For some reason I've been having a lot of nightmares. Like, back-to-back nightmares night after night, ones strong enough to wake me up, and I'm an infamously heavy sleeper, especially odd since nightmares are normally so rare for me. This one was especially bad, I woke up feeling hot and terrified, unsure if I could trust my senses or my surroundings.
I was 3rd person spectating this creepy guy, going door-to-door asking people for children's shoes. He goes up to the second floor of a flight of apartments, knocks on a random door, and asks the single woman there for some children shoes. She says she wouldn't have any, her (daughter or younger sister?) died years ago, and right about as she's about to shut the door on the creepy guy's face, the creepy guy points at a pair of little shoes that are just obviously sitting on her counter top. Bewildered, the woman just agrees to give them up to the guy to get him to leave her alone. Satisfied with his bounty of shoes, he exits the building and proceeds walking down the street, I can't remember exactly what he says, but from this point he's talking about his love of children's shoes, and how he always finds a use for them.
He proceeds down the street, to a cemetery where there's ambulances and people gathering around. There's a dying young girl there, bleeding to death from some unknown cause, shoeless. The creepy guy gives her the shoes, we watch as a paramedic puts them on her, and she looks really happy and satisfied before passing.
Then I'm a detective, at the original apartment building, to investigate. There's nobody in the original woman's apartment. We heading to go down the stares, when a guy is rushing up to confront us, I instinctively punch him in the face, sending him flying down the staircase, and the dream cuts away the instant he hits the ground, going to a future scene where I'm standing at the top of the staircase (again) staring down at where he *would* have landed, but the spot where his head would be is circled in thick black marker.
Then a bizarre Bald Eagle-headed monster with stiff, unbending elbows and knife hands jump scares me around the corner, rushing up at the stairs at me. (This is where I say "fuck brain not cool. Not cool man.") Then this same jump scare happens again and again, by repeating the scene over and over like a dozen times, with the scene ending just before he reaches me.
Then the dream cuts to an interview with a Hideo Kojima-esque game designer character, trying to get me to understand his arty and edgy game, because apparently literally everything that just happened happened in the context of a videogame. "Why are you scared of the eagle head monsters? They're the protectors, you want as many of those as possible, just swarming all around you all the time. They stop the REAL monster." and sure enough the scene repeats again, and there was a darker and scarier, grim reaper version of the same monster, being stopped from getting close to me by the first monster who's just wildly hovering in my face. The Kojima character takes manual character of the Protector Monster, moving him away from me, letting me get killed by the Grim Reaper Eagle Monster, who stabs into both of my temples with his knife hands and kills me instantly.
Throughout the entire nightmare, there's been a recurring flash at a digital, red LED alarm clock (identical to the one sitting at the side of my bed) with a sign that says "I'll open up at 6:11", and it seemed really pointless throughout the dream because it was never 6:11, but now it was. The digital display panel unlocks and opens up, and I push my fingers into it to see what's inside, and the damn thing clamps down on my fingers like a bear trap.
That's where I wake up, feeling so hot like I'm boiling under the covers, but I'm not covered up and otherwise nude. I don't know why this dream scared the shit out of me so much.