We've talked a lot these last couple of entries about Byrgenworth Academy, and all their fun research into things like phantasmal gastropods or where your extra eyeballs should go (you're still gonna love the answer to that), but just how has all that been working out for them? You probably guessed just by everything else in the game, if not today's title, that the answer only raises even more alarming questions. But don't take my word for it! Here comes one now!

HAHA, what?! What happened to you dude?! What did you DO??? You've gone all sloppy!!!!! All sloppy all over the floor! What even does that?! What idiotic thing did you get into, smart guy????

Slime Scholars are another enemy classified as kin. They are boneless, white and gooey, retaining human faces with an unwholesomely blank expression, and you'll also notice that their heads are always cocked sideways! Are those big heavy genius brains just causing them to tip over, or does it just symbolize their "skewed outlook?" We don't even know how intelligent they are anymore really; they still wear their college garb, but they don't speak, and we don't see them do anything other than slither around, hang off ceilings, or try to kill us with their long, stretchy arms. Why do they do that, and why ae they like that? What DID these smart guys get into? The eyeballs thing? The slugs thing?

The answer is actually kind of all the above, but also another concept to spring on you: "The Nightmare." What is The Nightmare? Is it related to The Dream? Kind of, yeah, well...The Nightmare is a darker, more alien other reality, incomprehensible to our kind, but everything monstrous and wrong in Yharnam seems to actually just be what happens as The Nightmare overlaps into it. The thing is, this doesn't even necessarily mean that Yharnam is the "real world" either, as the entirety of Bloodborne quite possibly takes place in multiple interconnected dream realms, but we really aren't meant to ever know for certain. All we can know is that The Nightmare is where the Great Ones come from, and we the player will only ever experience a more "comprehensible" version of it that usually resembles a distortion of our own world, but some people got it into their heads (literally) that they ought to want to see all the way into the Nightmare. The real Nightmare, in its truest form.

So what did these brave pioneers learn from that endeavor? What lesson have they to teach us after plunging their consciousness repeatedly into the nightmare realm like some kind of cosmic skindiver? I guess just one lesson, really, which is a resounding "don't do that," and they didn't have to do that for everyone to know that, but I admire their devotion to science. How would we have known exactly WHY we shouldn't do that, or exactly how to not be doing that, without their selfless sacrifice?