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"I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams."
The Hero has hurt in his Back Story. A world of hurt. Or worse, he had to Shoot the Dog and is wracked with guilt. Or, both.
Not that he will show it, not him, not The Stoic. (Perhaps just on this topic, but that's where it hurts.) He won't even say Don't You Dare Pity Me!; he would if someone sympathized, but his pain is too hidden for anyone to think of pitying him. He won't even suffer a Not So Stoic moment. Or Sand In My Eyes.
So how do you show the readers (and sometimes the other characters) he's not actually just cold and heartless? How do you humanize him without Character Derailment? Or inappropriate Character Development for the story?
You give him Bad Dreams.
There are various options:
- Mildest, he can be restless in bed or mutter to himself — or even start shouting. Or other characters can comment on it.
- Show the dream sequence, showing his terror and a remarkable lucid account of the trauma (possibly a Flashback Nightmare, possibly symbolically represented), and how he woke in horror. Either a Nightmare Sequence, Daydream Surprise or All Just a Dream is possible.
- Have him talk in his sleep (or in a delirum). This is used, often, to let other characters in on the secret. His talk is often remarkably clear, lucid, exact, and detailed. True, the significance often has to be pieced together, but it can be done.
As soon as he wakes (often by sitting up in bed), he will be back to normal. However, he may suffer Insomnia, which can reach dangerous proportions if they are Recurring Dreams. If he woke everyone else screaming, he will apologize for disturbing them. Usually. Once in a while, someone will actually admit to a secret at this point; this can be unrealistically beneficial. If the character suffers from Go Mad from the Isolation, he will often not be able to remember that he is safe until several moments after waking.
If it stemmed from My Greatest Failure, may overlap with Anxiety Dreams, and be fixed with it if the character tackles the problem the second time round.
Visions about bad things, whether past, present, or future, or plain old ordinary dreams that are just unpleasant, are not Bad Dreams; Bad Dreams indicate trauma. (And Truth in Television, really can stem from trauma.)
Can be used to show the extent of trauma for any person, but obviously more likely for the Stoic, the Emotionless Girl, Broken Bird , and the like. Or in cases where the character would never show his pain before a particular person. On the other hand, it is a convincing way of demonstrating trauma for, and humanizing, anyone, since you can't fake dreams. May be used to reveal the true character of No Hero to His Valet (type 2). Or demonstrate that Being Evil Sucks. Or to show that The Alcoholic is Drowning My Sorrows. The Captain is prone to Bad Dreams because he cannot show weakness in front of his men and feels responsible for them.
The Complete Monster, on the other hand, may be explicitly described as sleeping like a baby. Just to underscore his monstrosity.
Your Worst Nightmare may be mistaken for Bad Dreams. When the character suffers from Trauma Induced Amnesia, often overlaps with Dreaming The Truth.
Contrast Dreaming of Things to Come. When the dreams are symbolic, they can not always be distinguished; dreams of a villain could be remembering the past encounters, or foreshadowing future ones. Also contrast Talking in Your Dreams. The character may not be able to tell that someone is communicating because the means are bringing up memories.
May be a Fever Dream Episode. Supertrope of Flashback Nightmare, which always shows the nightmare and is literal. These are often Recurring Dreams, at least by implication.
Examples
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Anime and Manga
- Guts from Berserk gets these a lot because of his horrible childhood. It only gets worse when he gets the Brand Of Sacrifice.
- Tarou from Ghost Hound has been having these ever since he got kidnapped when he was 4.
- Asuka from Neon Genesis Evangelion has one right beside shy protagonist Shinji on their final night of having to sleep together. It's about her mother.
- Lucy from Elfen Lied demonstrates all three of the variations at one point or another. One of her Bad Dreams lasts for more than an episode.
- In Fruits Basket Yuki suffers a Bad Dream about his mother. He is worried because he hasn't had it in a while.
- Rin also suffers a Bad Dream about her parents when she's ill.
- At one point, Tohru has a bad dream about the day her mother left and was hit by a car and killed. The dream itself wasn't bad (just her mother bidding Tohru goodbye as she left for work), but Tohru watches while knowing what will happen and wakes up as she tries to warn her mother not to leave.
- Haruhi Suzumiya empowers total strangers to come in and mop up her bad dreams, then has a good dream with her SO.
- Hellsing : Alucard, of all people, has bad dreams of when Abraham Van Helsing defeats him, and later has hallucinations containing homages to various films. He's properly freaked out about this. This is exaggerated in the fifth OVA.
- Digimon Adventure 02 basically managed to turn Ken Ichijoji from the psychopathic Big Bad into The Woobie by using this method.
- In "Count Cain", the titular Cain suffers near-constant nightmares due to his father's abuse and generally miserable childhood. Peculiarly, his own bad deeds, including several poisonings, don't seem to bother him at all.
- Evangeline of Mahou Sensei Negima! has recurring nightmares of the day the Thousand Master rejected her, defeated her, and sealed her in Mahora Academy.
- After the events at the start of the Magic World arc, Negi himself had one where he saw all his students petrified. It ends with the petrified Asuna shattering.
- Shows up multiple times in Chrono Crusade.
- Chrono is shown having nightmares both after Rizelle is killed (implying guilt for Chrono and also hinting at his [at the time] unrevealed backstory) and in a flashback (hinting that he possibly has something like PTSD after a battle while leaving the demon's home world).
- Rosette also has a bad dream after a traumatic battle that's half-flashback and half-symbolic, which sets up the uncharacteristic despair she's in for the rest of the chapter.
- In the anime, Rosette has a bad dream about Joshua to foreshadow the reveal about her backstory.
- Pokémon: The Rise of Darkrai features a Pokémon specifically capable of giving any sleeping person Bad Dreams, and is physically incapable of doing otherwise. When the main character, Ash, is put to sleep, he's given a vision of Palkia's appearance in the city. Of course, he doesn't realise what's going on until it's too late.
- Additionally, due to Palkia's Space Warping powers being out-of-control at this point, any Pokémon put to sleep will have their nightmares in full view for everyone to see. Most of the Pokémon dream of being chased by "something frightening" - Lickylicky on the other hand dreams that it has transformed into Baron Alberto (not strictly the villain, more of a Jerkass) and thus the actual Baron ends up turning into Lickylicky. He even takes advantage of this in an attempt to battle Darkrai and begins using attacks. He loses. When Palkia wakes up and regains some control of its powers, the images of nightmares fade away and the Pokémon all inexplicably wake up at the same time.
- In Full Metal Panic!, Sousuke is eventually shown to have nightmares concerning Kaname, along with his dead mother (who died protecting him, and told him to "fight" and "never give up"). These nightmare sequences are pretty much the only mention or thoughts he gives of his mother (as he isn't a very sentimental person), and without them, it would be made rather ambiguous whether or not Sousuke even remembered his mother (since she died when he was 3-4 years old, and he was even shown going mute and repressing memories of her when he was young, and only got better with Kalinin's help).
- Happens early on in the Fullmetal Alchemist manga, with Ed waking up from a dream of his mother with her flesh falling off her body.
- Maria in Sakura Wars has Flashback Nightmares about her time as a soldier in Russia and particularly about the death of her commanding officer (who was either her mentor [anime] or her love interest [manga]... the original game is unclear on this point), for which she feels responsible.
- In ...Virgin Love, Kaoru has a lot of trouble catching sleep because he always dreams of his abusive childhood.
Comic Books
- Heather Hudson has a dream sequence after the death of her husband in Alpha Flight: in the graveyard, one by one, the team members leave her. Then her dead husband's rotting corpse rises out of the grave and chases her.
- Batman in various media and usually focusing on reliving the night of his parents' murder, with story appropriate variations.
- Magneto suffers these from his experiences in the Holocaust and his daughter's death afterwards.
- At the end of Watchmen, Ozymandias seems perfectly content that he did the right thing, but seems to show a hint of doubt when he mentions his dream of "swimming towards a terrible...never mind", drawing a parallel between his story and the mariner of the comic-within-a-comic, in which a man commits horrible atrocities in order to save his home from attack from a dreaded ship of the damned. However, the attack never happens, and he eventually joins the ship, having ironically lost his soul through his attempts to save his village.
- Several of the members of the post-Zero Hour Legion Of Super-Heroes have recurring Bad Dreams following the "Legion of the Damned" arc, in which many of them were taken over by The Blight.
- Yorick, the protagonist of Y: The Last Man, gets these frequently. At one point one of his companions comments that they'd hate to live in his mind.
- A variant of this trope appears in The Punisher MAX. Frank's worst dream is actually a happy dream of an alternate future in which his family didn't go to the park and he is a grandfather who is having dinner with his wife, children, children-in-law, and grandchildren. The reason that Frank considers this a bad dream is because it painfully reminds him that his family is dead when he wakes up.
Film
- In Breakfast at Tiffany's, Holly gets into bed with Paul and talks in her sleep about, apparently, losing her beloved brother in the snow. The trope is slightly averted in that she'd already revealed, earlier in that scene, that she worries about her brother, but not the extent to which it distresses her.
- Wolverine in the X-Men movies is shown to have some nasty nightmares about his experience with Weapon X. Nightmares so nasty he wakes up and stabs whatever's in front of him.
- Or whoever, unfortunately for Rogue.
Literature
Live Action TV
- In the Torchwood episode "Small Worlds", Jack Harkness dreams about his last encounter with The Fair Folk, and how all his men died.
- River from Firefly has these as a result of what happened to her at the Academy.
- The main characters from Supernatural get hit by this a few times.
- In season four, Dean spends many nights tossing over his nightmares of hell. In season seven, Dean is once again having nightmares, this time about Castiel's death and Sam's hallucinations. Well, mostly about killing Sam's monster friend.
- Sam had nightmares throughout Season 1. While some were visions, the ones where he watched his girlfriend die over and over again still affected him like this. In season seven, his hallucinations of Lucifer began as nightmares.
- In one episode, Bobby's nightmares are used against him by a Monster of the Week, as are Dean's.
- The later-period M*A*S*H episode "Dreams" consists of each of the exhausted characters falling asleep and dreaming a symbolic but horrific dream reflecting the war (except Potter, who has a really nice dream about home). At the end, they are talking about going to bed, Winchester quotes, "To sleep, perchance to dream", and everyone decides that, after all, another cup of coffee might be enough.
- In "Hawk's Nightmare", the imitable Hawkeye goes through sleepwalking and terrifying dreams where he wakes screaming loud enough to rouse most of the camp. It's determined that he's having a sane reaction to his insane situation, and the worst his childhood had to offer was $20 he may or may not owe an old friend.
- Commander Sinclair in Babylon 5 was plagued with dreams of the Battle of the Line.
- In The X-Files, Mulder often relives his sister's kidnapping during nightmares.
- In season 2, he also dreams of Scully being tortured by those who abducted her.
- Reversed in season 8, in which Scully has nightmares of Mulder being tortured ruthlessly by aliens. These get so regular she panics when she's not having them anymore, for fear that his death may be the reason.
- In Buffy the Vampire Slayer, in addition to Prophetic Dreams, Buffy experiences guilt-fueled dreams about her encounter with Faith in the season 3 finale episode "Graduation Day" (part 1). These dreams begin peacefully but become Bad Dreams because of Buffy's guilt. The dreams appear in episodes involving Faith after the aforementioned encounter.
- Likewise at the beginning of Season 3, Buffy's dreams reflect her guilt at killing a re-souled Angel in the Season 2 finale. The dreams stop after she confesses her action to Giles.
- The two-part 3rd Rock from the Sun episode "A Nightmare on Dick Street" has each of the aliens experiencing a vivid bad dream (shown in 3D, no less).
- The Doctor Who special The End Of Time begins with everyone on Earth having nightmares of a laughing man.
- In "The Next Doctor", the amnesic, possible future incarnation of the Doctor has Bad Dreams, stating that with everything a Time Lord has seen and done, of course he has Bad Dreams. The Tenth Doctor simply replies "Yeah,". Jackson Lake isn't the Doctor though. His Bad Dreams are caused by the death of his wife and kidnap of his son that he's suppressed the memory of out of grief.
- In the Series Five episode "Amy's Choice", the Eleventh Doctor's cheerful carefree manner is revealed to be a mask at least some of the time. This is revealed in two dreams caused by psychic pollen. Amy and Rory are also included in these dreams, so they end up seeing Eleven's inner darkness for themselves.
- In the first series of Spaced, Tim wakes from dreams of his ex-girlfriend shouting out her name on several occasions.
- "They've Got a Secret", a first-season episode of Farscape, shows a hallucinatory version of this: D'Argo is awake and walking around the ship, but is hallucinating, and thinks that the other characters are actually people from his past. They eventually realize this, and play along to get him to snap out of it. We (and his crewmates) learn about his wife and son in this way.
- Spencer Reid in Criminal Minds. In the two-parter "The Instincts" and "Memoriam'', the entire plot is driven by the fact that he is having horrible dreams that include finding a dead body behind a dryer, seeing babies at a crime scene, and being devoured by leeches (he wakes up in the middle of the night at a victims house shouting "Morgan, get 'em off me!", which is a huge piece of bait for shippers). He later connects these dreams to his father in "Memoriam" and the investigation is on.
- Earlier in the show, Rossi is haunted by nightmares relating to the Galen murders.
- Robin from Robin Hood has nightmares about fighting in the Holy Land, but oddly none (that we see) about the fact that Marian was murdered in the Holy Land. On the other hand, Guy is seen having a nightmare after he kills Marian.
Video Games
- In one of the multiple endings, Albel Nox from Star Ocean: Till the End of Time is accused by the protagonist of causing him to wake up every night with his screaming from nightmares. Albel's considerable angst over his dead father is ostensibly the cause. Albel's father was a renowned and successful leader in Airyglyph's military, and he died when Albel failed the test to join the same military branch, the Dragon Brigade. This would have resulted in Albel dying in a fire, if his father didn't step in to save Albel at the cost of his own life. Even though Albel's father saved his life, Albel still got burned pretty bad and lost most or all of his left arm.
- Cloud from Final Fantasy VII experiences these regularly over the course of the game (sometimes while he is wide awake).
- Haunted by his actions in the attack of Mysidia, and distraught by the King stripping him of his rank, Cecil from Final Fantasy IV suffers from bad dreams on the night before his assignment on the Village of Mist. Rosa is there to comfort him.
- In Final Fantasy VI, Shadow's backstory is only revealed through his flashback Bad Dreams when you rest at an inn.
- Max Payne gets these a lot as a result of failing to save his wife and baby girl.
- Miles Edgeworth in the first Ace Attorney game admits that he's dreamed of his father's murder almost every night for the last fifteen years.
- Serge from Chrono Cross suffers a melancholy dream about Kid after seeing Lynx take over his body and stab her, and getting shunted into another dimension in the aftermath.
- At the end of Metal Gear 2, Snake yells at Big Boss that he's had terrible nightmares for the last four years, and says that by killing Big Boss he can end the nightmares. Not only does this not work, it's not terribly conducive to drama when Snake's nightmares were never actually mentioned until that one scene. On the bright side, the nightmares were eventually developed into PTSD and this was used to flesh out Snake's character into something more rounded.
- Metal Gear Solid 3 has a bonus scene if you save while in the prison cell which is Snake's (somewhat odd) nightmare (Snake's afraid of vampires, and Para-medic talks about Dracula after you save). The scene is actually a demo of "Guy Savage", a game that was never released. Following the dramatic wake-up you can call your support team to get some humorous conversations (like SIGINT's rather disturbing dream).
- In Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops, Python mentions having nightmares every night due to the people he's killed as an assassin, which was only training for him to kill Snake. By killing Snake, he reasons the nightmares would go away.
- Aribeth in the original Neverwinter Nights campaign has a lot of these in chapter 2
- In The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, the player character has some pretty scary dreams
 if they become a vampire. It's a good thing they didn't actually show them as a cinematic!
- In the Point Lookout DLC to Fallout 3, your character is exposed to hallucinogenic swamp plants, and goes on a bad head trip through the swamp; including mocking bobble-heads with inscriptions insulting you and your mother's death. Then when you wake up, it's revealed somebody cracked open your head and cut out a chunk of brain.
- Yo-Jin-Bo allows you to have a conversation with either Yo or Ittosai if you choose to stay in the cave with them while on their respective paths. Yo dreams about a time when he accidentally hurt his mother as a child, and Ittosai flips out and attacks Sayori, believing her to be his father.
- In Dragon Age Origins, Grey Wardens suffer Bad Dreams after the Joining due to their new connection to the Darkspawn taint that lets them hear the Call of the Old Gods. Eventually they can block them out. Resurgence of the dreams is the first sign that the taint is overcoming the Grey Warden. Rather than succumb to it, the Wardens travel to the Deep Roads to die while killing as many Darkspawn as possible.
- In Lux-Pain, although Atsuki haven't dreamt them since joining FORT, the dream about how his parents died, as well as his sister being eaten by Silent infectees and barely surviving, came back in Episode 1 and it counts. No one knows about it until Rui accidentally reads it with her fortune-telling powers.
- Bao-Dur and the Exile in Knights of the Old Republic II are revealed to have bad dreams about the Mandalorian War, particularly the final battle. In a randomly generated cutscene on the Ebon Hawk, the Exile walks the ship while everyone else is asleep - except for Bao-Dur, who can't sleep for the same reasons, and sympathises.
- Fate/stay night: Shirou Emiya still has dreams about the end of the fourth Grail War and is wracked by his helplessness to save those around him at the time.
- Fallout: New Vegas gives us potential companion Craig Boone, who was forced to Shoot the Dog twice. After you gain his trust, he'll tell you that he thinks about the massacre of Bitter Springs even when he sleeps. He also states that a dream made him reconsider traveling with the Courier to the site of the massacre.
- Kratos' motivation to serve the gods in the first God Of War game is to rid himself of the nightmares that he'd been plagued with since he killed his wife and child. Unfortunately, while he ultimately obtains forgiveness from the gods for his service, they don't take away the nightmares.
- The Pokémon Darkrai's Special Ability is named this. It hits an opposing Pokemon for 1/8 of its max HP at the end of every turn if it is sleeping. The move Nightmare does the same thing, but it does 1/4 of their max health instead.
- In the first Mass Effect Shepard can tell Liara that s/he's being kept up at night from dreams and visions from what s/he saw when s/he accessed the Prothean beacon.
- When asked how he is at the end of The Arrival DLC for Mass Effect 2, Shepard will reply that s/he's no longer having visions, "if that's what you mean."
- And in Mass Effect 3, s/he has a cutscene after leaving the Citadel about a young boy s/he failed to save on Earth. It is indicated in dialogue that Shepard now suffers nightmares about The Fall of Earth every time s/he goes to sleep.
- In an e-mail conversation in Assassins Creed Brotherhood, Rebecca says that she hears Demond screaming during the night. Apparently, there are some psychological drawbacks to strapping a person to a machine that messes with their memories for several hours at a time. Who would have guessed?
Web Comic
- Type Two is the primary way in which the reader learns Lexx's backstory in Alien Dice. Early in the story, Chel wakes Lexx up because he was crying out in his sleep while remembering one of his first attempts at suicide. He refuses to share his past with her.
- In The Order of the Stick, V wakes from a trance with Bad Dreams—which are actually memories, as elves' trance isn't technically sleep.
- Metanoia's Star Tyrian, Lampshaded 2+ 19 by the character.
- Several times in Platinum Grit, Jeremy has nightmares about his insane cousin Dougal coming back for revenge. Sometimes with a few odd goings on to suggest they're more than dreams.
- Shopclerk, from Adorable Desolation wakes up screaming every morning, but he doesn't remember what he's been dreaming about.
- Bob and George Megaman has them, apparently
- Dominic Deegan: After the battle And for someone else, too.
- Shelley has them in Wapsi Square.
- In El Goonish Shive, Grace used to have them before she defeated Damien and faced her fear of her beastly side.
- In Prickly City, the voter who cast the deciding vote to elect Kevin, Lost Bunny of the Apocalypse, to the Senate (and get him out of Prickly City), has dreams of his campaign for the presidency — combining this with Anxiety Dreams.
- NinthElsewhere: Since the story takes place almost entirely in one of the character's subconscious, this trope was inevitable.
- In Blue Yonder, Jared dreams of his family -- ending with the moment they were attacked.
Web Original
- In The Gamers Alliance, Refan and Ronove suffer from these. In Refan's case it's mostly about the guilt for having killed for the first time, but he also has flashback dreams which make him gradually remember who was responsible for his mother's death, and later he even has nightmares about his nemesis who contacts him telepathically. Ronove's dreams make him gradually recover his memory, and their content foreshadows that he is in fact a former demonic Dreadlord.
- Kate of KateModern is frequently disturbed by strange dreams featuring needles, morbid imagery and sinister figures. In the Grand Finale "The Last Work", it is implied that these are memories of being a baby in an Order laboratory.
- These happen all over the place in Broken Saints. Chapter 7, Lucid, is all about the lucid dreams Raimi's been having.
- Considering how traumatic her entire life is, Himei Shoutan of Sailor Nothing gets these very often. Most of the time, it's just pieces of her memory replayed for her viewing pleasure, but sometimes, her nightmares go all creative on her. She doesn't wake from them screaming. At least, not anymore.
- The first chapter of Greek Ninja begins with Sasha having one.
- Ayla Goodkind of the Whateley Universe routinely has Bad Dreams that reflect her self-doubts and the horrific traumas she has gone through since she became a mutant. Most of the Phase stories have at least one night of nightmares.
- The Nostalgia Chick screams at the Will Smith fish to please leave her nightmares.
- Ti'Cira Hawk from The Gungan Council has reoccuring nightmares reliving the torture sessions under the hands of Azrael Daragon during her time in slavery.
Western Animation
- Done without seeing the actual dream in Batman Beyond, when Payback calls himself Bruce's worst nightmare, and Bruce simply retorts "You have no idea what my nightmares are like."
- Similarly notable in an episode of Justice League where the team was being locked inside their own nightmares. Batman, running on willpower and coffee, struggles mightily to stay awake, and when bad guy taunts him, he says, "You don't want to see my nightmares." That Chekhov's Gun doesn't fire, though, and he takes his opponent down before passing out.
- Xmen Evolution has Mesmero using his Psychic Powers to enter the minds of a bunch of X-Kids as they sleep, then he turns their dreams into nightmares, and ultimately mind rapes them into serving him.
- In Ghost of a Chance, Kitty has a bizarre dream about befriending a girl named Danielle, and then she has more hallucinations/bad dreams about Danielle, including one where the mansion begins to flood and ooze slime from the walls, while a zombie-like Danielle calls for Kitty to help her. It turns out that Danielle is a mutant with psychic abilities, who had been trapped in a cave-in near where Kitty visited earlier in the episode. The dreams she was sending Kitty were messages for rescue before her body was drowned. We also get hints in the series that Danielle wasn't very popular in her hometown because she had a tendency to give other people bad dreams by mistake.
- [[Wolverine]] also has nightmares about the Weapon X program; the episode they appear in has some justification, though, in that his brain is being remotely messed with by the original scientist in charge of the Weapon X program.
- The Season 2 opener for Avatar The Last Airbender shows that Aang has been experiencing nightmares (for what was probably the better part of a month) about his actions under the Avatar State in the previous season finale.
- Zuko's had some bad dreams, too, mostly having to do with his struggle to please his father and his desire to fulfill his destiny, as seen in S 2 E 17, "The Earth King."
- Season 3 has an entire episode (called "Nightmares and Daydreams") devoted to Aang's stress-induced nightmares before invading the Fire Nation. He forgoes sleep and decides to spend his days and nights training, resulting in a series of hilarious sleep-deprivation induced daydreams. Most of his so-called "nightmares" are also Played for Laughs ("Oh no, I forgot my pants and my math test!"), but at least one of them approaches serious Nightmare Fuel territory.
- The finale of Courage the Cowardly Dog featured two of these, resulting from Courage's constant berating from an evil teacher. Both of them involve bizarre creatures taunting him about his imperfections. And these are nasty dreams, especially the first, more infamous one.
- Subverted in an episode of The Fairly OddParents. Timmy is very guilty of releasing the town goat and blaming Vicky that he has "wish nightmares" brought on by wishing in his sleep, creating a garbled pink mess in his bedroom.
Real Life
- People with post-traumatic stress disorder frequently have nightmares about the traumatic event in question.
- In fact, this is a common enough symptom that treatment approaches for PTSD that target nightmares explicitly have been developed (and shown high efficacy).
- People who fall into comatose states frequently have "dreams" in this vein as well, the memories of which usually haunt them for years to come. One member of the AdventureQuest forums allegedly was tortured by demons for three months while he was in a coma following an ATV accident and incorporated many of his hellish sequences into his stories.
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