BOO-GLEECH

Written by Jonathan Wojcik

The Revenge of
Nightmare Beings

A year ago, I invited people to talk about the strangest, most disturbing entities from their own dreams and nightmares, and I took the time to personally illustrate and review a selection of my personal favorites...though only a small selection, as the number of amazing, baffling and sometimes chilling dream stories quickly climbed into the hundreds.

So, let's do it all over again. This time, I'm going to start things off with a selection of my own dream-entities, having previously only really shared one of particular significance. When we're done, I expect to see your own in the comments section here, and I'll be drawing another 20-30 before Halloween 2 is done with!

THE WALRUS

I don't remember exactly when I had any of these dreams, but I did keep them written down for years in a little text journal on my computer. Many of them faded completely from my memory, but whenever I re-read one, it feels almost like I'm right there in the dreamworld all over again.

The walrus was the antagonist of a dream I must have had over a decade ago, judging by the details of some of the other entries, and I can now remember the thing as clear as day. For some reason, this dream of mine was from the perspective of two men who lived together underground after some sort of great cataclysm, and were attempting to raise an orphaned child they found in the surrounding city ruins. Little did they know, the child was forever pursued by a "walrus" who killed anyone else in its path, which I could see wandering the surface in search of its prey.

The walrus looked like a man, in dingy, dirty clothes, with a deformed face resembling a wrinkled, spandex mask with a very real muzzle and teeth.

The most unsettling thing about the walrus were that its eyes were only painted on.

The other most unsettling thing about the walrus was the absurd speed with which it zipped around while only barely moving its legs - like greatly accelerated video footage.

I have a fuzzy impression that he may have even flown through the air in his jittery, fast-forward shuffle.

I awoke before I ever found out what the walrus wanted, but I knew it was getting closer and closer to to sniffing out its next victims.

CACTUS LADY

Many of my dreams begin with me watching a "movie," which quickly blurs into the "reality" of the dream. Thus was the case of the cactus lady, the ghostly villain of a dream-film similar to The Ring or The Grudge in tone. Cactus lady looked exactly like the pale, black-haired spirits popularized by these and other Japanese films, except of course for the gigantic cactus branch sprouting out the middle of her face, swaying like a feeler as she crawled and groped about a decrepit old house.

This disturbing horror tone didn't last long, however, because the cactus lady soon morphed into a huge, blood red humanoid covered in iron plates, with a bucket-shaped helmet, and the people of her local village assembled their own enormous knight to end her rampage.

The ensuing battle scene continuously focused on a black wicker basket attached directly to the side of Cactus Lady's helmet, which was apparently supposed to hold the severed head of her giant opponent. Unfortunately, she would be sliced down the middle before this could happen, and the dream ended with Dragonball Z characters clapping their approval.

INSIDIOUS BIRD

This is one I had only a few months ago, so it's still fresh in my memory. This time, I found myself in the shoes of a middle-aged businessman who was, for whatever reason, in hot pursuit of a huge, naked, baby bird. The creature was easily ten feet tall, its head perpetually aimed straight upward, and moved with remarkable efficiency on its stubby, awkward feet.

I chased the bird through city streets, up and down staircases, even across rooftops for no reason I could fathom, except that it seemed both profoundly important and strangely exhilirating.

That was until the bird dashed into an enormous office complex, and rather anticlimactically cornered itself in a cubicle. For a moment, I thought I'd won...but the bird didn't look scared anymore. It only stood there in the corner, calmly swaying, somehow exhuding an air of triumph from its blind, expressionless face.

Suddenly, I noticed that the office workers were just as expressionless, standing stiffly like an army of dummies and all staring straight at me, unblinking.

I somehow immediately knew I'd been tricked. The bird had lured me into some kind of trap.

It opened its dumb, gaping mouth a little wider, and a sound like an airhorn blasted from its throat.

That's when I woke up, fascinated by the narrative my subconscious had just woven but maybe a little disappointed that its climax was a cheap jump scare.

THE ARMOIRE

This is an especially quick, cheap drawing, but the armoire only looked like an ordinary armoire in the dream itself, so it was either draw an armoire or just throw up a stock photo of an armoire.

This rather lengthy and elaborate dream centered around the life of a lonely, haggard, 20-something man who lived in the run-down, overgrown mansion of his deceased and supposedly abusive stepmother, who must have willed him her possessions more out of spite than for any other conceivable reason.

He despised the mansion and the memories of his stepmother, but any time he tried to leave, no matter where he fell asleep, he would wake back up in the mansion again almost immediately.

Sometimes, he would even seem to escape for a while. More than once, he thought he had successfully moved into a brand new apartment, or even gone on the run and lived out of hotels...but it was always an illusion. All along, he'd simply been moving his belonging in and out of the mansion, again and again.

The culprit?

The furniture.

Every single item that came with the mansion was, in same way, malevolent. The dream didn't go into specific details, but I got a general impression that whatever a given object could do to torment the guy, it would. Lamps might turn themselves off at just the right moment for him to trip over something. Drawers might displace his clothes. Appliances might have the opposite of their intended effects.

At the center of it all was the armoire. I never did see what the armoire was capable of doing in the dream, but I kept seeing dramatic, ominous close-ups of it when things would go wrong. The armoire delighted in its hatred of the man. It did everything in its power - whatever that may have been - to prolong his suffering, keep him trapped, and even prevent him from killing himself to escape, though I also got a distinct impression that it "needed" him. The armoire feared losing this human to torture. It couldn't bear the thought of being left alone to wallow in its own misery and malice.

In a twisted way, the armoire loved him.

...And this was about the point at which I dreamt this had all been another movie, I looked it up on the internet, and all I found was an assortment of fan-art treating the armoire and its victim as a cute couple.

THE HIDEOUS EYE GUY

This is a dream I had more than fifteen years ago, but I've never forgotten one moment of it. It began with me - once again feeling that I was someone else entirely - wandering the property I'd grown up on for no specific reason, when I came upon a humanoid entity resembling a dirty, felt doll, pure white and featureless except for a cornea and pupil also cut from felt.

Who knows why, but I felt I'd somehow recently done this being a significant favor, and I asked it what it was going to give me in return.

The eye-doll-man responded:

"YOUR FIRST! HIDEOUS! EEEEEEEYE!"

This line was delivered loudly, yet without emotion, as though reading awkwardly from a B-movie script. The closest comparison I can draw is the legendary "oh my god" from Troll 2, though I wasn't aware of the film at the time.

The being aimed one palm in my direction, presumably preparing to give me my first hideous eye, whatever that meant, but I rolled out of the way and successfully avoided what I took to be an invisible beam firing from his hand.

Rather than continue his assault, the creature looked dejectedly at the ground, and with an air of defeat and humiliation, began to somehow push an old, empty, rickety shopping cart up a flight of stairs into the sky as I returned to the real world.

I could keep going, of course, with these monsters all day. I could show you others I remember like the council of meat or the money pigs, but I'd rather hear more of your own!

Just try to remember this isn't a "contest"...I just plain love hearing other people's creepy dreams, and though I'm pretty busy as it is, I'll just be drawing some of them for my own fun! Think of it as part of the build-up to this year's upcoming horror fiction avalanche.