Written by Jonathan Wojcik

NIGHTMARE MENAGERIE 2021: SOME OF MY OWN!





INTERNATIONAL WATERS

I just woke up from a dream that there was a 90′s horror movie simply called, for some reason, "International Waters." The plot of the movie was three people trying to escape a partially flooded, capsized cruise ship as they’re chased by a murderous, swimming newborn baby because according to this film if a baby is born directly into seawater it unlocks ancient prehistoric survival instincts.

One of the three people had actually given birth to the baby like right when the boat flipped over but she was really nonchalant about the whole thing like "well of course he’s going to kill us he’s a baby in seawater" looking at the other 2 like they were idiots for not knowing.

I don’t know how it could kill people but the baby had black voids for a mouth and eyes, it was lightning fast in the water and it could speak full sentences in a child voice though I couldn’t make out anything it said.



CRAWLING WOMAN

Just remembered a fantastically terrifying dream I had the other night from the perspective of a tiny little boy who lived in basically an empty shack-sized house with nothing but a screen door. It was on a suburban street with houses all around but it still felt incredibly isolated and lonely, and his mother regularly, perhaps at all hours that she wasn’t asleep, sat outside unresponsive to him like she was too absorbed in daydreaming or maybe even catatonic.

But every day the son heard a scraping and tapping at the screen door, and he couldn’t see, but I could see that outside on the porch was a strange woman bunched up on the ground, face down, so only her clothes and hair and one hand were visible. Somehow, I knew her presence was connected in some way to the mother’s behavior.

Back from his perspective, he was on the floor trying to hide from view and afraid to look up, but again, I could see what was happening, and the porch woman slowly rose to peer in through the screen door.



NOT QUITE PEOPLE

The dream I just woke up from: two people were trying to survive some kind of distorted imitation of reality, kind of silent hill style but they also had to "blend in" and not call attention to themselves so this reality wouldn’t "realize" they were actual real humans.

I saw bits of them wandering dark, vast stairwells and hallways but I most of the dream I just watched them sneaking carefully through the crowded bleachers of some kind of sporting event inside of a school, and it was harrowing because the crowd was rhythmically moving up and down (the "wave" thing that crowds do) in perfect order and nothing else. Their arms were just straight down and they were smiling but making no sound whatsoever. The two real people were like trying not to freak out or cry as the crowd members nearest to them would actually turn to look at them with their big, dead silent wide eyed smiles but still not do anything else.

At some point I noticed that the "fake" people’s heads were hairless and a little concave in the back, like the force that created them didn’t know what humans really looked like from behind. They also had many different unnatural skin colors and the crowd was organized by color in perfect squares.

The sports game (which I couldn’t see) had announcers who sounded authentically human and excited but their conversation was still weird and nonsensical. The only dialog I remember clearly was one voice saying "how long does it normally take you to get the ball from Micheal?" and the other just repeating "thirty minutes. Thirty minutes."


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