Ugh, I just had a horrible nightmare. And it was one of those that felt like it lasted the entire time I was asleep, too, even though I know it's not really possible.
It started out with me looking at houses to buy. I toured this one huge house and decided I liked it. I bought it, but the previous guy living there didn't want to leave. So I moved in, but he kept breaking in and I kept finding him and his stuff places (like in this weird cinderblock room in the basement). So that wasn't scary, just sort of creepy.
Later in the dream, there was this woman after me. She was in her early fifties with brown hair and sort of looked like someone I used to know, but she had this supernatural element to her where she could spontaneously freeze-frame her face into every horrifying thing I'd ever seen and scare the everloving hell out of me. Anyway, for some reason she wanted me and mine dead.
So, for what felt like hours, she tailed me through this dream. At one point my family hid me in some sort of oncology nursing home where you could buy "average beds for $5 or a really nice bed if your family wants to spend $7". But she followed me there, killing off the employees. At one point there was a thunderstorm and I jolted out of my dream-sleep to see her at the window, cutting the screen with a big knife and grinning at me with this insanely evil and grotesque grimace.
Still later, I abandoned the oncology place and was back in this big house. She found me there, too. At one point I glanced out the window and she was all twisted up like a pretzel, walking on her fingertips across my darkened yard, completely covered in blood and looking at me. Yeesh, still having chills thinking about it.
Nevertheless, for some reason in this environment I decided to have a dinner party. Then I became concerned that she was going to show up and stalk my dinner guests as they arrived, so I was watching out the window. This nurse I used to work with IRL showed up, I saw her car pull up as I watched out the window.
I suddenly had some psychic flash forward to the crazy woman killing her, dismembering her, and arranging the pieces in my yard for me to see. So as the nurse stood by her car and smoked a cigarette, I became frantic to get her in safely.
So I went outside, only to find myself on this shoddily-built deck that was only wide enough for people to walk single file on it. It ran the length of the house and was built on this soft embankment next to a stone wall and some poison ivy, and it was about 75 feet in the air on the very edge of a cliff. I shouted to the nurse and she put her cigarette out and waved, and came up to where I was. Then we had to navigate this thing back toward the house.
I was just telling her "I'm sorry this deck is so flimsy, my puppy had surgery and we needed the dirt that was under it"
when the deck started to give way and fall off the face of the cliff. I made a frantic grab for poison ivy and sandstone, and then lost hold and tumbled backwards. I was in the process of falling to what I knew was my death, waiting for the impact, when I jerked awake.