Had my first panic inducing nightmares in quite some time last night. Thought I’d record them here because of how visceral they were and because I might like to analyze them later.

First dream involved me (in the body of a woman, possibly the first dream I’ve ever had with that scenario) walking around some house I didn’t recognize. In one hand I held an exactoknife. There was another lady with me, that I didn’t recognize. For some reason I was either shirtless, or my stomach was exposed, because I noticed this strange patch of extremely dry, itchy, scaly skin on my belly. I kept scratching this spot, and eventually used the flat of the exactoknife blade to attempt to scrape away the flakes of dead skin.

Using the blade to do this soothed the itching, but then I noticed that the spot had begun bleeding profusely. At first it was just an oozing, but that quickly grew into it almost spurting out of me. I started to panic and scream and went to a mirror in a bathroom. The woman I was with came with me, and from behind grabbed the skin around the patch and started squeezing. Thick red blood started gushing out of what had become a gaping hole in my stomach. I screamed as loud as I could and just watched in horror as I lost more and more blood. Eventually the blood stopped, and only a clear, thick slime squirted from the hole. Seeing this caused me to become faint and pass out, which meant that I woke up in the real world, breathing heavily and covered in sweat.

After shaking off the dream, I went back to sleep and had another nightmare, a more familiar one from when I was younger.

I dreamed that I was in a wooded area behind a house, in what felt like a rural place. The space behind the house gently sloped and then became a fairly steep embankment above a sort of drainage ditch. In the trees ahead of me, there were cast-iron frying pans and other heavy objects hanging from ropes, dangling from the limbs at head height. A group of teenage boys I was with decided to start running headfirst towards these objects and knocking themselves out, and I got the impression we were recording some sort of show like “Jackass”. Everyone was laughing at these guys hurting themselves, as I stood on a steep part of the embankment.

Looking down, I saw an enormous snake slither out from under the leaves and debris on the ground below me. It had a bright red triangular head, and I knew it was some sort of viper. It startled me, but since it was moving away from me I didn’t worry too much about it. But when I looked down, I saw that there were even more snakes surrounding my feet. Enormous cottonmouths and rattlesnakes were inches away from me and I started panicking. I wanted to get as far away as possible, back up the embankment and closer to the other people. But as I put my hands on the ground to try and crawl back up, the hill grew steeper and and slippery. I felt like I was about to fall back into the ditch, where countless other snakes loomed. I grabbed hold of a huge root sticking out of the dirt, only to realize too late that I was grabbing an enormous python. I felt its extremely smooth and muscular body start to contort, saw its head emerge from the debris and knew that it was going to rear back and strike me. At this moment, my fear peaked and I woke up again, hyperventilating.

The first dream confuses me the most. I’ve had body horror dreams before, but they generally always involve me as myself, and always involve something dental – teeth falling out, crumbling – because of my intense dental anxiety. I’ve never experienced that sort of dream in another person’s body. The snake dream is a variant on a theme of nightmare that I’ve had ever since I was a child, generally involving having to carefully navigate a ground covered in venomous snakes, who sometimes strike and bite me. The first dream I’ll definitely need to analyze further.