare? Or the first nightmare you can recall ever having? I just thought it's actually interesting to hear what really scared people when they were little.

To be fair, I'll share first.

So, Sean laughed at me but seriously, I was three guys, and hated Star Trek....

It was about Spock beaming me up, I still remember the stars and the strange Star-trek windows as three people in their Star fleet clothing were staring at me. They wanted Spock to beam me up, but I didn't want to be abducted by aliens!  (Alien phobia) I literally woke myself up crying >.> I decided from then on I'm never napping in my parents room (kid logic blamed that for it).

So your turn~

Turn turn! My very first nightmare was about being dead and feeling nothing other than my conciousness vanishing and starting to feel terribly cold, also my first dream and memory, and non-lucid lol Got terrified about stop existing while in the dream, just to wake up for a 4th birthday party, kinda fun.

I remember mine very well. There were these friendly aliens that looked like those things from Men In Black (the little yellowish things; I can't remember what they're called). Anyway, if you became friends with them, then your face would take on the substance of play-dough and would inevitably peel off. I went to the doctor immediately, but they hadn't yet found a cure.

When I woke up I screamed for my mom to come in my room, and then I wouldn't let her get near me until she turned on the light, because in the darkness her face looked like play dough. XD

And :( that's emo.... I hope your birthday was fun then?

O.o that would scare me too! Wow Hazel >.> I seriously would have nightmares for life if that ever happened to me.

Not sure.  Two come to mind both from pre-school.

• In a desert and a sandstorm was coming.  It engulfed me and I woke with the sheets in my face!

• Watching a large conveyer belt like an escalator going down.  It was rolling under a small dark gap.  Baby daleks were travelling on it, which was scary enough.  Then my mother was showing me that I had to get onto it too, as she lay on the conveyer to show me and started to disappear into the small dark gap too.

I think that one was linked to the fear of not getting off the end of an escalator at the top (or bottom) and getting dragged into the machinery.  I recall my mother being very anxious about that.

Seems sci-fi is emerging as a common theme here.

I remember my first series of nightmares...they all occurred when I was very young, and they all involved a middle-aged white male stalking me. The most prominent and scariest thing at the time was that he had no lips(this was horrifying for a five year old ). The dreams shook me up pretty badly, and he pretty much became my version of the bogeyman - I was terrified at the thought of him jumping out of my closet or from under my bed, and I refused to sleep until my parents moved my bed from the window(out of fear he would fly through).

My family seemed to enjoy hearing about that guy, and so when I stopped dreaming of him I would come up with incredulous nightmares featuring him in the starring role

I have great memory of my childhood.  While I don't remember my first nightmare, I do remember the subjects of my earliest bad dreams.

For some reason, I was terrified of escalators and often had nightmares involving super-fast, narrow, high, steep and otherwise dangerous escalators.

The other "nightmares" I know recognize as lucid dreams, though I didn't know I was lucid.  I would get trapped in this infinite wall-less void, though it had a floor and ceiling.  There was never anything there - nobody and nothing.  And the feeling that went with it was almost claustrophobic.  It happened frequently, and I hated it.

They were very vivid. I'm not sure which came first the alien dream or an evil witch who came into my room and spun me around my ceiling till i cried.. lol, They happened around the same time when i was about 10

1st night: i'm in my bed and i see a dim light outside my window, which is located just above my bed head at the time. I hear tapping on the window. I look outside and see nothing unusual except a long scrawny grey hand tapping with one finger. I guess the alien was shorter than the window. I was so happy to meet an alien! much like meeting an ET friend, i happily tapped back to it on the window. We played like this for a few minutes. It was a good dream.

2nd night: I'm in my bed again and hear the tapping! Excited that my alien friend has returned i turn to tap on the window just like last night. Just as i do my first tap - in the space of a split second i'm violently sucked through the window and i feel something sharp. Next i'm laying on my floor unable to move. Mum opens the bedroom door and as the hallway light enters my room i notice my headless body laying on the other side of the room (i'm seeing through the eyes of my severed head). As soon as mother has seen what had happened, she screams like i've never heard before. I wake up in a sweat.

As for what frightened me as a little kid (about 3-4 y/o): I had watched a really scary movie with my parents where some people got eaten by piranhas. Since then my mother would frighten me into wearing my slippers around the house by telling me there are piranhas under the sofa or furniture. Upon hearing this i would immediately jump onto the sofa or anywhere off the floor and refuse to get down till she brought me my slippers! My family found this really funny and mum loved to brag about it. It wasn't very long before i slid my head down to look underneath, whilst still on the sofa. I had discovered mums cruel joke, there really were no piranhas! Till this day (if its not really cold) i proudly walk around the house barefoot! its good for the feet!

D: That's scary, to see as the dead, especially as a child! Your mean mom and the piranhas, if not for that story, I bet that nightmare would never have happened >.>

hahah i laugh at them all now.. and i every kid needs to figure their parents out at some point.

The first nightmares I remember, or more accurately night terrors, were all geometric shapes.  Accompanied with a horrific slowness that felt like insanity of having your soul ripped out.  There was sometime a feeling of vertigo where the shapes would get really big without moving, and the logic of that is enough to fry your brain!

I would always wake up from these feverish with cold sweats, but I didn't really have a fever.  The physical symptoms would subside after I stopped being scared, which could take a long time.

Those types of dreams are common enough, myself and others have tried to describe them here: http://dreamviews.com/community/showthread.php?t=29794

Quote from: The Cusp on August 09, 2009, 10:44:52 AMThe first nightmares I remember, or more accurately night terrors, were all geometric shapes.  Accompanied with a horrific slowness that felt like insanity of having your soul ripped out.  There was sometime a feeling of vertigo where the shapes would get really big without moving, and the logic of that is enough to fry your brain!

I would always wake up from these feverish with cold sweats, but I didn't really have a fever.  The physical symptoms would subside after I stopped being scared, which could take a long time.

Those types of dreams are common enough, myself and others have tried to describe them here: http://dreamviews.com/community/showthread.php?t=29794

I remember that thread.  At about the same time I encountered a horrific black cube (black in the sense of being like a black hole, not like shiny black) that paralysed my arm when I touched it.  Devil-like faces appeared on its sides and I woke up.  I have had other polyhedral dreams but nothing so terrifying.

These solids have fascinated scientists (metaphysicists?) for centuries.  Something archetypal, would you say?

I can't say that I remember my first nightmare, but I do remember that it was a nightmare that triggered my first lucid dream.  I was pretty young -- maybe 8 or 9, and I was being chased by some sort of monster.  At some point I thought to myself, "Hey, monsters aren't real, I must be dreaming!  If I can just make myself wake up, the monster won't get me!".  At which point I forced myself awake.  I was really fascinated by the fact that I had become aware of my dream state, but didn't know what to call it, or how to do it again.  I told people about it, and I think they basically just humored me, but nobody told me that I'd had a lucid dream.  Didn't happen again for many years.

I have yet to stop laughing!

Just kidding.

I can't remember my first nightmare, but I did have/still have recurring nightmares every so often. In one of them, I am in a new house that our family moves into. At one point, I wake up in a bath tub, and the water is churning violently. The tap is on, and if I had been asleep any longer I probably would have drowned. Later on I try to get my family to leave, but I don't quite remember how successful I am. After that, I try escaping on a boat because the house is surrounded by water. I'm about 20 feet away from the house when a super bright spotlight shines on me. I just stare at it in horror as a strange sound rings out. I can't really remember the sound but it is paralysing.

There are more scary events to that one that I can't remember. I also have some other recurring nightmares.

Hmmm, now I think about it, one of my EARLIEST nightmares, maybe even the first one, involves our old apartment in Hong Kong. I was with my mother in one my parent's closets. A single lightbulb provided the light, and nearby on the wall was the buzzer/speaker thing that guests use to contact us. At one point, the buzzer made a terrible sound, like static. That scared me enough, but to add to my fear, the lightbulb started flashing in time with the creepy buzzer. I hid under my moms dress.

Quote from: Burned up on August 10, 2009, 08:41:36 AMThese solids have fascinated scientists (metaphysicists?) for centuries.  Something archetypal, would you say? Yeah, but whose archetype is it?  From what I understand, archetypes are developed with personal experience, so where the hell did those ones come from.

Archetypes do seem to be an accurate description for the real world manifestations of the platonic solids, yet none of them are perfect.  That is all their sides are not the same length like a true platonic solid.  But when you divide the lengths of the different sides into each other, you get harmonic ratios, numbers that end in something like .121212121212 or .666666666 to infinity.  Those ratios hold true for every instance of a particular element, be it a crystal, atom, or quark.  (Ok, quarks can't be measured like that, but you get my point)

Quote from: The Cusp on August 10, 2009, 10:45:52 PMQuote from: Burned up on August 10, 2009, 08:41:36 AMThese solids have fascinated scientists (metaphysicists?) for centuries.  Something archetypal, would you say? Yeah, but whose archetype is it?  From what I understand, archetypes are developed with personal experience, so where the hell did those ones come from.

The collective unconscious?  Well, that's what Jung would say.  He puts it down to genes etc and whatever goes in to making us human (enter Moonbeam!).

QuoteArchetypes do seem to be an accurate description for the real world manifestations of the platonic solids, yet none of them are perfect.  That is all their sides are not the same length like a true platonic solid.  But when you divide the lengths of the different sides into each other, you get harmonic ratios, numbers that end in something like .121212121212 or .666666666 to infinity.  Those ratios hold true for every instance of a particular element, be it a crystal, atom, or quark.  (Ok, quarks can't be measured like that, but you get my point)

Wasn't it Keppler who linked the harmony of the planets to platonic solids?  OK, he was not correct, but he was trying to find the same connections as we seem to be.  Yes, the geometry is fascinating, and can be extended into 4, 5 or more dimensions.  And don't forget the "golden ratio", 0.5*(1+sqrt(5)), which appears in pentagons, itself a shape with mystical connections.

mine was being chased by the cartoon rooster foghorn leghorn... he was trying to hit me with a giant mallet.

Oh goodness, I'd be scared of giant mallets hitting me too >.> Poor you joshbotch!

yeah ok I will chip in with my first nightmare, actually this plagued me when I was little over a period of years.

Dream:

I am in a orange sort of environment and I am running after a marble I have rolled along the ground. There is this weird absence of sound thats very oppressive. After a while the ground becomes bumpy and the marble starts to bounce out of control but I dont stop chasing it. After a long period of chasing I end up running through a stone door into a small stone room. I turn around and the the door is gone then the walls start to close in. I get crushed slowly, very slowly by the walls and always woke up terrified

that is one scary dream... how close to being a pancake were you when you usually woke up?

Quote from: joshbotch on September 16, 2009, 11:14:11 AMthat is one scary dream... how close to being a pancake were you when you usually woke up?

well it started at my feet and my head was the last to go I remember a few times it got to my head starting to get crushed so my feet were already flat by that time... I wonder if it was a subconscious interpretation of sleep paralysis or something

Actually, one of my earliest memories is of a nightmare I had:

I remember walking up and down this empty street of this city, crying and calling out for my mum, as I got lost and was wandering alone. The dream then begins to zoom out on the city, to which it is revealed that the city exists on the sole of a high heeled shoe.

What you make of that is up to you, but meh, first nightmare I can remember.