Written by Jonathan Wojcik
NIGHTMARE MENAGERIE 2018, PART IV
Guest Art by Sylizar!
ROACHES
Posted by Nick:
"I had a dream about all these bugs that started off as tiny seeds. Somehow they got into the car and turned into little roaches everywhere. Eventually they grew into these giant bulbous, swollen roaches, about the size of a cow. Some had wavy arms and heads on long stalks. Their heads were almost human but not quite. They turned the entire city of Las Vegas into Cronenberg-esque mutilations with their seeds, which they released through the bulbous pockets in their flesh. There was one part where somebody had cloned a cat, but the roach-seeds had gotten into it, so there was a cat walking around with roaches constantly pouring out of its body."
"I had a dream about all these bugs that started off as tiny seeds. Somehow they got into the car and turned into little roaches everywhere. Eventually they grew into these giant bulbous, swollen roaches, about the size of a cow. Some had wavy arms and heads on long stalks. Their heads were almost human but not quite. They turned the entire city of Las Vegas into Cronenberg-esque mutilations with their seeds, which they released through the bulbous pockets in their flesh. There was one part where somebody had cloned a cat, but the roach-seeds had gotten into it, so there was a cat walking around with roaches constantly pouring out of its body."
Insects are generally too otherworldly, too machine-like to look "gross" (no matter what anyone says) but put a human face where it doesn't belong and you can make almost anything seem ugly. Sylizar renders these creatures as unsettling as they really sound, especially nailing the uncanniness of an almost-human head, and I love the overall idea of human-bug hybrids that produce mutagenic "seeds." It's like a perfect package of body horror.
BEBEBE AND PAL
Posted by Aoakesme:
"As ridiculous as it may sound, the monster of my dream was really nothing more than just very, very dark static (near-black) with two oval googly-eyes and a simple triangular red mouth, who also had a sprawled biology, like a turtle without a shell and had much more long and hose-like limbs who had the most cartoon-ee hands one can imagine. Also did i mention it was called "Bebebe"? Yeah that's what i called it apparently.
It tends to pop up in my nightmares from very thin parts of my house, like in between our large orange sofa's cushions or under my bed/mattress, and the only thing it'd do is just... pull me in. If i managed to react fast enough to go away, it'd actually chase me down and do exactly that anyway, which always caused me to wake up.
At some point, "Bebebe" had a companion who'd ambush me in corridors or hallways of my house, who happens to be just one huge, muscly arm with an eye on it's shoulder part, and the only thing it'd do is just stop me from going anywhere.
So yeah, that's my main childhood dreams, and i'll probably never forget that."
"As ridiculous as it may sound, the monster of my dream was really nothing more than just very, very dark static (near-black) with two oval googly-eyes and a simple triangular red mouth, who also had a sprawled biology, like a turtle without a shell and had much more long and hose-like limbs who had the most cartoon-ee hands one can imagine. Also did i mention it was called "Bebebe"? Yeah that's what i called it apparently.
It tends to pop up in my nightmares from very thin parts of my house, like in between our large orange sofa's cushions or under my bed/mattress, and the only thing it'd do is just... pull me in. If i managed to react fast enough to go away, it'd actually chase me down and do exactly that anyway, which always caused me to wake up.
At some point, "Bebebe" had a companion who'd ambush me in corridors or hallways of my house, who happens to be just one huge, muscly arm with an eye on it's shoulder part, and the only thing it'd do is just stop me from going anywhere.
So yeah, that's my main childhood dreams, and i'll probably never forget that."
Bebebe is a beloved classic around here, or at least to me it is, and its relationship with the muscly arm is particularly intriguing. Even if there hadn't been a muscly arm in an episode of Courage: The Cowardly Dog, I feel like I'd still get a Courage sort of vibe from these two. A downright Dilworthian duo.
NATURE GONE WRONG
Posted by Pelican:
"I had a dream recently (not a nightmare exactly, because by the time it got really freaky it was more like I was reading it in a book than actively participating) that had an interesting creature. The dream started out really innocuously as well, and the pleasant backdrop never changed which only made the overall effect stranger when the monster appeared.
It started with me and some friends driving along through a lush green valley between these rolling grassy hills covered in trees and with wild pigs and horses grazing--all bright colors and idealized nature imagery. We were just making conversation and stuff--for a while it was really vivid; every detail was perfect, and everyone was saying exactly what they would have said in real life, but at one point one of my friends referenced a really creepy dream I had had a wile ago (and didn't even consciously remember) as if it were a movie, and at that point the dream suddenly became almost like a sequel to that original dream. (I'm not sure why I get the sense that it's a sequel, since I don't remember enough of the original dream to see anything that ties the two together, but somehow it definitely was.)
At this point we got out of the van and met up with some kind of government agents. They had hunting dogs which were tracking something (apparently the only way to find this thing) and we were following them deeper into the end of the same lush green valley (though without all of the animals, which had ominously disappeared by then) and as we walked along the guy in charge was explaining the situation to us. We had been brought in to fight a creature which he described as "nature gone wrong" (but which the "book"/narrative voice of the dream referred to as an angel for some reason) and told us it had "strong psychoactive properties." Apparently everyone who had confronted the beast so far had emerged physically unscathed, but they all deeply believed that they had been seriously maimed or dismembered, and felt the pain of their third degree burns or severed limbs even though the injuries were only imaginary. There was a whole network of these "survivors" including Paul McCartney and a couple of unnamed members of the British parliament, and months after their encounter with the creature when they had finally recovered mentally, they would die in horrible accidents; Paul McCartney's house had collapsed on him and the members of parliament had both jumped into a volcano. I think their deaths matched their imaginary injuries as well (though I don't remember if that was actually stated in the dream or just an inference on the part of my waking mind) The government agency had been watching these people and discovered that the monster was spying on them and from this information they managed to trace its "headquarters" to our current location.
When he finished explaining the situation the government agent and his comrades, along with the hunting dogs and all of my friends disappeared and everything was silent and the monster was floating in front of me. The creature was essentially a perfect sphere made entirely out of incredibly skinny human arms in various colors (grays and purples and dark blues and teals) The arms didn't move like arms would, however; they were perfectly static. The creature's "face" or maybe just its mouth was a grid of four pure white nubs shaped like rounded pyramids that looked really soft and maybe even glowed a little. It was using this appendage to somehow suck on the air; not breathing in but sucking on it like a catfish sucks on the walls of an aquarium. In addition, it had a few other random appendages; on its lower right hand side it had a giraffe leg sticking out, and on its back, only visible through an ornate mirror behind it, was a long multi-jointed, incredibly detailed insect arm with all of the bristles and things you see when you look at a fly's leg under a microscope, ending in a clawed hand with three fingers (kind of like the claw in the arcade game where you try to grab prizes) and on its left side it had a huge wart or tumor covered in a cluster of little yellow sucker-like tubes, some of them curled up and some of them actively pulsing. It also had a pair of spread owl's wings. The creature had already started moving towards me when the wings started to "wake up" and even when it moved them they didn't flap so much as awkwardly jerk up and down, pseudo-randomly and completely out of time with its movement. Once it started moving towards me, the dream ended and I woke up, so maybe that's all it had to do to kill me, I don't know."
"I had a dream recently (not a nightmare exactly, because by the time it got really freaky it was more like I was reading it in a book than actively participating) that had an interesting creature. The dream started out really innocuously as well, and the pleasant backdrop never changed which only made the overall effect stranger when the monster appeared.
It started with me and some friends driving along through a lush green valley between these rolling grassy hills covered in trees and with wild pigs and horses grazing--all bright colors and idealized nature imagery. We were just making conversation and stuff--for a while it was really vivid; every detail was perfect, and everyone was saying exactly what they would have said in real life, but at one point one of my friends referenced a really creepy dream I had had a wile ago (and didn't even consciously remember) as if it were a movie, and at that point the dream suddenly became almost like a sequel to that original dream. (I'm not sure why I get the sense that it's a sequel, since I don't remember enough of the original dream to see anything that ties the two together, but somehow it definitely was.)
At this point we got out of the van and met up with some kind of government agents. They had hunting dogs which were tracking something (apparently the only way to find this thing) and we were following them deeper into the end of the same lush green valley (though without all of the animals, which had ominously disappeared by then) and as we walked along the guy in charge was explaining the situation to us. We had been brought in to fight a creature which he described as "nature gone wrong" (but which the "book"/narrative voice of the dream referred to as an angel for some reason) and told us it had "strong psychoactive properties." Apparently everyone who had confronted the beast so far had emerged physically unscathed, but they all deeply believed that they had been seriously maimed or dismembered, and felt the pain of their third degree burns or severed limbs even though the injuries were only imaginary. There was a whole network of these "survivors" including Paul McCartney and a couple of unnamed members of the British parliament, and months after their encounter with the creature when they had finally recovered mentally, they would die in horrible accidents; Paul McCartney's house had collapsed on him and the members of parliament had both jumped into a volcano. I think their deaths matched their imaginary injuries as well (though I don't remember if that was actually stated in the dream or just an inference on the part of my waking mind) The government agency had been watching these people and discovered that the monster was spying on them and from this information they managed to trace its "headquarters" to our current location.
When he finished explaining the situation the government agent and his comrades, along with the hunting dogs and all of my friends disappeared and everything was silent and the monster was floating in front of me. The creature was essentially a perfect sphere made entirely out of incredibly skinny human arms in various colors (grays and purples and dark blues and teals) The arms didn't move like arms would, however; they were perfectly static. The creature's "face" or maybe just its mouth was a grid of four pure white nubs shaped like rounded pyramids that looked really soft and maybe even glowed a little. It was using this appendage to somehow suck on the air; not breathing in but sucking on it like a catfish sucks on the walls of an aquarium. In addition, it had a few other random appendages; on its lower right hand side it had a giraffe leg sticking out, and on its back, only visible through an ornate mirror behind it, was a long multi-jointed, incredibly detailed insect arm with all of the bristles and things you see when you look at a fly's leg under a microscope, ending in a clawed hand with three fingers (kind of like the claw in the arcade game where you try to grab prizes) and on its left side it had a huge wart or tumor covered in a cluster of little yellow sucker-like tubes, some of them curled up and some of them actively pulsing. It also had a pair of spread owl's wings. The creature had already started moving towards me when the wings started to "wake up" and even when it moved them they didn't flap so much as awkwardly jerk up and down, pseudo-randomly and completely out of time with its movement. Once it started moving towards me, the dream ended and I woke up, so maybe that's all it had to do to kill me, I don't know."
I like when a dream informs you that a monster or entity is representative of something so abstract, in this case that this surreal and grandiose horror is apparently what "nature" looks like when it's "gone wrong," but also an angel, and something that can essentially curse you to die by misfortune. You really dreamed up a final RPG boss here, didn't you. I wonder if anyone will ever finally defeat it. Any lucid dreamers want to try?
PLANT ALIEN AND BIONIC MAN
Posted by Bionichute:
"I had a weird dream just last night that I feel like sharing, and it has TWO monsters in it!
It wasn't exactly a "nightmare", aside from one thing near the end, mostly being a weird day in the life dream for me, but that's not what I'm here to talk about anyway. The first monster, while I forget the entire context behind it, was a large (and by large I mean probably the size of a large house) red thing. It's body was shaped like a rigid, thick V, with a, comparatively, tiny, blue human face on the lower part of it, which was more like a weird mask than an actual face. It's arms were two long tentacles, as were it's legs, except it had three for the legs, which it somehow stood on perfectly well despite the tentacles obviously not having any bones.
The creature mostly interacted with a child, and showed it had the ability to morph itself like a mimic octopus, turning into a vague approximation of a car, which the child rode on as it flew through the air, Totoro style. It acted like a really obnoxious kids movie mascot character, even trying to break the fourth wall on a film that didn't actually exist. Eventually, it turned out that the creature was a plant alien, who was attempting to begin an invasion of Earth.
The second monster ties into the alien thing weirdly. The context in the dream was that it was part of a news clip on the internet, which I looked up after learning about the previous creature being an alien. It, which was advertised on the internet as a "bionic man", was in a small cave in a forest, and at first looked like a small, gaunt human, before it crawled up into a random woman's face, where it's face started melting, revealing a weird, vaguely human shaped metallic skull, with the most notable feature being it's off-kilter telescopic eyes, where it opened it's mouth to reveal way too many small, sharp teeth. Immediately after, it's body, which also resembled a small, gaunt human, just made of mismatched metal parts, fell apart, leaving it's skull to make a horrible, off note metallic commercial jingle, before saying "I have done something. I have gotten what I deserve", and then making the horrible jingle again, repeating until I woke up."
"I had a weird dream just last night that I feel like sharing, and it has TWO monsters in it!
It wasn't exactly a "nightmare", aside from one thing near the end, mostly being a weird day in the life dream for me, but that's not what I'm here to talk about anyway. The first monster, while I forget the entire context behind it, was a large (and by large I mean probably the size of a large house) red thing. It's body was shaped like a rigid, thick V, with a, comparatively, tiny, blue human face on the lower part of it, which was more like a weird mask than an actual face. It's arms were two long tentacles, as were it's legs, except it had three for the legs, which it somehow stood on perfectly well despite the tentacles obviously not having any bones.
The creature mostly interacted with a child, and showed it had the ability to morph itself like a mimic octopus, turning into a vague approximation of a car, which the child rode on as it flew through the air, Totoro style. It acted like a really obnoxious kids movie mascot character, even trying to break the fourth wall on a film that didn't actually exist. Eventually, it turned out that the creature was a plant alien, who was attempting to begin an invasion of Earth.
The second monster ties into the alien thing weirdly. The context in the dream was that it was part of a news clip on the internet, which I looked up after learning about the previous creature being an alien. It, which was advertised on the internet as a "bionic man", was in a small cave in a forest, and at first looked like a small, gaunt human, before it crawled up into a random woman's face, where it's face started melting, revealing a weird, vaguely human shaped metallic skull, with the most notable feature being it's off-kilter telescopic eyes, where it opened it's mouth to reveal way too many small, sharp teeth. Immediately after, it's body, which also resembled a small, gaunt human, just made of mismatched metal parts, fell apart, leaving it's skull to make a horrible, off note metallic commercial jingle, before saying "I have done something. I have gotten what I deserve", and then making the horrible jingle again, repeating until I woke up."
God, dreams can seriously produce things so much more inventive than anything we struggle to come up with while we're awake. This feels like a set of entities that might show up in an 80's sci-fi anime with little to no explanation but absolutely phenomenal animation.
THE MINT CANDY
Posted by The Six Verses:
"The monster was a black quadroped, with a head that was simply a "cartoony" circular mouth with teeth, and a shaggy white mane ala the centipeedle from Steven Universe. Cant remember what the legs looked like, or anything else really. According to the dream, it was formed from a mint candy vengeful about not being eaten, and transformed people into others of its own kind during their sleep."
"The monster was a black quadroped, with a head that was simply a "cartoony" circular mouth with teeth, and a shaggy white mane ala the centipeedle from Steven Universe. Cant remember what the legs looked like, or anything else really. According to the dream, it was formed from a mint candy vengeful about not being eaten, and transformed people into others of its own kind during their sleep."
A short and simple one, but such a fantastic concept. WHY would this be the form of an angry mint candy!? And apparently it just keeps making more of itself. What if we all forget its victims ever existed? YOU COULD BE NEXT!
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