The COVID-19 pandemic brought life to an unexpected halt, and all levels of education including higher education had abrupt changes from face-to-face teaching to emergency remote teaching to sustain the continuity of education. English preparatory schools that provide newly-enrolled university students with one-year intensive English language program are no exception with regard to emergency remote teaching. Metaphor elicitation can be one of the ways to reveal university language instructors' subtle thoughts about emergency remote teaching. In line with this idea, this paper investigates the use of metaphors elicited from 60 university instructors from different universities in Turkey in relation to emergency remote teaching. After the analysis, 58 valid metaphors were recompiled and classified under six categories. It was identified that instructors found emergency remote teaching quite challenging and dynamic in nature while only a small number of instructors considered it a positive experience. It was also evident in the instructors' metaphors that they felt inadequate and untrained when they had this abrupt change at first and perceived emergency remote teaching as an unreal experience. Given the fact that there can be emergency situations in the future, we should move on after taking the necessary lessons from this challenging period.