The one Give Yourself Goosebumps book where you can't realize if you woke up yet.
You're spending the night in a very strange inn. As you fall asleep, you have dreams that are total nightmares. First you turn into a bat. Then your parents become aliens. Can you escape? Or will your worst dreams come true?
It's Only a Nightmare provides examples of:
- Amazingly Embarrassing Parents: Your parents are this in several parts of the book, especially an ending where you dream that they insist on taking you to a theme park for small children and having you pose for lots of photos.
- Bittersweet Ending: There's an ending where not only is your adventure in the book revealed to be just a dream, but so is your entire human life, and you're really just an animal. It sounds like a bad ending at first, until you realize that you are happy with your "new" life (mostly because it's your REAL life).
- Denser and Wackier: Justified, since this is a dream world.
- "Not Wearing Pants" Dream: In one bad ending, you confront Lord Morphos on a stage in front of a packed auditorium, only to suddenly find yourself in just your underwear. While the audience starts laughing at you, the Sleep Master appears to tell you that you're now trapped in this nightmare forever.
- Random Events Plot: This book tends to randomly shift from event to event, so much so it's difficult to determine what choice will do what (even more so than normally). Kind of justified as the book takes place in a dream world most of the time.
- Reality Warping Is Not a Toy: In The "B" Storyline, you are able to control your dreams by (in a sense) "wishing" in your mind what happens next, but your dreams have an effect on you in the real world, and can even kill you (It Makes Sense in Context). To make it worse, each dream is controlled by your thoughts first, so it is possible to just randomly think of something, and have that come true even though you didn't really want it to.
- Rip Van Winkle: One ending has you drinking a sleep rememdy that puts you to sleep for 70 years. Another even jokes you have joined the "Rip Van Winkle" club.
- Self-Deprecation: One part sees you noticing a Give Yourself Goosebumps book that is marked as number 456, poking fun at how many books the series, and the franchise in general, had.
- Shaped Like Itself: At one point, you have the choice of reading either an ancient book of sleep remedies, or a Give Yourself Goosebumps book titled "Nightmares Are No Fun". If you pick the Give Yourself Goosebumps, of course it's about the same subject as the book you're reading in the real world; so you have to go to page 1 and start the story again.
