Nightmares on Halloween

The first one was mild. I was being tattooed. The tattoos were on my upper arms, and not at all what I expected them to be. Two of them were Chinese characters, in green, and the third was a sunrise of sorts inscribed in a circle. In my dream I was thinking of what clothes I could wear to cover them, or what I could get tattooed over the characters. I vaguely remember Elspeth talking about her bad tattoo, on her chest, where an f looked like a p. The word was just a random set of letters. Meaningless. When I woke up it took me a few minutes to realized that my arms were unmarked. The sense of disconnection with my body continued until I fell asleep.

The second one was hellish. I was running through the woods with friends. We were chased by saber-tooth tigers that looked more like sloths. They caught us, and then transformed into people. We were held in a corral of sorts, but it wasn't locked. I think that we were being tortured, but I never experienced the torture. There was just an air of injury in the "cage." We were scared and hopeless, but at some point I realized that I could just walk out. I left, and made it back to a city and I told someone where I had come from. They sent me to therapy. After telling the therapist what happened, I ended up going back to the corral. I think it was part of a plan to free everyone. When I got back it was worse than when I had left. A cruel woman that I don't remember from before was directing the operation now. They had captured the president of the country that we were in, and were torturing him. They covered him in insects that bit him. They carved into his hands (maybe I was feeling the cat scratches pressed against my pillow.) They put him in a metal box, with his head in a glass bowl looking out at me so that I shared his pain. At the climax of the dream, they were somehow putting pieces of his wasted body in an oven with sizzling oil on top. When I asked if they were going to kill him, they said they couldn't but that they would kill a friend who was also in the corral. I was screaming and crying and so afraid. I decided that we had to escape, but I was worried that they had told me this as a trap. We left, found a car, drove through the dry woods until we ran out of gas as we approached a highway. My friend wanted to hitch hike but I thought that everyone on the road worked at the torture-ranch. I don't remember if that is how the dream ended because it had a feeling of endlessness. No matter how escaped I was, I would end up there again, or maybe I had never left.