Written by Jonathan Wojcik
NIGHTMARE MENAGERIE 2021
WALL CLOWN
Posted by Sugarquill-slayer on tumblr:
"I had one dream that I kept meaning to mention- a woman took me and a friend to "fumigate" a home of a monster. Said monster was a single clown within the walls that filled up the entire space inside the cracks like a fleshy wall. I saw it through a closet door when it surged through. It groaned quietly, like it hurt, to "close the door." My friend and I did as it came through faster, and had to struggle to hold it closed as the thing almost rattled off its hinges before the clown passed.
Important to note it had a little party hat."
"I had one dream that I kept meaning to mention- a woman took me and a friend to "fumigate" a home of a monster. Said monster was a single clown within the walls that filled up the entire space inside the cracks like a fleshy wall. I saw it through a closet door when it surged through. It groaned quietly, like it hurt, to "close the door." My friend and I did as it came through faster, and had to struggle to hold it closed as the thing almost rattled off its hinges before the clown passed.
Important to note it had a little party hat."
I know my doodle can't possibly capture how distressing this abstract clown mass must have been, which I really picture with a more realistically human face and that in itself kind of unsettles me the most. The horror of this monster isn't any threat it poses, but the enigma of its existence and its apparent suffering. It just wants to be left alone, apparently.
"FUNNY FACES"
Posted by Starrot on tumblr:
"So when I was very young I shared a room with my other two siblings. My brother, who was the youngest, was in a cot at the time.
I was recently reminded of a dream I'd had, although it may have been sleep paralysis, in which I had woken up in the night and looked over to my brothers cot. It had a lump of blankets on it but I remember thinking that it looked wrong—not like how a baby under blankets would look.
As soon as I thought that it was like they started to move, and something bigger than what was possible to have hidden under the blankets began to come out of them. It was like a shadow in that it had no details to it's features; it was just a dark silhouette with some 'textures' glinting in the light that suggested it was covered in bumps.
The first thing that emerged were these massive hands with long fingers that I think ended in little suckers or something. They looked a little like a frogs foot.
As it crawled out I saw it had a humanoid torso, only with three heads sprouting from one neck, and where its legs would've been it just kept going. I don't know if it was because it had a slug-like lower half or just because it was attached to the blankets somehow and was stretching.
Anyway, it dragged itself forward on its stomach towards me. I don't remember hearing it making any noise but I got that weird dream-sense that it was laughing or sobbing hysterically.
Unfortunately I don't remember what happened when it reached me, only that I woke up more upset than I'd ever been before at that age. Come to think of it this may have been my first distinct nightmare. My mum was telling me that when I woke her up I was crying about "funny faces" having scared me, and I that I wouldn't say anything else about it."
"So when I was very young I shared a room with my other two siblings. My brother, who was the youngest, was in a cot at the time.
I was recently reminded of a dream I'd had, although it may have been sleep paralysis, in which I had woken up in the night and looked over to my brothers cot. It had a lump of blankets on it but I remember thinking that it looked wrong—not like how a baby under blankets would look.
As soon as I thought that it was like they started to move, and something bigger than what was possible to have hidden under the blankets began to come out of them. It was like a shadow in that it had no details to it's features; it was just a dark silhouette with some 'textures' glinting in the light that suggested it was covered in bumps.
The first thing that emerged were these massive hands with long fingers that I think ended in little suckers or something. They looked a little like a frogs foot.
As it crawled out I saw it had a humanoid torso, only with three heads sprouting from one neck, and where its legs would've been it just kept going. I don't know if it was because it had a slug-like lower half or just because it was attached to the blankets somehow and was stretching.
Anyway, it dragged itself forward on its stomach towards me. I don't remember hearing it making any noise but I got that weird dream-sense that it was laughing or sobbing hysterically.
Unfortunately I don't remember what happened when it reached me, only that I woke up more upset than I'd ever been before at that age. Come to think of it this may have been my first distinct nightmare. My mum was telling me that when I woke her up I was crying about "funny faces" having scared me, and I that I wouldn't say anything else about it."
I'm sure I'm getting this one's design wrong, since it was almost totally in shadow in the dream. Besides its glistening bumpy texture, at least. Human heads or faces are always ghastly taken this much out of context, and especially when plopped on such an alien body. What really gets me though is the young Starrot's "real world" description of it as "funny faces." There's just something so ominous about that, and there were definitely things that frightened me so much as a child I couldn't bear to explain them in words either, even if they weren't actually even half as distressing as this one.
"ALAKSHMI"
Posted by jalordahedorah on tumblr:
"I dreamt I was a bodyguard for a princess who was getting stalked by a guy who just kept coming back no matter how hard he got beat up. Eventually it got to the point where I just annihilated him, like every bone in his body broken, but he got up again, this time in a really screwed up form that had a super stretched out Frampt from dark souls kinda head, with his skin hanging in tassels off his arms like deer velvet.
Him being all ghouled up was the fault of this other creature apparently called an Alakshmi, which looked like a warty reptile leg/foot with a single pore on top that had a super long thin strand of mycelium coming out and floating around it."
"I dreamt I was a bodyguard for a princess who was getting stalked by a guy who just kept coming back no matter how hard he got beat up. Eventually it got to the point where I just annihilated him, like every bone in his body broken, but he got up again, this time in a really screwed up form that had a super stretched out Frampt from dark souls kinda head, with his skin hanging in tassels off his arms like deer velvet.
Him being all ghouled up was the fault of this other creature apparently called an Alakshmi, which looked like a warty reptile leg/foot with a single pore on top that had a super long thin strand of mycelium coming out and floating around it."
I love each and every dream monster I've ever read, but this is one of those dream monsters with what I think is that purest, realest kind of subconscious "randomness." It's a frightening enough force to make a man into a misshapen corpse-puppet, but the thing's true form is basically a foot on a string. Dreams and hallucinations and drug trips certainly can and do conjure cool, intimidating, sometimes beautifully coherent "creatures," as we have seen time and again, but they're just as liable to send just a thingamabob after you. Any monster could scare you to death in real life, but I think if you saw this sort of grotesquely improbable doohickeys bobbing around and you knew it was real, you might feel downright sick that something real can make that much less sense than even the wildest paranormal theories could have prepped you for.
It's kind of also the territory of real old-school folksy horror. "The witch's house has chicken legs" horror.
THE SICK ANIMAL
Dreamed by ME, BOGLEECH.COM'S WRITER earlier this year:
In this dream my perspective was from some huge, sick animal lying down in some kind of zoo. I couldn't tell what it was, but I got the impression of something like a camel or a llama, with a long neck and limbs stretched across a concrete slope in some artificial rocky tunnel. A human handler was comforting it, but at the same time she was sweetly reassuring some other off-screen animal, which I somehow knew was a different species, and I knew was alarmed and frightened by the injured creature.
Despite the handler's best efforts, this other frightened animal ran off...at first.
Moments later, I saw the thing come charging back, in full view. It was absolutely gigantic, resembling a hairless, greyscale giraffe with skin "shrink wrapped" to a horse-like skull, and it was running on its hind legs like a 3-d video game model; the "animation cycle" of its legs didn't really match its speed, and the bottoms of its hoofed feet clipped smoothly through the bumpy terrain.
This creature was holding a huge club in its upper limbs, with incredibly long metal spikes. My viewpoint was still from the dying mystery animal, looking up at this approaching figure, and I actually felt the sudden, sharp smack of its weapon in the sick creature's flesh as I awoke with a start.
In this dream my perspective was from some huge, sick animal lying down in some kind of zoo. I couldn't tell what it was, but I got the impression of something like a camel or a llama, with a long neck and limbs stretched across a concrete slope in some artificial rocky tunnel. A human handler was comforting it, but at the same time she was sweetly reassuring some other off-screen animal, which I somehow knew was a different species, and I knew was alarmed and frightened by the injured creature.
Despite the handler's best efforts, this other frightened animal ran off...at first.
Moments later, I saw the thing come charging back, in full view. It was absolutely gigantic, resembling a hairless, greyscale giraffe with skin "shrink wrapped" to a horse-like skull, and it was running on its hind legs like a 3-d video game model; the "animation cycle" of its legs didn't really match its speed, and the bottoms of its hoofed feet clipped smoothly through the bumpy terrain.
This creature was holding a huge club in its upper limbs, with incredibly long metal spikes. My viewpoint was still from the dying mystery animal, looking up at this approaching figure, and I actually felt the sudden, sharp smack of its weapon in the sick creature's flesh as I awoke with a start.
I can't "review" one of my own, so I can leave that to anyone else who feels like it! It's not one of my favorites of the dreams I've had, but it was the only visually striking "creature" I really dreamt up in 2021.
THE PIG
Posted by Centipedal:
"It was the upper body of a pig, with maybe no lower half and definitely no legs. If it had no lower half, it was because it was torn away and the flesh was in tatters. The pig was carried around by a bunch of disembodied arms that grew out of the concrete hallway around it like fungi. They sort of passed it forwards, more arms growing in front to keep passing it along. Both the pig and the arms were the same entity, just different parts of it. It might have had long black hair."
"It was the upper body of a pig, with maybe no lower half and definitely no legs. If it had no lower half, it was because it was torn away and the flesh was in tatters. The pig was carried around by a bunch of disembodied arms that grew out of the concrete hallway around it like fungi. They sort of passed it forwards, more arms growing in front to keep passing it along. Both the pig and the arms were the same entity, just different parts of it. It might have had long black hair."
This was only one brief visual with no attached narrative and it might still be the "good GOD" entry of the year. It's actually kind of a nice middle ground between one of those "nonsensical whatsits" and the "seriously cool monster" category. A creature ferried along by a conveyer belt of disembodied arms is already interesting, even moreso that the arms are still a part of its form, and it honestly could have been anything crowd-surfing those fungoid hands, but I love that it's something as bluntly grotesque as a pig carcass. It's a bunch of classic horror imagery remixed in just too clever a way for most people to come up with when they're fully cognizant, and even speaking as a totally nonspiritual person, I feel like it gives me a whole new understanding of what "unholy" is supposed to mean. This is definitely, in my scientific opinion, the kind of thing that evil makes. What I'm saying is I might be rather skeptical if you tried to tell me that literal demons from hell are a real live thing in this world, but if you told me that this is the kind of thing they've ever looked like I'd just have to say "well, yeah, I mean obviously, I'm not stupid."
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