Written by Jonathan Wojcik
NIGHTMARE MENAGERIE 2021
Guest Art by Plakis Morakis!
ENOCH
Posted by Pfff:
"Not really a big narrative, but I had a lovely little nightmare the other day where I lived in a world of human/bird hybrids (known, unsurprisingly, as "Mordechais") in loincloths where I was a scrawny little bird-headed person who was travelling with my cousin Enoch, who was easily four times as big as myself and with limbs as wide as tree trunks.
Enoch was a very high-ranking member of the family simply by virtue of being big and strong, having no other discernable qualities, which is to say, he was just a bully who always got what he wanted, but in birdmen society, that was considered highly respectable and worthy of quiet obedience.
We decided to rest in a little park-like cemetary with beautiful cypress trees. The whole setting had a very mediterranean/middle eastern feel to it, with lovely pastel colours. The whole dream was more cartoon than life-action. Enoch ordered me to go look for fire wood so I could cook a meal for him, but also casually told me, in his insufferable if melodious dudebro voice: "don't stray too far, you're gonna be dessert". Enoch was known for eating unimportant members of the family whenever he felt like it, and that, too, was something you were supposed to quietly go along with.
But I didn't. I ran and ran, with the advantage that I was more nimble than Enoch, until I reached a city, and kept running until a friendly rock band decided to take me in (though they clarified that they could not guarantee they wouldn't try to eat me themselves, at some point, if they decided I was lame)."
"Not really a big narrative, but I had a lovely little nightmare the other day where I lived in a world of human/bird hybrids (known, unsurprisingly, as "Mordechais") in loincloths where I was a scrawny little bird-headed person who was travelling with my cousin Enoch, who was easily four times as big as myself and with limbs as wide as tree trunks.
Enoch was a very high-ranking member of the family simply by virtue of being big and strong, having no other discernable qualities, which is to say, he was just a bully who always got what he wanted, but in birdmen society, that was considered highly respectable and worthy of quiet obedience.
We decided to rest in a little park-like cemetary with beautiful cypress trees. The whole setting had a very mediterranean/middle eastern feel to it, with lovely pastel colours. The whole dream was more cartoon than life-action. Enoch ordered me to go look for fire wood so I could cook a meal for him, but also casually told me, in his insufferable if melodious dudebro voice: "don't stray too far, you're gonna be dessert". Enoch was known for eating unimportant members of the family whenever he felt like it, and that, too, was something you were supposed to quietly go along with.
But I didn't. I ran and ran, with the advantage that I was more nimble than Enoch, until I reached a city, and kept running until a friendly rock band decided to take me in (though they clarified that they could not guarantee they wouldn't try to eat me themselves, at some point, if they decided I was lame)."
This is a dream with a pretty compelling world and understandable internal logic; a bird society would absolutely look the other way while the biggest bird eats anyone forgettable enough. If you don't agree, I suspect you don't really know birds. I get a weird, wistful feeling reading this short narrative, as if I can imagine a weird mix of wholesomeness and constant dread hanging over its setting, and Enoch becomes a pretty frightening antagonist.
I wonder if the world of entirely Rigbys is significantly better, or significantly worse.
EVIL CARTOONS
Posted by Deadgoon:
"From what I remember, it was like a trailer for a live action/CGI horror movie featuring a group of these deranged 3D cartoon/puppet characters as the villains. They all had big glossy eyes and each one of them was based on some typical "cartoony" thing if that makes sense? Like here are some of the ones I remember
- A mangy, drooling brown dog that was proportioned like Dogmon
- An ice cream cone with little legs and a smiling face on its melting scoop
- A kinda cockroach-ish blue-green bug with a semi-realistic body but a huge simplified cartoon bug head with mandibles and antennae that bulged as if its lower body was being squeezed in a cartoon
- And the one that stood out to me was a big beaten up-looking red car with eyes that bulged out from the windshield and talked by flapping its hood
If I were to compare them to anything I would say they looked like those little keychain squeeze toys with the pop-out eyes As for the trailer itself, it opened up with a song sung by the creatures like it was the opening to a children's show, but then it suddenly cuts to a scene from the movie where a boy is screaming for his father, who is on the floor being attacked by the cartoons (don't remember what most of them looked like, but one of them was the dog), but after a little bit of conflict it cuts to the dad's face as he starts laughing and then it cuts to the boy's face who looks terrified for a sec but then he starts laughing too but with worried eyes And yeah that's all I remember lol"
"From what I remember, it was like a trailer for a live action/CGI horror movie featuring a group of these deranged 3D cartoon/puppet characters as the villains. They all had big glossy eyes and each one of them was based on some typical "cartoony" thing if that makes sense? Like here are some of the ones I remember
- A mangy, drooling brown dog that was proportioned like Dogmon
- An ice cream cone with little legs and a smiling face on its melting scoop
- A kinda cockroach-ish blue-green bug with a semi-realistic body but a huge simplified cartoon bug head with mandibles and antennae that bulged as if its lower body was being squeezed in a cartoon
- And the one that stood out to me was a big beaten up-looking red car with eyes that bulged out from the windshield and talked by flapping its hood
If I were to compare them to anything I would say they looked like those little keychain squeeze toys with the pop-out eyes As for the trailer itself, it opened up with a song sung by the creatures like it was the opening to a children's show, but then it suddenly cuts to a scene from the movie where a boy is screaming for his father, who is on the floor being attacked by the cartoons (don't remember what most of them looked like, but one of them was the dog), but after a little bit of conflict it cuts to the dad's face as he starts laughing and then it cuts to the boy's face who looks terrified for a sec but then he starts laughing too but with worried eyes And yeah that's all I remember lol"
If I saw the film trailer described here, it would have definitely made me hunt down and watch the movie. The boy and his dad inexplicably laughing is incredibly ominous, especially that the boy doesn't seem fully affected by whatever's happened to their minds. All four of the toons are great designs, a highly diverse bunch of creepy-cute weirdos, but I agree with Deadgoon - something about the car sticks out the most. I feel like the car should be the leader and the other should ride inside it.
GAME BOY BATHROOM GHOST
Posted by SkeleDudeCW2:
"I had a dream just last night that I wanna share. I call it the GB (Game Boy) Bathroom Ghost. Everything was in the style of the classic Game Boy (most specifically the original green and black screen), and it took place in a public school bathroom where a creepy girl in a nightgown resided, doing random things like sneaking around and/or crawling on all fours. Things took a turn though when she dragged a corpse of either a student or member of the faculty out of a bathroom stall, which she referred to as her friend. She embedded them into the wall before declaring she needed/wanted more. Afterwards she revealed her true form as she began to levitate, her hands became clawed, and her eyes and hair grew wild; one eye even growing twice it's former size. It was at this point you could control the girl/ghost; pressing the directional buttons made her float in the appointed direction, and pressing one of the face buttons (don't remember which) made her vomit exorcist style, while the other seemed to do nothing at first. You could make her fill almost the entire screen if you held the down button long enough, and if you pressed the other button at this point, you could make her pound her fist against the screen, as though she wanted you as her next friend/victim. Afterwards, I woke up. Truly an unsettling experience."
"I had a dream just last night that I wanna share. I call it the GB (Game Boy) Bathroom Ghost. Everything was in the style of the classic Game Boy (most specifically the original green and black screen), and it took place in a public school bathroom where a creepy girl in a nightgown resided, doing random things like sneaking around and/or crawling on all fours. Things took a turn though when she dragged a corpse of either a student or member of the faculty out of a bathroom stall, which she referred to as her friend. She embedded them into the wall before declaring she needed/wanted more. Afterwards she revealed her true form as she began to levitate, her hands became clawed, and her eyes and hair grew wild; one eye even growing twice it's former size. It was at this point you could control the girl/ghost; pressing the directional buttons made her float in the appointed direction, and pressing one of the face buttons (don't remember which) made her vomit exorcist style, while the other seemed to do nothing at first. You could make her fill almost the entire screen if you held the down button long enough, and if you pressed the other button at this point, you could make her pound her fist against the screen, as though she wanted you as her next friend/victim. Afterwards, I woke up. Truly an unsettling experience."
FROG MIME
Posted by Negative Space:
"Not really a nightmare, but I had a dream about a beat em up/arcade sort of game where you could play as this mime/clown girl who could stretch and detach her various limbs and body parts (possibly inspired by that one character from Skullgirls). Like her arms and head would float over her torso/the enemy and "rain" down stretchy punches and the like. I think she had suspenders and a striped undershirt of some color (white and something), with green skin, a stretched out deadpan expression with dull/glazed eyes and clown lips and makeup on. She looked like a person, but as much like a frog in her expression and posture as possible while still being human, if that makes sense. There we go with frogs again, lol."
"Not really a nightmare, but I had a dream about a beat em up/arcade sort of game where you could play as this mime/clown girl who could stretch and detach her various limbs and body parts (possibly inspired by that one character from Skullgirls). Like her arms and head would float over her torso/the enemy and "rain" down stretchy punches and the like. I think she had suspenders and a striped undershirt of some color (white and something), with green skin, a stretched out deadpan expression with dull/glazed eyes and clown lips and makeup on. She looked like a person, but as much like a frog in her expression and posture as possible while still being human, if that makes sense. There we go with frogs again, lol."
This might be one of the first benevolent frog-like beings we've seen in this series. At least, she might be benevolent. She's the player character in her own game, so the odds are she's probably fighting for a good reason, right? Maybe? I like that she can come apart. There's a lot of entertaining themes and motifs rolled into this being. You know what would be cool, is if a being like this existed specifically to act as player character in these video game dreams; like she can dream-walk, but only if the dream is framed as gameplay. Maybe her hard work is all that keeps some video game dreamers out of the old "Dying In Real Life" trap.
MOTHER GOOSE
Posted by Cornelius Featherjaw:
"I could honestly fill an entire series of posts with just the weird stuff I dream about, creature related and otherwise, but today I'll just mention this one. Unlike a lot of my dreams, I remember exactly when I had this dream. It was when I was a little kid, and my family went to visit my cousins who lived out of state. We had to spend the night at their house, and that night I had this dream.
The dream was about a girl who offended a powerful being known as Mother Goose, and was punished by having a curse put on her which would cause her to become slightly closer to turning into a hideous monster every time she lost her temper. I don't remember many details about the girl's life after that, because the horrifying image of Mother Goose dominates my memories of the dream. I couldn't see much of it, and I couldn't make sense of what I did see, which is part of the horror. It was a massive form silhouetted against the full moon, and looked like the curving neck of a goose, but without any eyes or mouth or other facial features. I could vaguely make out other similar shapes below it, and I couldn't tell if those were its children or perhaps parts of the same creature. I was absolutely terrified of that dream, to the point that for years afterward I refused to sleep with my stuffed Clifford the Big Red Dog because its tail reminded me too much of Mother Goose."
"I could honestly fill an entire series of posts with just the weird stuff I dream about, creature related and otherwise, but today I'll just mention this one. Unlike a lot of my dreams, I remember exactly when I had this dream. It was when I was a little kid, and my family went to visit my cousins who lived out of state. We had to spend the night at their house, and that night I had this dream.
The dream was about a girl who offended a powerful being known as Mother Goose, and was punished by having a curse put on her which would cause her to become slightly closer to turning into a hideous monster every time she lost her temper. I don't remember many details about the girl's life after that, because the horrifying image of Mother Goose dominates my memories of the dream. I couldn't see much of it, and I couldn't make sense of what I did see, which is part of the horror. It was a massive form silhouetted against the full moon, and looked like the curving neck of a goose, but without any eyes or mouth or other facial features. I could vaguely make out other similar shapes below it, and I couldn't tell if those were its children or perhaps parts of the same creature. I was absolutely terrified of that dream, to the point that for years afterward I refused to sleep with my stuffed Clifford the Big Red Dog because its tail reminded me too much of Mother Goose."
Wow, this is a scary one. If it were just any old ambiguous entity that curses humans, that would be one thing, but the fact that it's called Mother Goose opens up a whole world of compelling possibilities, most notably the idea that perhaps our concept of "Mother Goose" is just a diluted misunderstanding of a very real, very terrible being that's not at all a goose, but perhaps for reasons beyond our understanding, there simply isn't anything we can better allude it to than...a mother and a goose. The kind of thing that will suddenly make sense if you ever fully perceive the thing, but you're likely not going to exist a whole lot longer than that.
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