October 22nd, 2011 / 7:07 pm
Snippets

Let’s give away NOTHING, by Blake Butler. Three copies, courtesy of me/Sator Press. Comment with your email address to enter. Winners picked soonish. If you want: talk nightmares.

109 Comments

  1. Drew Lerman

      I have a nightmare sometimes about having to wrest the wheel of an out-of-control car from my autistic cousin.  In these dreams I myself am too young to drive.  In the variations where I am able to take the wheel from him, I am no better able to drive than he had been.  Nightmares!

      drewlerman87 at gmail dot com

  2. tony

      I had a nightmare where my dad hung himself and my mom beat the shit out of my little brother

      tonyflesher@gmail.com

  3. Drew

      Hi! My email address is andrew.w.webster@gmail:disqus.com, and all of my nightmares involve my job. I work over eight deep fryers, so if that’s not nightmarish enough in real life, my dreams make up for the horror in the dreamscape. Um, the first nightmare I ever had involved the troll from Billy Goat’s Gruff chasing me through a warehouse filled with wooden crates á la the end of Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark.

      Cheers. 

      Drew

  4. Don

      Nightmares of having teeth knocked out.

      don-at-heysmallpress-dot-org

  5. Brandiwells
  6. herocious

      the cud in my mouth wouldnt go away. constantly picking it off my tongue and throwing it as far away from me as i could. it was gray and clayish. it grew. when i came to, my face was swimming in a pool of saliva. i walked to the balcony and spit onto a succulent three floors down. herocious@hotmail.com

  7. XTX
  8. Ethan

      Nightmare I’m eating a bowl of cereal and realize the cereal is clumps of human hair and the spoon is woven human hair and my tongue is a thick numb knot of human hair.

      ethanryan@gmail.com

  9. spencer
  10. Doug Paul Case
  11. 14
  12. Anonymous

      One time I dreamed I was at my grandmother’s farm and there were wagons outside. I remember being scared of the wagons. My grandmother walked out to do laundry and a large beam of light hit her and she died. Some things started running through the house. I jumped out of a window and then I woke up.

      justinryancarter@gmail.com

  13. Mike Gross
  14. deborah brandon

      Abandoned shopping malls and truckloads of female corpses being strung up in contorted postures in the median along the freeway, and a big brotheresque voice coming in through the AC on my car saying, You’re next, be careful.

  15. MAB

      I have a reoccurring nightmare that I am clenching my jaw so tight that the lower teeth break and splinter my uppers.

      mauriceburford@gmail.com

  16. Cate

      Last night I dreamed my little brother lit my hair on fire. I woke up today and felt like calling him up, calling him an asshole. 

      catiewaier@gmail.com 

  17. b.

      benleemccormick at gmail dot com

  18. Brett Erik Gallagher

      repeated dream where i am walking down a street lined with grey houses, pick one and walk in: upon entering, hear voices and see shadows of people talking but no one seems to be around. walk up spiral staircase in the middle of the house, and walk across a large room, finding a small staircase lined with thick dust, leading to a small room, lined with pentagrams and a bookcase that is too dark to make out what it holds, though i feel frightened looking at it. walking back upstairs, i make it some length across the floor and then fall through, only to begin again, walking down the street and walking through the threshold into it’s interior.

      brett.erik.gallagher@gmail.com

  19. Marco

      I suffer from insomnia and have ever since I was 6 years old. When I do sleep, it’s usually nightmares I dream about. I have watched myself die so many times in my sleep. Sometimes I have this reoccuring dream where I’m begging for my life and someone shoots me and there’s a hill in the distance lined up with everyone I know in my life just watching me die………

      I almost feel like my body forces itself to lay awake so I can avoid all the nasty dreams I have. On the plus side, I am the most creative at night. My mind runs rapid and when I’m reading a script or trying to research a character, I have the most success doing it late into the AM. I would love to read this book!

      mdgennuso@gmail.com

       

  20. ravi mangla
  21. Anonymous
  22. Lucy Maddox

      As a child, I had recurring nightmares about being slowly lowered into a bathtub full of lobsters.

      proofrawk@gmail.com

  23. Lpetach09

      I have a recurring “Crime and Punishment” nightmare in which I kill someone and get away with it.
      The guilt slowly eats me up from the inside. 
      I’ll often wake in a cold sweat.
      I killed my Aunt Karen last night.

      lpetach09@georgefox.edu

  24. Tim Horvath

      Nightmares of recent extraction: 1) Teaching anxiety dream. Teaching a course in American culture. The only reading is from Don DeLillo. All the students are required to write all papers in the style of DeLillo. This counts as a nightmare, I think, in spite of my fondness for DeLillo (maybe the nightmare being how aptly it might work). 2) Daughter’s dream. Giant tarantula in room. Me in real-life betawave awakeness: Certified tarantula eradicator.

      horvathon@gma:disqus il.com.

  25. werdfert

      i have recurring nightmares about being stuck within the walls of some huge cathedral. there are secret passageways, but i’ve gotten lost and i can’t make my way back to the sanctuary which is huge and painted black.
      werdfert@hotmail.com

  26. John Taylor
  27. Anonymous
  28. Anonymous

      about every nightmare for me has had normal-sized people surrounding diving boards or microscopic people inside dirt

      stephendlew@gmail.com

  29. Cole

      In all my nightmares someone is attacking me in my room, same as the room in which I am in fact asleep, and I think, in the dream, “This isn’t a dream; you have to wake up now.” I know it is vitally important to defend myself against the attacker who is in my actual room but I am trapped in the dream in which I am dreaming that this attack is not a dream. I try to scream and I wake myself up making strangled sounds. 

      Sometimes there’s a further recursion: the terrifyingly urgent thought is “This isn’t a dream THIS time.”

      I have parasomnias, too. I know I’m gilding the lily now, should stop with that one nightmare description, but who cares, I bought the book just this afternoon, along with The Four Quartets (for an exam). (But I haven’t started reading Butler or Eliot yet.) My creepiest parasomniac behavior is a laugh, a flat laugh that sounds like I’m just saying the words “ha ha ha.” And hypnogogic imagery that’s very De Quincey-ean: if I fall asleep in a certain state of tiredness with a light on, I’ll often wake from half-sleep to the most beautiful wallpaper of arabesques and roses. I am not sure why my mind always assures it’s wallpaper, like hallucinated wallpaper is better than hallucinated roses. 

      A few years ago when I read about parasomnias in the New York Times, they asked the researcher, And what about sexual parasomnias? This was after the researcher had described all manner of para-sleep behavior, at great length. Now he said only, “Those people are not asleep.” It was so pitiless and so clipped. What made him so angry? He had expatiated on sleep murder, but sleep jerking off got only a “those people are not asleep.” Maybe sleep researchers are plagued by fraudulent sleep volunteers. Maybe he has had to watch a lot of them.

  30. Laura Carter
  31. Donald Dunbar

      normalghost (at) gmail

      When I was 10 and had a fever I dreamed that I was an obsidian ball floating through the desert, propelled by gravity slingshots from city to city until, and this happened numerous times throughout the night, one city failed to catch me, and I slipped into this repeating eternal clipping of vision and the first part of a scream over and over.

  32. Carpenoctemtheatre

      carpenoctemtheatre@yahoo.com

      I’ve always had nightmares that involved being chased by and fighting off big cats, cougars and such. In my twenties, I discovered that I could reach into their mouths and grip their lower jaw at a fleshy spot just behind the teeth, making them unable to bite me. While I don’t imagine this would be effective or advisable outside of a dream, I’ve been able to wrestle them down to the ground ever since. Then we cuddle. Now I love these dreams.

  33. Eric

      I often wake up with a feeling of profound loss left over from a dream, but have no what is missing.

      themarstrander@gmail.com

  34. spencer madsen

      a nightmare where i learn that the truth behind the growth of hair is inextricably linked with the average number of perceptions people have of you

      spencer.mad@gmail.com

  35. Pelagic
  36. Alex Chapman

      My nightmare is sitting through another psychology class listening to people describe their dreams. alex.chapman@gmail.com

  37. Maggie

      I used to have nightmares about living on a space vessel where vampires talked to me via video chat in foreign languages.

      mggi.mcg@gmail.com

  38. derick dupre

      The nightmare where I’m emailed by a stranger

  39. JP
  40. Tim B.
  41. Ccoronado215

      I always have nightmares that something bad is happening to my children. I guess I am paranoid or maybe its the kiddos driving me nuts who knows! Oh wait I do in my dreams ha! Well I would love to read the book. Please pick me! Thanks ccoronado215@yahoo.com

  42. Taylor
  43. jdel

      jsonnen88 at gmail.com

      my father in my nightmare has been hunting deer and there is an accident with the gun. his leg or maybe his guts bleed onto the froze-together pine needles on the land his father owned and he looks at me like for just once will i please not deliberate and then begs me to kill him the rest of the way. i obey.

  44. MikeofMandan

      I flipped out after watching the movie Arachnophobia when I was a child.  In a hysterical fit I barricaded myself in the largest room in the house, clearing everything from the floor around me.  I fell asleep out of exhaustion, turning in circles scanning the floor for spiders.  Once asleep, spider nightmares.   mikelr@hotmail.com

  45. Mick

      I have a recurring nightmare where a Pee-Wee Herman pull string doll comes to life, hunts me, and stabs me to death.
      cottins@me.com

  46. jmark

      A doctor told me I have delayed sleep phase disorder. I pass through a kind of nightmare every morning between 2am and 5am. jomarksn@gmail.com

  47. Matt Weinkam

      My bedroom is at the end of a long hallway of creaky hardwood flooring. A unknown man is walking towards my room to kill me. He is walking very, very slowly. 

      matt.weinkam at gmail.com

  48. Truestruggle

      i have a nightmare where i kill someone. to hide the evidence i eat their entire body.

      truestruggle at gmail dot com.

  49. murphy

      srd at mit dot edu

  50. catheaven

      i dream parts of disney’s robin hood (like, the one with the animated fox) but find it really scary while dreaming it. this has been happening since childhood.

      brainpowers at live dot com

  51. Brittany Wallace
  52. Derek

      i guess i used to have what you might call nightmares as a kid, mostly of falling or being eaten alive, until i started liking them and ‘tried’ to have nightmares (ate bananas or top ramen before going to bed) and stopped having them. 

  53. Sean

      Not long ago, I slept, but it was as if I did not.  My mind and body seemed to swirl nearly to the light
      of pure lucidity, then the depths of dark unconsciousness – never completely
      waking up, never completely blacking out.  It was never completely anything but some
      sort of gray middle.  In this
      non-committal dreaminess I walked endlessly towards the horizon, upon which was
      clearly visible the beginning gray light of a morning which never erupted into
      anything more than a taunt.  The
      light seemed to be going away from me, as if morning had forgotten which
      direction it should travel.  I
      chased after it, barely able to see, trudging through tall, sharp grass that
      cut at my legs and a forest of bare tree limbs, which pawed at my face, scraping my neck and cheeks.  There was a constant accumulation over my eyes – a
      shapeless, colorless gauze which pulled apart like cotton-candy.  I wiped and pulled at it constantly, but as quickly as
      I worked, it replaced itself in like kind.  Like an evening dew of
      substantial intent, the further I walked the heavier it got, the harder I
      worked, the more I slowed, until finally, out of breath and exhausted, I gave
      up, watching the crack of light go over the horizon, leaving me in darkness
      with nothing but icy wind, scraping and whittling naked branches together.
      seandotdwyer@gmail.com

  54. M Thomas Stevenson

      m.thomas.stevenson@gmail.com  usually my nightmare nowadays involve people i know and love being mean to me, like just ridiculously hateful, and i always respond with an equal amount of hatefulness in the dreams, which i dont even know what that means for me. 

  55. Augustjsmith
  56. Anonymous

      Vague shape of a man, backlit by quietly menacing blue light, approaching room through a narrow hall, reaching door.

      loganfry @ utexas.edu

  57. Jason Jimenez

      string of nails stuck in throat, i pull up. 

      j j i m e n e z (at) c c a (dot) e d u

  58. bemightee
  59. Matthew

      I pretty much don’t dream or have nightmares, I just relive a catalog of mortifying moments of my life, unable to do anything differently, watching myself make the same mistakes. 
      MattJ19@gmail.com

  60. Ghought
  61. Kris Hartrum

      LAST NIGHT I had a very high fever and I watched eXisTenZ by David Cronenberg which is a strange movie with a lot of bio-mechanical gore, body modification, mutated amphibians and a young Jude Law. Afterwards I sleep and had a dream that the milk in my fridge was actually soy milk. I cannot express to you my surprise.

      krishartrum@gmail.com 
      @Khartrum

  62. ben

      i have dreamt before that i am in a small cottage that resembles an old home of mine that resembles another place i once stayed and it is that sort of perpetual night that surrounds a nightmare in which even the activities of day are shrouded in night and my father and i are unpacking groceries when spiders begin to descend from the ceiling.  they are everywhere spiders in all the corners and they are opening like nightflowers and crawling along the walls to get to us.  they slide gently down their threads trying to reach us and we climb under the table trying to hide from them.  we huddle together under the table but the spiders are coming from everywhere out of every room in the house and every corner descending towards us under the table.  i don’t remember if either one of us says anything to the other but there is a look of fear on his face.  i have dreamt this dream a number of times.  

      benbalcom@gmail.com

  63. WeedOnBooks

      I don’t have a particular nightmare I can remember, but recently the cast of Made in Chelsea has just kind of been chilling in my dreams. 

      zombywoof27@gmail.com

  64. Bradley Sands
  65. Hypocrite_no1

      In the dream I’m watching television and I see myself sitting in the exact same room, wearing the same clothes. I look around in the dream but there is no camera and the me on television is not replicating my movement. The movie on the television cuts to a scene of me driving. There are the same billboards all around me, a severed cat and the word SOON. A title card says “five days later” and suddenly I’m watching myself sitting in a train station and when the train comes, I jump in front of it.

  66. Oliviadigsby

      Once I dream about being carried by four ladies wearing white gowns, looking so scary and I was horrified when i saw that one of them is my aunt. 

      oliviadigsby@gmail.com

  67. Tomk
  68. Petermarkus66

      My recurring nightmare is of Blake cutting off my head and nailing it to a backyard telephone pole. 

  69. ryan chang

      ryanchang@gmail.com . most nightmares include uncanny replays of that day, leaving me with an almost unbearable dread and sticky feeling

  70. Nick Sturm
  71. James Schiller

      Most of my dreams are perfectly acceptable: dull fondlings of matter.  Like all literature though, I read it for some thick input that will holocaust me / reveal new feet.  I’m confident NOTHING has that mother lode.  I’m buying it anyway.

      jschiller4@gmail.com

  72. Tyler Gobble
  73. lea
  74. Laura

      Yes please. I have lots of nightmares, in fact, they are just a normal part of my dreamscape.

      Hawthornescarlet at gmail dot com

  75. shaine scar

      Streaming visuals à la 2001 star gate sequence on a non-stop drive from San Francisco to Austin, TX. 35 hrs w/ no sleep = radical times.

      sascarminach@gmail.com

  76. Luke
  77. Frank Tas, the Raptor

      I never really had nightmares but around eight or so I used to picture myself shooting my parents to death and then turning the pistol on my sister while she was on both knees between and in front of their corpses, crying and pleading with me not to kill her. I’d stand at the entrance of our family room and imagine this while watching them watch tv and cry, and when they asked me what was wrong I had to say “I don’t know” to avoid telling them what was going through my head.

      mrfranktas@gmail.com, fuck you

  78. brosephine

      j.e.somoano@gmail:disqus.com

  79. JScap

      I recently got glasses.  Last week was my high school reunion, but I didn’t go because I don’t live in my home state at the moment.

      Anyway, last night I dreamt I was at my high school reunion and I left my glasses on the table.  Long table, lots of beers.  When I went back for them I opened my case to find a large pewter-looking revolver.  I wandered around without my glasses, with the ornamental revolver instead, and couldn’t recognize people that I couldn’t even remember.

      Here’s my email address: joseph . scapellato @ gmail . com
      @9513f962b43c0d6674779f1959a4724d:disqus 
      Thanks for having this giveaway!

  80. Michael Filippone
  81. Mylumyes

      Everything blurry, my glasses are right beside me but I can’t reach them. I strain with every finger muscle, but no glasses. A man holding a kinfe has been chasing me. He ooms there in the background of the blurriness. I am paralyzed. I can’t even remember waking up, but it seems like it takes forever.

      mylumyes@gmail.com

  82. Kate Gray

      this isn’t a nightmare but last night i sleepwalked for the first time since I was a kid. I was staying in a hotel, went to sleep kind of drunk, “woke up”/realized I was conscious around 3 am in the basement of the hotel stairwell. I must have gotten out of bed, left my room, and walked down the hall to the stairwell while asleep. I couldn’t see the floor numbers on the doors without my glasses that well but I eventually figured out what floor I was staying on and knocked on the door to our room so my BF would let me in. it was pretty strange.

      ekaterinagray@gmail.com

  83. Justin Daugherty
  84. EIS
  85. James Yeh

      Giant hairy snake, floating Jesus head just outside my childhood bedroom (with weird turnkey thing in his neck), getting emasculated by a D-shaped handsaw (this caused me to bite through one of my veneers), being rejected by love interest (many times, many interests), perpetual teeth problems often involving tonguing them loose and then out.

      jamesyeh82[at]gmail.com

  86. M. Kitchell

      i’m too poor to buy this right now and i want it you know my email address i am entering this contest even tho i probably ‘can’t’ but w/e

      my nightmare is that i have to move back to the midwest at some point
      my other nightmare is that nothing will ever make sense

  87. Cassandra Troyan

      cassandra [at] cassandratroyan.com

      had a nightmare of a strange
      sexual fantasy where Harrison Ford followed me around on a cruise ship, offering me a large foam check for $50,000 to erotically crack crab claws underneath the table while
      he rubbed himself. 

  88. Justin C.

      I think when I was around eight or nine, this dark presence started entering my room at night, and I would know—just like, really know—that it was going to murder my whole family if I didn’t stop it. And that if I tried to stop it, it would murder me. I didn’t experience this as a dream, really. Like, I experienced this as fully real at the time. Every night for a while, it would come. Or, often. Regularly. It would come in my second story window, silently, and I would pull the covers over my head because I didn’t want it to murder me. If I’m asleep, the thing wants to murder me less, was the thinking. It would pass over and kind of check me out—like, Nope, this one’s sleeping, can’t murder him—and then head out of the room. The part I remember the most is like, the moment right after the thing decided it would not murder me and it left my room to murder other people. I remember so many nights, laying with the covers over my head, unable to sleep, too scared to help my family. I was sure that they’d be dead by morning. I also recently had a dream where a man covered in zebra-colored paint pulled his lips back and flashed his teeth at me like he was trying to communicate some kind of orangutan threat. Also, orangutan spelled right, first try! Things are looking up for me!

      cut.with.the.kitchen.knife@gmail.com

  89. Darren

      i have had a recurring nightmare throughout my life in which I / the viewer of the dream is incorporeal, and there seems to be a lot of lava, colored metal platforms and paranoid voices talking about the stock market or something. sometimes (probably 2 or 3 times a year), when i am awake, I hear the voices / feel the sensation of the nightmare and feel my own internal monologue ‘going under’. the internet has suggested i exhibit early signs of schizophrenia.

      darrenchaitman at gmail dot com

  90. travis
  91. Krysbeau

      Sometimes, when I get back together with a certain ex-lover, (maybe because alcohol, maybe because I just feel like it) I’ll have nightmares in his bed early in the morning.  Sometimes they’re about malevolent animals (snakes mostly, but bears too) but sometimes they’re just about people changing, without so much as a hiccup, into other people a lot.  Last time I woke up from a nightmare (giant grizzly), I was already holding on to him real tight and it felt good even though. The sun wasn’t up yet and the ceiling fan made the room too cold, so I got closer to his back and fell back asleep and the dreams were more innocuous after that.  I don’t think the nightmares are omens or whatever, about me and him, but it would be convenient probably to my ends if I told myself they were. I’m going to listen to the Rolling Stones tonight before I go to bed and maybe it will happen so one of their songs will play in my head as I dream.  I’ll assign meaning to why my subconscious latched itself to a specific song but probably disregard it when I need to and just do what I feel like.  I can’t know yet but I will later.  Once he had me under his thumb and he knew it.  That isn’t true anymore but I still think about it.  Anyway I don’t think there is much left in me for him.  Maybe I will still try.  There are times he is embarrassing to himself and me too.  There are times in crowded places where he seems like the only one worthy to look at.

      From what I’ve gathered, stories people tell about their dreams are always hard to pay attention to, or care about.  Those, and ones about romantic relationships, probably.  I did pay attention, though, when he told me a dream he had had once about a planet made of fruit.

      kbeaudoin (at) mail.csuchico.edu

  92. Krysbeau

      All that seems very pretentious now that I look over it and I’m sorry if it smacks of pretension to someone else too, but I still want the book.

  93. Landolakes

      fuck yeah the driver

  94. Paul Curran
  95. Mary Miller
  96. Donald

      Had a recurring nightmare from about 3 – 5 yrs old in which there was a skylight in the roof of my kitchen (inexplicably, as there are floors directly above it), and when I looked up I noticed a huge, looming black cloud. Somehow, by whatever dream logic, I knew that it was sentient, malevolent, had designs on us. Devouring, corrupting – who knows. I tried to tell my mum, but she was busy cooking, and either didn’t hear or wouldn’t listen, so I ran through to the dining room – originally a separate room, but since the late 80s knocked through to join the kitchen in an elbow – and scrambled in to hide under the table. The last howeverlong of the dream would play out with me cowering there, under the dinner table, fenced in by chairlegs, watching the cloud as it slowly descended into my back garden and gathered slowly but surely at the window, pressing against it, trying to find a way in.

      Never did find out how it ended.

      donald.futers@gmail.com

  97. Liz Logan

      I live my nightmare: stuck in a coop where the noise never stops.

      sickofnyc at gmail.com

  98. sol

      nightmares about mouths and hairs

      netpredator100 at aim dott com

  99. saki

      i saw i gun down a robber and my mother was beside me wearing red high heels. i was afraid.

      papagrigor@gmail.com

  100. Kristen
  101. UncleIstvan

      Zombies dressed in pink animal costumes were materializing out of the trees at my aunt’s farm.  Me and my father were being attacked but the only things we could find were giant pink foam noodles (the pool toys).  We were both terrified but laughing at how silly it all was but my father was also laughing because he didn’t want me to be frightened.  

      It sounds like some weird surreal comedy, but it was terrifying.

      monkeyman3@gmail.com

  102. Michael J Emmons
  103. Nibelungen

      you will get nothing and like it

  104. Rich Yap

      i had a nightmare that i was at some hollywood party with all these major celebrities. i remember that i kept saying the wrong things to courtney cox and she kept getting offended. david arquette kept laughing at the situation. then someone screamed and when i look there are a couple of zombies tearing someone apart. everyone else starts to scream and the room goes into a panic. i get shoved from all angles as everyone tries to run away, but little by little, the hollywood elite are becoming the hollywood undead. and i have no way out…

      ryap88@gmail.com

  105. Pete Michael Smith

      My first year of college, I had a recurring nightmare maybe three or four times a week. Always the same.

      In the dream, I woke up blind. I could see shadows and some light and hear well, but never a clear visual. It was terrifying. The problem about waking up blind of course, is getting help. In the dream, I would always fall a lot and scream and no one would come. 

      As the year wore on and I got progressively more and more afraid of waking up blind in real life, I started to sleep with my cell phone in my hand and by shoes by the bed, so that if need be I’d be able to make it outside and find someone. It’s been years, but when I sleep alone, I still sleep with my cell phone in my hand, even though it’s a touch screen now and I wouldn’t be able to be sure I was calling anyone at all.

      pete.michael.smith@gmail.com

  106. Otus

      My nightmares all involve people endlessly retelling all of their dreams that aren’t about me. Matt.Benak@gmail.com

  107. Mark Folse

      How could I not want a copy after this?

  108. Xsweetwilliamx

      xsweetwilliamx@gmail.com

      as a child I had nightmares about depatment stores, ones with really really high shelves. I don’t really remember my dreams anymore but my boss keeps having nightmares that I’ll quit, so that’s cool.

  109. Kevin Tyler

      I had a nightmare that I wasn’t allowed into Mormon heaven and my family waved at me from my concrete slab in Mormon hell. 

      psych333@gmail.com