What a fucking nightmare. Can't remember the last time I had one that actually made me fear. The dream starts with myself sleeping in a hotel with a group of about a dozen acquaintances, when I notice that the 3 closest to me are all dead. To not alarm everyone I tell the guy in charge the horrible news, but I'm completely freaked out when one of the bodies gets up and starts walking away. I sit back down while waiting for help to arrive. The three dead bodies remaining are all around me, and they've all sat up, they're covered in white cloths and they're all staring at me.
One of my friends asks me if I'm all right, and I say yes, but they're still all looking at me.
Things take a considerable turn for the worse the next day when they begin talking. The nightmare goes on for what seemed like 4 days in a European city, wherein I started to believe I was going mad arguing with the dead - who were getting louder, more aggressive, harder to ignore and worst of all, harder to separate as fiction from reality. The pattern would repeat everyday. It seemed like I was on a holiday in this dream, and was trying to enjoy everything from the hotel to the beaches, but every sequence of the dream I grew more and more convinced that I had gone insane because I started entertaining conversation and argument with these spirits, much to the consternation of the people around me. For example often in this nightmare I would say something in response to the hallucination, and one of the people around me would act confused as to what question I was asking. In one particular instance I told them to shut up, which alarmed the people in my room as all were already quiet. On the 4th day of this I finally concluded that I had gone truly mad and I asked my friend, (whom for context, has a medicine background), if they had noticed how I had not seemed myself for the past 4 days. They concurred, I seemed considerably more distressed. Behind his shoulder spoke one of the spirits, which I ignored. Just as I'm about to ask for his help, we are interrupted by a man in a high-visibility jacket telling us we've been fined for illegal parking, breaking a red light and so on, we both indignantly reply that is impossible as we do not even have a car here, being on holiday. After we see his smile we realize he was joking, and he was just a tourist guide.
Interestingly, he points out a tower - one which I'd seen and been within in a previous dream (though it was a considerably more pleasant dream than this). I walked within the circular staircase tower, and this was the first time in the dream where the presumed hallucinations did not follow. Within this nightmare I recognized this tower as one I had been in before, yet this is a tower that does not exist in real life, and I was not aware within the nightmare that what was taking place was a dream or that I had only ever seen the tower in a dream.
The previous dream I saw this tower in, I ascended to the top in a mock pilgrimage, the tower itself being dedicated to a great chessboard whose each piece was an astral sign led by the Sun King. Within the previous dream this was all very sincere, with the tower being imbued with this spectacular, awe-inducing scale of cosmic proportions, but in this nightmare it was mundane, a limestone pillar whose very exciting quality was that it was so mundane - the tourist guide remarking that my appreciation for the tower was puzzling. As I returned down and exited the tower I noticed the astral chessboard pieces, only in this dream they were no longer composed of stars, being now human-sized statues carved of red stone, my eye being drawn to the two Knight pieces and the King. The first Knight was a Lion with a fish's body, the Sealion, the second was a fish covered in spines which I at once recognized as the Lionfish. It was at this point when I revealed that I believed I had gone just a bit mad, with my one consolation being that I was sure I had not completely lost the plot yet, but with the hallucinations not ceasing after 4 days it seemed to be more than a passing issue or fever induced vision. We both concurred it'd be best to cancel the holiday and seek help, but misfortune strikes as a storm stops us from leaving. On this final part of the dream, which had all seemed so real, I looked to a river that had been piled with three layers of sandbags all to slow a river down so as to render it safer after unusually heavy rainfall, standing under a roof which did near to nought as the rain fell horizontally from the force of the wind.
It all comes to an end when in this terrifying storm when my friend, who had been hitherto helping me, falls down a sloped riverbank and is having his life threatened by a 3 legged wolf. In between him and I, the only thing stopping me from reaching his hand, is the first ghost. I made it there in the end, grabbing his hand and cursing to the heavens how shit this all is, swearing that if the wolf got any closer I'd break its skull, defying all the dead people telling me I was going to die here and fail to save my friend - when suddenly there is no rain, I clubbed the wolf with the ghost, and my view switched to a third person of myself watching a film of myself, with the contents of the nightmare being that film I was watching with my friend. I then said the film was good apart from the strange ending, whose tone didn't match the rest of the film, to which my friend agreed. The film was a Romantic-Comedy with multiple editings, some of which I remember as being a USSR version, one under my name, a Microsoft version, American comedy version, music video, plague pastoral and about 18 other made-up genres I can't remember.