Recent nightmare: Bars and diners.

I dreamed the other night that I was in the black neighborhood bar, only in my dream it was a cinderblock off-the-highway diner in the middle of a big parking lot - though, it was cement floors and high ceilings in this diner like a warehouse - and it was night.

I was there for hours with old friends having a good time and laughing, and at the end of the night when I'm on the other side of the bar (getting drinks, I think), this red-faced drunk Asian guy in a dirty flannel shirt pulls out a knife at one of my friends, and holds the tip against the lower part of his throat (right where it's going into the chest), and makes him lie down on his back on the booth seat, holding the tip of his knife against his throat all the time.

I'm still thinking it's a drunken joke all this while, then suddenly he shoves the knife in, draws it down to the chest, then picks it up and cuts a slit at the top and the bottom, then reaches in to open up the little "doors" he made in my friend's throat.

At this point in my dream I'm getting woozy, so I tear my eyes away, run out the back door, and run into the parking lot and hide behind a building while calling 911. I'm looking around the corner at the black neighborhood bar to make sure the guy isn't coming after me when I feel sick, and wake up - and at that point I jumped straight out of bed, I was so wide-awake and horrified.

...I think what probably caused this was my going to see "The Lovely Bones" earlier that day, since though it's not graphic, in a dream sequence the murdered girl is in the bathroom looking at the serial killer who killed her taking a bath, and there's blood and mud everywhere, and a suggestive barber's razor sitting on the edge of the sink...