Have you ever been so scared by a nightmare that when you woke up you were just there, frozen, remembering it? if so, what was it about?

Dreaming I was free, waking up in jail. Very weird experience to say the least.

Not specifically. Rarely I'll wake up in the middle of the night and just feel super paranoid that someone is there. Usually it's when I've been woken out of a dream.

I dreamt once that I had woken up from a coma in the hospital, and it was about 20ish years in the future. It scared me that so much time had gone by that I didn’t remember and could never get back, and that everyone who knew me had probably forgotten about me. Getting up and seeing someone I didn’t recognize staring back at me in the mirror.

What had happened? What led me here? And what the hell do I do? I was lost.

It was strange waking up for a second time back in my actual bed. But it was such an odd experience, terrifying in its own regard at how real it seemed.

Alright, I got one, but it requires a dumb amount of exposition. I had nightmares like any other kid, usually following some scary movie: the Basilisk from Chamber of Secrets, the vampire zombies from I am Legend, Alien, but they were never repeats. One movie franchise I've loved most is Jurrassic Park. I watched the first movie over and over and over again. One day, when I was 7 or 8 I think, I came down with the flu. It was so bad I would have waking fever dreams. My mom wanted to cheer me up so she rented JP:TLW and I was ecstatic as my 101.3° mind could be. Watched it, and something about the tone shift to night, the flashing lights, the raptors hunting in the grass, and that god damn T-Rex against the RV scene imprinted the most visceral prey response I ever felt.

Since that day until I was twenty-fuckin'-two, I would have weekly-to-nightly nightmares exclusively about JP dinos. If I was in the open: t-rex, and if I was indoors: raptors, and if I was in a tiny crawlspace those little green fuckers would eat me alive and I'd feel every little chunk of myself get torn off. Eventually, I learned how to recognize specifically a raptor bark as a sign that I was dreaming and could turn it into a lucid dream, if I could keep my panic in check and literally do what Jesus Pratt did a decade before JW (that scene, when I first saw it, triggered a nightmare the next night).

Got all that? That's just the setup to this god-awful dream. I'll preface this by saying there was no raptor bark. There was no sign that I was dreaming. I was at my actual dinner table with my actual family at my actual house. It was storming (we lived in FL at the time) and pitch as oil. We had a big french window and I could see something glinting outside, like the rain was hitting something that definitely wasn't 6in from the window. The lightning flashed, and what I could at first see straight through to the outline of houses across the street was now a completely silver gator-rex hybrid. When the flash was gone, it faded like sci-fi camoflage, except perfectly, and only brief flashes of light disrupted the biological light-bending. Next thing I know, the window bursts open, and my father, who's back was to the window, gets a grizzly smile of fang punctures from shoulder to gut to shoulder, and just like that, he's yanked into the night.

Flash cut to myself, my brother, and our neighborhood friends planning some Goonies style plan to lure the monster to the sewers using walkie talkies taped to the walls and polaroid cameras on trip wires so we could see it coming. We were gonna collapse the sewer tunnel somehow, idk. We fucked up bad. I heard my friend choke on his crushed throat through one of the walkie talkies. I heard his brother screaming down the tunnel before a roar, crunch, silence. I hid in a little electrical conduit area cut out of the tunnel. My brother ran. I didn't see the monster, but you could hear the scratching and thudding and then my brother just goes flat in the sewer water, turning into a red puddle. I don't know why nothing else stuck to it, but his blood did. And it just slowly turned it's bloody outline of a gator maw at me...

That's when I woke up. Swear to God I made none of this up. I remember every detail.

I never remembers my dreams. I can barely remember a nightmare from when I was around 10 or something. I'm in my 40s now and that's the last dream I know of.

These days it's usually mundane grown up stuff like the IRS coming after me for tax evasion.

I remember a dream I had as a kid, I was being suffocated by a plastic bag. When I woke up I could have sworn the plastic bag was still on my head.

Everyone has such scary dreams and the one that really scared me was my 8yo ass being chased around a table by a scary Pokémon.

I once dreamed that I was falling asleep, realized I was dreaming at some point and thought fuck it let’s enjoy it. Then a few seconds later woke up (in real life).

It may not be that scary but it’s damn weird.

Not nightmares per say, but every once in a while I dream that I've been tasked with something really important/tried to uncover an important mystery, and then wake up before I can solve it. This makes me really frustrated when I forget later what the important thing was.

There was this one dream where my duvet cover ate my entire family and a monkey in a red vest threw pins at me that got stuck in my feet.

I was in kindergarten and this dream scared the shit out of me. The worst thing is that I dreamt it more than once lol

Dreamt i was 70 years old and lamented how fast time flies and that i could relate when the seniors say they feel younger than their age. Not scary, but sad.