Nightmares Quotes

“You are the keeper of your memories. And you are the composer of your nightmares.”
― David J. Naiman, Jake, Lucid Dreamer

“That night, Annabeth slept without nightmares, which just made her uneasy when she woke up - like the calm before a storm.”
― Rick Riordan, The Mark of Athena

“But I stayed up thinking about how I've been lying to him, no less than I lie to myself in my pre-sleep ritual. And I lied to him again just as we were growing more intimate than ever and he asked me about my scar.”
― Zack Love, Anissa's Redemption

“He clearly suffers from some past traumas too, so hopefully he'll understand why I was untruthful to him about mine.”
― Zack Love, Anissa's Redemption

“It's the place where dreams end and nightmares begin—it's the world of Intimate Partner Violence (IPV).”
― Mallika Nawal

“Lately I've been having nightmares, where I'm cut into so many pieces that there isn't enough of me to be put back together.”
― Jodi Picoult, My Sister’s Keeper

“I wonder sometimes if the thoughts that flock my nightmares are abandoned memories coming home to roost.”
― Danielle Teller, All the Ever Afters: The Untold Story of Cinderella's Stepmother

“I am kinda lost, don't know who I am, what am doing, and why I am in it. Everything around me is more like a weird dream.

I wish I could wake up. Before the dream finishes me.”
― Ratish Edwards

“Shortly before five o’clock, Mayor Thorin woke from a terrible dream. In it, a bird with pink eyes had been cruising slowly back and forth above the Barony. Wherever its shadow fell, the grass turned yellow, the leaves fell shocked from the trees, and the crops died. The shadow was turning his green and pleasant Barony into a waste land. It may be my Barony, but it’s my bird, too, he thought just before awakening, huddled into a shuddery ball on one side of his bed. My bird, I brought it here, I let it out of its cage.”
― Stephen King, Wizard and Glass

“The man standing in the booth placing the tickets into her hands for the fun-house loomed largely in front of her with arms comprised of iron muscle. She remembered the gray cataract that covered over one of his eyes and the terrified feeling it gave her. She had been too young to understand the malady. To her; his eye looked as though it belonged to a creature from the sea. A frightening creature composed of reptilian and fish like attributes, which would pull unsuspecting prey underneath the darkest oceans. The smile on his face, with the crooked teeth, the cigar, contrasting with the bald head and unshaven face increased her sense of panic.”
― Jaime Allison Parker, River at the World's Dawn

“In these myriad ways, we carved out our lives in Los Angeles. Yet falling asleep was often an act of travel, taking me quickly by the hand so that I am instantly surrounded by verdant foliage, the ocean's emerald roar, the voices of Alice, Mala, our grandmother. Those most familiar and beloved of women.

But there are also nightmares. Over and over I dream of a small house, a glittering lagoon, a mango tree, and a young girl. She stands before me and her large bruised eyes do not leave mine. When she unpins the sari fold at her shoulder and pulls it away from her, I see sunset-colored bruises on her delicate clavicles. When she undoes her sari blouse, I see the grenades tucked like extra breasts under her own. It is grotesque. I wake trembling, and her eyes stays with me for hours.”
― Nayomi Munaweera, Island of a Thousand Mirrors

“They had three cadences, these spectral drummers, which they called First Kings, Second Kings, and Revelations. Going into a fight, they went from one cadence to another with no apparent signal until the officers began to shout commands and men began to fall. Then the drummers began a solemn drill beat that Bushrod believed would be the muttering undertone of every nightmare he would ever have.”
― Howard Bahr, The Black Flower: A Novel of the Civil War

“I'd ask my parents to leave the door open just a little bit so I wouldn't be stuck in the prison of my bedroom and mind, the imaginary horrors barring me from entering dreamland.”
― Caspar Vega, Donald Trump: Plague Doctor

“Haunted by nightmares are often the devils in your bloodlines.”
― Fahad Basheer

“That was the thing about bad dreams in the Wild North. You still had them when you woke up.”
― Dean F. Wilson, Coilhunter

“AS I SLEEP

I fear that darkness
Finds me
As I sleep
When life is quieted
Midnight’s brutal feet
Cast upon me
Cementing me
Against my pillow
In a heaven
Of black roses”
― Trisha North, Internal Devices: The Faulty Drives Within My Mortal Hardware

“Kafka's long nightmares were but a preparation for the actual horrors we were to experience even to a greater degree.”
― Henry Miller, Sextet: Six essays

“I am coming to see that the sensation of the worst nightmares, a sensation that can be felt asleep or awake, is identical to those worst dreams' form itself: the sudden intra-dream realization that the nightmares' very essence and center has been with you all along, even awake: it's just been... overlooked.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“He wondered if sanity had completely forsaken him in a land where nightmares and reality existed side-by-side.”
― Kevin Purdy

“A ten-year-old Amanda wandering around the sights and sounds of a carnival. Trying to take it all in as such an event was much larger than the backroads of isolated territory from whence she grew up. She could not imagine this many people assembled in one place. It was made more disturbing by the fact none of them seemed familiar. Short for her age, she wandered unnoticed among the crowds and began to feel the first stirrings of fear. The loud talk, the screaming children, the long lines of procession, along with the myriads of odors created a miasma that she wanted to flee. The laughter and the faux expressions of joy on the faces of people, took on the maroon tones of a nightmare. She could imagine underneath the laughter, were horrid screams about to erupt.”
― Jaime Allison Parker, River at the World's Dawn

“Some dreams never come true. It becomes nightmare that will leave you with regrets.”
― Salman Aziz

“I can’t tell you how many times I’ve woken up in a cold sweat thinking I’m being chased by a grunting, disfigured man wielding a hatchet. Usually we're at an abandoned campground, which leads me to believe this is a subconscious mashup of Friday the 13th and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. He never catches me. The only thing that ever happens is I'm running and he's chasing. It's pretty horrible. I know it’s not real, but it feels real, and you know how feelings are. They make everything real.”
― Anne Clendening, Bent: How Yoga Saved My Ass

“The incident plaguing him on this very night, did not have any relation to the jungles, the killing fields, the faces of villagers and the Vietcong, nor the hours of trekking through the mud, to destinations never revealed over the radios.”
― Jaime Allison Parker, River at the World's Dawn

“His mind was still at the precinct, where he saw his friend being yanked out of the car. It was an image he would never forget. He dreaded the terrifying experience that must have followed for her. He had a feeling he was going to have nightmares for years.”
― Jason Medina, The Manhattanville Incident: An Undead Novel

“Nightmares come in many forms when you’re a cop.”
― C.A. Taylor, Torch

“Too often dreams become living nightmares when we turn goals into jobs.”
― Richie Norton

“With my newfound sense of safety came strange thoughts and fragments of scenes flashing in my head. They came slowly enough for me to see them clearly, but out of context, and I didn't understand what they meant. More and more often, I woke up drenched in sweat.”
― Olga Trujillo, The Sum of My Parts: A Survivor's Story of Dissociative Identity Disorder

“I adopted all the expedients that would naturally occur to a young medical man to end these enervating experiences, but without avail. I dieted. I exercised. I would get up and dress, go out either on foot or in my car, in spite of a strong fear resistance. Fear pursued me out of those dreams. The nightmare quality hung about me and could not be shaken off. I was awake and still dreaming. Never have I seen such sinister skies as I did on those night excursions. I felt such a dread of unfamiliar shadows as I had not known even in childhood. There were times on those nocturnal drives when I could have shouted aloud for daylight as a man suffocating in a closed chamber might shout for air.”
― H.G. Wells, The Croquet Player

“The Dream Maker is here by consent of every person who ever came here.”
― Donna Goddard, Circles of Separation

“I never remember my dreams which suits me fine.”
― John King, The Football Factory