DAY ELEVEN:
DREAM SUPERBEAST DREAMGILLAS

Written by Jonathan Wojcik

Our last Ultraman Ace Superbeast was Bad Balloon, and if you thought that child-stealing rubber bag was unwholesome, you aren't even prepared for this one.

Dreamgillas is a monster that can manifest, as its name implies, within human dreams, and used this ability to torment a little boy named Yukio. In his recurring nightmare, he crosses the same bridge over the same lake he always crosses on his way home from school, only for the kaiju to appear and begin drenching him with water from its mouth (at least, hopefully water?) until Yukio would awaken terrified in a puddle of...oh no. Ew.

WAIT WHY IS THAT RED

Yes, it's true, Dreamgillas is the first and one can only hope the only kaiju to ever revolve around urinating, or at least revolved around it in this particular instance. Not to say that it's ever appeared again, but we don't know that this entity has to tie in with bladder control, do we? It could very well draw power from any water-related nightmare, couldn't it?

Regardless, the stains even come out in the shape of the monster's silhouette, which only proves to Yukio that there's something more at work than just an ordinary dream, and that only leads to his increasing suspicion that the monster really will arise from that lake one day. Once he crosses the bridge and truly expects to see Dreamgillas, it's precisely what the monster needs to cross over into the real world at last, ready to wreak havoc with what I'm so glad is merely an "explosive red liquid" it can spray from its mouth.

A monster that emerges from water-related nightmares is already unsettling, but that they had to go and involve nocturnal enuresis is even more unpleasant, with or without the also unpleasant realization that there are probably people who consequently fetishize this monster.

What really makes this one, however, is that colorful, unforgettably psychedelic and truly dreadful design. Its bony lattice-like face and square lips resemble a boxy, skinless fish head, complete with fan-like fins for "ears" and raw-looking, slimy eyeballs so bugged out they look ready to fall off, not to mention the third eyeball perched atop its thorny head-spike! Then you have its warty, crusty dinosaur-like body, the turtle-like or crustacean-like carapace on its chest, and finally the matter of that thing sticking out of its neck. A yellow, segmented, roughly conical appendage that just dangles over its chest like some obscene, alien necktie, or perhaps the tail end of a parasite embedded in its throat?! I'm sure you wondered about that thing already, but no, it does not do anything we know of and nobody knows why it is there, which is easily in the top two or three most alarming things you could ever say about any part of a psychic piss demon.

NAVIGATION: