Lucid dreaming:

Experienced with the dreamer feeling awake, aware of dreaming, and able to control events consciously.

Nightmares:

A frightening or unpleasant dream; a terrifying or very unpleasant experience.

Lucid Nightmares:

Being awake during a terrifying experience, and helpless to do anything about it.

So goes the tales in the book, Lucid Nightmares, a new collection of short fiction from author David Boyer, in which real life nightmares, impossible to explain or escape from, fill every chapter.

Take, for example, the story “Claustrophobia,” in which a man wakes up from what he believes is a nightmare, only to realize he's been buried alive–and his air supply is rapidly running out. In the story “Spider Bait,” a man who believes he suffers from extreme, migraine headaches, realizes with terrifying clarity that a small, deadly form of spider has crawled into his ear while he was sleeping, and has laid eggs in his brain. In “Brain Pie,” the Sheriff of a small town on the verge of starvation finds a way to feed the locals and get rid of the riff-raff at the same time. In “Taking Pictures of the Dead,” a serial killer who believes he can capture his victim's souls with a special camera visits the local cemetery at night to do just that, but ends up being dragged into the darkness of death to join them. In “Try Me,” a computer video game geek becomes convinced that one of the characters in his favorite video game is actually capable of entering the real world in order to win the game, and...he could be right.

This and much more in...Lucid Nightmares.