Written by Jonathan Wojcik
NIGHTMARE MENAGERIE 2022
Guest Art by Actual Identity!
Lemon Orb Spokeshorror
Posted by Bee of Unusual Size:
"The basic premise was that every 5 years or so, there would be an event called the "Soda Wars". This would be a competition between different soda brands, with the losers being absorbed by the winners, but unfortunately it has devolved into the Coca-Cola Company and PepsiCo winning and getting rid of all competition. That is, until one day, out of nowhere, a new contender appeared.
Lemon Orb.
Lemon Orb was a mysterious soda company that nobody has ever heard of before, but it made a big splash. Their main selling point, they said, was that they have unlimited resources. This would allow them to use the best ingredients and treat their workers well, as they would not need to cut corners or exploit workers for the sake of more profit. Their drinks were apparently great too, and they easily won the Soda Wars, taking over PepsiCo and the Coca-Cola Company.
So that's the background. The dream actually began with me driving through a dirt road in the countryside, surrounded by trees. My car had the Lemon Orb logo on the hood, a simplified lemon slice. Since Lemon Orb won the Soda Wars, a lot of weird things happened, I thought. For one, there were weird ''effigies'' on the side of the road sometimes. They were pieces of bloody skin loosely hung up on branches, constantly singing praises of the company, still alive somehow but near mindless. I kept driving.
Nobody knows where Lemon Orb came from, or how they obtained "unlimited resources", but they weren't exaggerating and are here to stay. As I made a turn, a pillar of bloody flesh emerged from the ground, towering above my car. I stopped, then its top unfurled into a wide, flowering shape, like a pair of mangled wings, revealing a face with a wide, unnerving grin. I knew I could not pass without the creature's permission without getting attacked, even though there was nothing important nearby. The logo on my car and a few praises of the company were enough to satisfy this being however, and it allowed me to pass before going back underground. I kept driving, not sure where.
I was not affiliated with Lemon Orb, and it was only a matter of time until something realized that."
"The basic premise was that every 5 years or so, there would be an event called the "Soda Wars". This would be a competition between different soda brands, with the losers being absorbed by the winners, but unfortunately it has devolved into the Coca-Cola Company and PepsiCo winning and getting rid of all competition. That is, until one day, out of nowhere, a new contender appeared.
Lemon Orb.
Lemon Orb was a mysterious soda company that nobody has ever heard of before, but it made a big splash. Their main selling point, they said, was that they have unlimited resources. This would allow them to use the best ingredients and treat their workers well, as they would not need to cut corners or exploit workers for the sake of more profit. Their drinks were apparently great too, and they easily won the Soda Wars, taking over PepsiCo and the Coca-Cola Company.
So that's the background. The dream actually began with me driving through a dirt road in the countryside, surrounded by trees. My car had the Lemon Orb logo on the hood, a simplified lemon slice. Since Lemon Orb won the Soda Wars, a lot of weird things happened, I thought. For one, there were weird ''effigies'' on the side of the road sometimes. They were pieces of bloody skin loosely hung up on branches, constantly singing praises of the company, still alive somehow but near mindless. I kept driving.
Nobody knows where Lemon Orb came from, or how they obtained "unlimited resources", but they weren't exaggerating and are here to stay. As I made a turn, a pillar of bloody flesh emerged from the ground, towering above my car. I stopped, then its top unfurled into a wide, flowering shape, like a pair of mangled wings, revealing a face with a wide, unnerving grin. I knew I could not pass without the creature's permission without getting attacked, even though there was nothing important nearby. The logo on my car and a few praises of the company were enough to satisfy this being however, and it allowed me to pass before going back underground. I kept driving, not sure where.
I was not affiliated with Lemon Orb, and it was only a matter of time until something realized that."
Artist's Notes: Artist's notes: If any of what I drew doesn't match up with the description, that's because I was working from memory. I PRESUME that last line was meant to end with a full stop, because the dream was actually posted with a comma there, but then reposted with nothing added to the end. A chilling final line, isn't it? This thing is definitely connected to Lemon Orb's infinite source, but is the company even still in control? And was it ever? For that matter, was it ever anything but a front for this... flesh?
A Ghost Horde
Posted by Bee of Unusual Size:
"I had a dream that actually started with a Bogleech review. He was reviewing creatures from some japanese cartoon from the late 2000s with a lot of different ghosts and monsters, though I didn't really read it because I wanted to watch the show myself without spoilers. (I can't remember the monsters in the review I did see but I wish I could come up with that sort of character design consciously.)
In the next segment of the dream I was watching the show with subtitles. It was supposed to be in Japanese, but since I don't know the language it was mostly gibberish with some animal-crossing like sounds thrown in sometimes. While the backgrounds were 3D, the characters were 2D with a 'cutout' feeling, with the main characters being black and white like animation from the 30s or so.
The show was about a little cat girl (who looked kinda like Animaniacs-y without the red nose and with the white part of her face evoking a skull) who had to move in with her grumpy bull-terrier uncle. The reason for her having to stay with him was that she went to visit him but to go home she'd have to cross a railroad and apparently a train would just keep going on forever, blocking the way. The uncle has a business or something that involves him running two spooky trains (completely unrelated to the blocking train), and the girl's goal is proving that she is worthy of being in-charge of one of them. This was all shown in the first episode which had some sort of friendly ghost, but I cannot remember what it looked like.
The second episode was significantly more confusing, opening with a 'stampede' of ghosts in a desert. Unlike the characters before, they were all old 3D puppets like the bird guys from the Dark Crystal. There was a whole army of them, and they were all chanting "WHORE-E-YO! WHORE-E-YO! WHERE DID ALL THE GOLD GO?" in regular human voices. I think they were trying to insult Tokyo but I knew that they held a grudge against this world's Las Vegas. Perhaps they're the same place here? I think they were resentful because gambling ruined their lives before they died?
From this group of marching spirits I remember only two specific ghosts. One of them looked like a very crudely put together long beaked vulture skeleton with no eye sockets that was made of wire or crumpled golden tinfoil. It wasn't even a proper skeleton shape but more flat, with the head in profile. The second ghost was a blue, with a roughly muffin-shaped body with like a dozen bald old man heads evenly placed all over the top half that all tried to face the same direction, with varying success.
Apparently a larger, more powerful spirit was trying to take advantage of all these ghosts. I can't remember what it looked like outside of it being very contorted and moving in unnatural ways. When the bird guy noticed it, he tried to get the blue ghost's attention by tapping him on the... shoulder? bulb? to which the blue ghost responded with a "whozzat mate?" in the voice of a tired British grandpa.
The focus of the episode would have been the girl and her uncle stopping the large spirit from taking advantage of these ghosts and helping them pass on, but I unfortunately woke up before I could finish it."
"I had a dream that actually started with a Bogleech review. He was reviewing creatures from some japanese cartoon from the late 2000s with a lot of different ghosts and monsters, though I didn't really read it because I wanted to watch the show myself without spoilers. (I can't remember the monsters in the review I did see but I wish I could come up with that sort of character design consciously.)
In the next segment of the dream I was watching the show with subtitles. It was supposed to be in Japanese, but since I don't know the language it was mostly gibberish with some animal-crossing like sounds thrown in sometimes. While the backgrounds were 3D, the characters were 2D with a 'cutout' feeling, with the main characters being black and white like animation from the 30s or so.
The show was about a little cat girl (who looked kinda like Animaniacs-y without the red nose and with the white part of her face evoking a skull) who had to move in with her grumpy bull-terrier uncle. The reason for her having to stay with him was that she went to visit him but to go home she'd have to cross a railroad and apparently a train would just keep going on forever, blocking the way. The uncle has a business or something that involves him running two spooky trains (completely unrelated to the blocking train), and the girl's goal is proving that she is worthy of being in-charge of one of them. This was all shown in the first episode which had some sort of friendly ghost, but I cannot remember what it looked like.
The second episode was significantly more confusing, opening with a 'stampede' of ghosts in a desert. Unlike the characters before, they were all old 3D puppets like the bird guys from the Dark Crystal. There was a whole army of them, and they were all chanting "WHORE-E-YO! WHORE-E-YO! WHERE DID ALL THE GOLD GO?" in regular human voices. I think they were trying to insult Tokyo but I knew that they held a grudge against this world's Las Vegas. Perhaps they're the same place here? I think they were resentful because gambling ruined their lives before they died?
From this group of marching spirits I remember only two specific ghosts. One of them looked like a very crudely put together long beaked vulture skeleton with no eye sockets that was made of wire or crumpled golden tinfoil. It wasn't even a proper skeleton shape but more flat, with the head in profile. The second ghost was a blue, with a roughly muffin-shaped body with like a dozen bald old man heads evenly placed all over the top half that all tried to face the same direction, with varying success.
Apparently a larger, more powerful spirit was trying to take advantage of all these ghosts. I can't remember what it looked like outside of it being very contorted and moving in unnatural ways. When the bird guy noticed it, he tried to get the blue ghost's attention by tapping him on the... shoulder? bulb? to which the blue ghost responded with a "whozzat mate?" in the voice of a tired British grandpa.
The focus of the episode would have been the girl and her uncle stopping the large spirit from taking advantage of these ghosts and helping them pass on, but I unfortunately woke up before I could finish it."
Artist's Notes: I would like to say that I just couldn't not draw this dream after reading that the monsters from it were on your site. I would like to. I can't, I started drawing it because the combination of ghosts, casions and 30's animation reminded me of Cuphead. That aside, guess what? The show might still not be real, but provided that you post it, the monster designs will be on your site anyway. I have the most notes for this because I improvised the most... The tinfoil vulture skeleton is based off looking at a chart of a real one. The old man thing off its traits, loosely described (shape comparable to a muffin, a shoulder/bulb), abstracted, and with crab limbs because I misremembered it as having them and thought the concept was cool. Oh, and the faces are, yes, based on the Old Man Of The Mountain. The Gambling-Ghost, with a hyphen because I'm sure the drawing was "encouraged" by me reading My Life In the Bush Of Ghosts, is just the imagery I got from reading it description, that drippy mouth added to give it a bit of goofier charm to contrast the more frightful elements. The bow tie as well as the buttons that show up behind the ribs are, I admit it, cribbed from King Dice. I told you this dream reminded me of Cuphead, and I felt that this thing might have some kind of collection to gambling. So, I made it dapper. (And clever. You better believe it's loaded!) It seems like a good "starter" villain if you ask me. The horde goes last, and this is entirely improvised... I mixed it together from some monsters from my own dreams (the floating thing, the cubist frog head, the spotlight-train, the rag lady with a mask and the heavyset, tentacled humanoid with a sphere for a head), some monsters I made up (note: some of them are based off YOUR suggestions as to what goes in a monster horde shot, also the ghost girl got a belly button because there was a smudge there that looked like one), one spirit from Slavic mythology, and also there are three nightmare monsters from years past. I picked those that seemd fitting. Can you find them?
A Youkai
Posted by Robert M. Lloyd:
"I just recently had the weirdest dream. It began with me messing around on my computer in what was basically like a combination of my old house and my current one. On my wrist was a Yo-kai Watch. So far, so normal (by the standards of my dreams). My mom, dad, and brother were all downstairs. Then Mom came into my room and said she was planning on buying us tickets to a boat ride. I thought that was a great idea, so she told everyone about it and we left immediately. We were on the island where I used to live, and we went to the harbor at one end of main street to wait for the boat. This is where things get weird.
My Yo-kai Watch detected something, and it turned out to be a portal to the Yo-kai World (I've been playing a lot of Yo-kai Watch recently). I promptly jumped through, and Dad followed me, which my dream self realized must mean he could see yo-kai too. We messed around for a bit, remembered the boat ride, and returned to the normal world just in time. Then, as is usual for my dreams, I couldn't quite remember what happened next, but next thing I remembered was that it started raining upside-down. Like, rain was coming from below and going up into the sky. Everyone was confused, and I slept it off (yes I slept within my dream, shut up). The next day, it was snowing, and Mung Daal from Chowder showed up in my kitchen to cook for us, which nobody questioned.
Things got weird again at dinnertime, when the whole thing turned into a nightmare. After messing around on the computer some more, I went downstairs for dinner, and found my family eating outside even though it was still snowing. Their food was completely covered in snow, and they just kept eating it anyway with a smile on their face. An uncanny smile that didn't fit any of them at all. My dream self was creeped out, but joined them anyway, and for some reason the snow didn't even touch my food. There was way more food on my plate than I'm used to, and I refused to eat it all, but my parents said "the shrimp" wouldn't show up unless I did. I somehow was encouraged to keep eating by this until I looked inside and saw "the shrimp". It was literally just an oversized shrimp, but for some reason this absolutely terrified dream me. When I said I didn't want "the shrimp" to show up, Mung Daal ran out of the kitchen.
Suddenly, he collapsed into a blob of blue skin as though all his bones just disappeared. From the blob erupted hundreds of spindly arms, one of which kept threatening me with a drill if I tried to leave the table without finishing my dinner. My family just kept eating, completely ignoring my plight. Eventually, "Mung Daal" was distracted by something I can't remember (I think it involved my brother) and I ran away, but he chased me and cornered me in my living room. He rose the drill to my neck, turned it on... and then I woke up.
Just a little add-on: In the dream, I knew that everything that happened was because I messed around in the Yo-Kai World."
"I just recently had the weirdest dream. It began with me messing around on my computer in what was basically like a combination of my old house and my current one. On my wrist was a Yo-kai Watch. So far, so normal (by the standards of my dreams). My mom, dad, and brother were all downstairs. Then Mom came into my room and said she was planning on buying us tickets to a boat ride. I thought that was a great idea, so she told everyone about it and we left immediately. We were on the island where I used to live, and we went to the harbor at one end of main street to wait for the boat. This is where things get weird.
My Yo-kai Watch detected something, and it turned out to be a portal to the Yo-kai World (I've been playing a lot of Yo-kai Watch recently). I promptly jumped through, and Dad followed me, which my dream self realized must mean he could see yo-kai too. We messed around for a bit, remembered the boat ride, and returned to the normal world just in time. Then, as is usual for my dreams, I couldn't quite remember what happened next, but next thing I remembered was that it started raining upside-down. Like, rain was coming from below and going up into the sky. Everyone was confused, and I slept it off (yes I slept within my dream, shut up). The next day, it was snowing, and Mung Daal from Chowder showed up in my kitchen to cook for us, which nobody questioned.
Things got weird again at dinnertime, when the whole thing turned into a nightmare. After messing around on the computer some more, I went downstairs for dinner, and found my family eating outside even though it was still snowing. Their food was completely covered in snow, and they just kept eating it anyway with a smile on their face. An uncanny smile that didn't fit any of them at all. My dream self was creeped out, but joined them anyway, and for some reason the snow didn't even touch my food. There was way more food on my plate than I'm used to, and I refused to eat it all, but my parents said "the shrimp" wouldn't show up unless I did. I somehow was encouraged to keep eating by this until I looked inside and saw "the shrimp". It was literally just an oversized shrimp, but for some reason this absolutely terrified dream me. When I said I didn't want "the shrimp" to show up, Mung Daal ran out of the kitchen.
Suddenly, he collapsed into a blob of blue skin as though all his bones just disappeared. From the blob erupted hundreds of spindly arms, one of which kept threatening me with a drill if I tried to leave the table without finishing my dinner. My family just kept eating, completely ignoring my plight. Eventually, "Mung Daal" was distracted by something I can't remember (I think it involved my brother) and I ran away, but he chased me and cornered me in my living room. He rose the drill to my neck, turned it on... and then I woke up.
Just a little add-on: In the dream, I knew that everything that happened was because I messed around in the Yo-Kai World."
Artist's Notes: Those are less artist's notes and more a theory about just what has happened here. So, it has been said that what happened was because of the Yo-Kai World, so it might not be a stretch that this "Mung Daal" is in fact one Yo-Kai, or just yokai because he does not abide by the game rules, possibly literally in the real chef's skin. And many yokai were said to eat humans. Easy to follow so far, right? So, why was Yokai Mung Daal making such massive servings? Let's say that... there's more to cook with in a well fed human.
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