"That's right, my little fish, just keep swimming away. There are no boundaries in dreams, no restrictions from one's own physical body. You have entered a new world, where the spirit is free and that freedom is limitless, EVEN FOR SOMEONE LIKE ME! HA HA HA HA HA!"
— The Thief, Paprika
One of the most common nightmares (alongside falling to your death and public nudity) is that of the pursuing threat: the dreamer is chased in some way by something horrible, be it a monster, a killer, or just the school bully. Sometimes the chase takes the form of a nerve-wracking creep across a darkened building while being stalked by a menace that remains just out of sight, sometimes it's a frantic attempt to escape from a pursuer that's right on your heels. Either way, the dreamer can't outfight or outrun the nightmare forever, so it's very common to get caught and wake up just before the killing blow lands.
As such, it's quite popular for threats in dream worlds, virtual realities, and other "imaginary" scenarios to operate through this modus operandi rather than stand-up fights or even conventional warfare, just to drive home their nightmarish attributes.
For good measure, it's also very common for the pursuers to be Invincible Boogeymen, casually shrugging off anything their prey can throw at them and forcing the hapless dreamer to Run or Die. And unlike dreams in the real world, getting caught isn't a guarantee of waking up...
Also, it's not unknown for this kind of threat to be a Dream Weaver, a Nightmare Weaver, or a Virtual-Reality Warper, the better to make the chase more complex and frightening.
May result in a Catapult Nightmare... if you're lucky.
Examples:
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Film — Animated
- Inside Out: Jangles the Clown is one of Riley's biggest fears, hence why he's locked up in the darkest depths of Riley's subconscious. She will sometimes have nightmares about him, and whenever she does, he'll always chase after her and she'll wake up shortly after. Joy and Sadness exploit this in order to try to wake her up by luring Jangles to the dream studio, and once he gets there, it doesn't take very long for Riley to wake up.
- In the film adaptation of Paprika, Atsuko/Paprika is eventually able to confront the Big Bad responsible for stealing the DC Mini — namely Chairman Inui... only to find too late that she's still dreaming, and Paprika finds her Dream Weaver powers outmatched for the first time in the story, leaving her with no choice but to leg it. The whole thing quickly descends into a nightmare, with the thief's crawling vines chasing her through the corridors, the thief's accomplice following her into artworks to block her escape, and the thief himself countering her mermaid form by becoming a leviathan that swallows her whole and spits her into the Parade Dream.
Film — Live-Action
- Dreamscape: When Alex enters the President's dream to protect him from Tommy Ray, Tommy attacks and pursues them within the dream, taking on various forms including that of a ninja and a snakeman, while also sending zombies and wolves to hound them as well.
- Inception:
- Extractors will eventually find themselves up against Projections of the dreamer's subconsciousness. The mental equivalent of white blood cells, they react with increasing hostility towards any intruders — even friends of the dreamer — and will grow steadily more numerous and violent in their efforts to eliminate them. Because Projections are limitless in number, Extractors have to hide somewhere out of the way while they finish their work... and if that doesn't work, all they can do is run like hell in a desperate attempt to stay ahead of the Projections — as Yusuf finds himself stuck doing in Level 1 of the heist.
- Mal, the Living Memory of Dom Cobb's wife, regularly pursues him whenever he dreams and sabotages any job he's assigned to. For good measure, it's not uncommon for her to chase and corner Cobb's allies in sequences that range from tense to outright nightmarish — even teaming up with a mob of Projections in Ariadne's training session so she can stab the apprentice architect to death.
- In the finale, Mal raises the possibility that Cobb never awoke from their initial dream exploration of Limbo and that he's been dreaming all this time — even suggesting that the law enforcement agencies and corporate hit squads that have been hunting him around the world were really just Projections, casting the frantic chase scene in Mumbai in an entirely different light. It's soon confirmed that Cobb did awake from that particular dream and is actually being haunted by Mal's shade for the lengths he went to in order to awaken them from Limbo.
- The Matrix: Throughout the computer-generated dreamworld of the Matrix, sentient programs known as Agents hunt down any humans rebelling against the system. Because they're essentially unstoppable killing machines, Red Pills are taught to Run or Die when dealing with Agents, and even legendary resistance fighters like Trinity are afraid of them. As such, most encounters with Agents quickly degenerate into a chase scene right out of a nightmare, with the Agents jumping across buildings to catch up, punching their way through walls to get at characters in hiding, or just possessing any human mind close enough to continue their attack.
- The Night House: Beth finds creeper shots taken by her husband, Owen, of a woman who looks just like her. She tracks the woman, Madelyne down, and it's revealed that Owen was ostensibly thinking about an affair. Only he wasn't — he was tracking the women to bring them to the house and kill them. Beth freaks out Madelyne, but she eventually tells Beth a story that, the night before, she dreamed of Beth (who was her) and someone was chasing them.
"I dreamed I was you. Well, I was me, but I was you too. And something was chasing you — me."
"Well, did it get us?" - A Nightmare on Elm Street: This is a popular tactic of Freddy Krueger throughout the franchise, for in the event that he doesn't just torture a dreamer to death on the spot, he enjoys slowly hunting his victims across his labyrinthine boiler room — or kicking up the pace into a literally nightmarish pursuit through dreams. Indeed, the first film begins with Tina being stalked through the boiler room, and it's not until their second meeting that a proper chase ensues. Worse still, Freddy's Nightmare Weaver powers allow him to complicate the pursuits by teleporting, turning himself into a monster, or just delaying his victims in some way — as Nancy discovers in the first film when the floor under her feet turns to glue.
Literature
- In Hogfather, Mr. Teatime's heist crew find out the hard way that the Tooth Fairy's Castle defends itself by conjuring up manifestations of their own worst childhood dreams. At least two of the party are chased down by their respective monsters, and one is so left terrified during the pursuit that he loses his footing on the spiral staircase and falls to his death. On the upside, they can't actually die in the Castle, as it's a mystical realm based on the imagination of children, so death has no meaning there... but on the downside, that just means that the victims are teleported back to reality, where they promptly die from their injuries anyway.
- The Pilo Family Circus: After Jamie steals a bag of mysterious powder left behind by Goshy the clown, he finds himself being stalked by the rest of the Clown Division in a nightmare. Here, he's trapped in the same corner of the city where he found the powder and left struggling to hide while the clowns slowly hunt him down, helplessly listening to them drawing closer and closer. Thankfully, finding Jamie in the dream doesn't give them an opportunity to harm him... but it does allow them to get a fix on his location in the real world, resulting in carnage when Jamie gets home from work that day.
Live-Action TV
- Doctor Who: In "Amy's Choice", the Doctor, Amy, and Rory all find themselves in two wildly differing scenarios by the Dream Lord and are forced to guess which story is a dream before it kills them. While one features the TARDIS being slowly frozen, the other is set in a small country town where Amy and Rory have settled after their adventures with the Doctor ended... and it's currently being invaded by the Eknodines. Here, the Doctor and co find themselves once again running from aliens, for though the Eknodines can't move very fast, they never abandon their pursuit. Worse still, all three characters will fall asleep and wake up in the other scenario the moment they hear birdsong — which can happen at any time, including when the Eknodines are in danger of catching up, to the point that the Doctor has to force himself to stay awake until he can lock himself in a storeroom. The twist is that both scenarios are dreams.
- In Doom Patrol (2019), ghostly detective Edwin Paine has a recurring nightmare of being chased down an endless hallway by an unseen pursuer, a grim reminder of the fact that he spent several decades in Hell after being murdered by some Satan-worshipping classmates at boarding school.
- Farscape: In "Revenging Angel", Crichton is left comatose after a violent altercation with D'Argo, resulting in a dream scenario in which he tries to survive being hunted down by an imaginary D'Argo while resisting the urge to just take revenge. Crichton can partly control the dream by turning himself and everything around him into cartoons, but though his roadrunner act can keep imaginary D'Argo on the ropes for a little while, his attempts always end with the funny cartoon adventure degenerating into horror as his pursuer corners and temporarily kills him. In the end, Crichton goes on the offensive through cartoonish traps and refuses the call to revenge, awakening from his coma without losing himself.
- Fraggle Rock: In "The New Trash Heap in Town", all the Fraggles have been having a recurring nightmare since Gobo got his leg thumped after a particularly violent encounter in the Gorgs' garden. The Nightmare Sequence shows Junior sledgehammering his way into the Rock, crawling in amidst screams of terrified Fraggles, and beginning, on all fours, to chase them.
Junior: [laughing maniacally] Okay, you Fraggles! I've busted in here, and now I'm gonna thump all your legs!
- House of Anubis: Senkhara, who has dream-walking powers, has appeared chasing Sibuna down the school hallways twice. She cornered Amber with no escape and came very close to cursing her with the mark of Anubis, only prevented when Nina woke her up. Later, Nina had a dream in which she was Senkhara, chasing her friends and Victor through the halls and eventually cornering a terrified Fabian and Amber in a bedroom.
- Legion (2017):
- The Devil With The Yellow Eyes consistently haunts David throughout the first season, hunting him down and slowly driving him insane in the hopes of taking over his body. In one case, an attempt by Syd to explore his mind in the company of David's inner child results in the two of them being pursued by the Devil in the form of the World's Angriest Boy In The World.
- In "Chapter Five", Syd finds herself cornered in David's mind with the Devil slowly pursuing her around it, clearly taking great delight in the fact that Syd can't escape and David is helpless to stop him. Worse still, getting ensnared by the Devil results in Syd, David, and the rest of the mutants getting dragged into a Nightmare of Normality set in Clockworks Asylum.
- In "Chapter Seven", the Devil — now in the form of Lenny — traps Syd and Kerry in a ruined illusion of the Asylum, then begins hunting them down for fun. Ultimately, a combination of David's power, Rudy's Heroic Sacrifice, and Cary using a halo machine to trap the Devil inside David's mind end the chase, releasing the dreamers from captivity.
- Subverted in the second season, in which David and the Devil have gained enough power to drop the hunting aspect of their relationship altogether. From now on, the Devil, a.k.a. Amahl Farouk, a.k.a. the Shadow King is more than happy to challenge his opponent to psychic battles for supremacy.
- Stranger Things: Vecna cannot easily leave the Upside Down on his own, so, in order to compensate for this, he forces people into a sleep and then chases them in their dreams. He traps his unlucky victim in a nightmare that they cannot wake up from, and then continually haunts and pursues them, calling them by name repeatedly before the deed is done. Once Vecna corners his target, he'll lift them off of the air, and then use his Psychic Powers to contort their body into all sorts of unnatural shapes, which affect the living body as well. Once he is done, the victim is reduced to nothing but a black, contorted husk. Dustin even compares Vecna's murder methods to that of Freddy Kreuger's.
Video Games
- Batman: Arkham Asylum: On occasion, Batman will fall under the influence of Scarecrow's Fear Gas and descend into a hallucinatory nightmare in which he has to avoid being hunted down by a gigantic version of Scarecrow until he can find a means of regaining lucidity.
- In The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening, it is revealed that every monster in the game is this since Koholint Island is actually a dream of the Wind Fish. Link dying against them will cause him to die in real life, and they will never stop coming after him because he will cause the island to vanish if he wakes the Wind Fish up.
- Mario & Luigi: Dream Team:
- During the final fight with Antasma, if any of his attacks hit Mario, the plumber falls asleep and is taken to a nightmare. A larger Antasma will then chase Mario down a looping corridor while spewing fireballs at him, and it's up to the player to find the correct way out, depicted in-game as a rainbow portal. If they fall into any of the dark red portals, Mario will start falling and has to dodge a series of buzzsaws before having to repeat the chase sequence until he successfully escapes and re-enters the fight with Antasma.
- The same applies to his Battle Ring counterpart Antasma X, with the additional condition that it allows Antasma X to steal one of Mario's turns if he falls into a red portal. This is already bad enough in his own Battle Class because it has a limit of 14 turns, but during the Battle Medley, every turn he steals leaves you with less for the fight with Bowser Jr.
- Neverending Nightmares: Because Thomas can't fight back against the monsters, he can only evade if he wants to avoid waking up in yet another dream. He can hide when pitted against the baby monsters and the asylum patients, but most of the time he's forced to keep moving, either staying a few steps ahead of slow-moving foes like the dolls or running blindly down a corridor from the swift and deadly Nightmare Thomas. And some threats, like the shadows in "Childish Things", literally can't be escaped at all. Worse still, Thomas is asthmatic and can't run very far without getting winded, so he has to conserve his energy or run out of breath with a monster right on his heels... and in the "Wayward Dreamer" level, Thomas is even worse off as he's left struggling to outrun the same threats as a child with an even worse case of asthma.
- Psychonauts:
- All minds in the game feature Censors, entities that protect the brain from dangerous thoughts and commonly take the form of bureaucrats armed with rubber stamps. Unfortunately, as the mind's immune system, they don't differentiate between harmful ideas and friendly psychics, and will pursue Raz the moment he arrives in someone's brain. Though they can usually be fought like any other opponent, in more chaotic levels like "Sasha's Shooting Gallery," they emerge in such numbers that Raz is forced to avoid the oncoming army until he can shut off the valve that's producing them.
- In the final level, Raz is pitted against the Butcher, the nightmarish memory of Coach Oleander's father. Not only is this gigantic monstrosity immune to Raz's psi powers but the camera is oriented towards him, railroading the player into a chase sequence in which Raz must stay one step ahead of the Butcher until he gets one of his knives stuck in the ground, allowing Raz to clamber up his arm and attack his head up close. Things only get worse when the nightmare incarnation of Raz's dad teams up with the Butcher and even merges with him. As such, it's not until the very end, when Raz's father imbues Raz with enough psychic power to give him an edge over the Butcher that the boss battle actually becomes a straight-up fight.
- Resident Evil Village: During the visit to the Beneviento Estate, Ethan Winters' falls under Lady Donna's hallucinatory influence, resulting in a nightmare in which he's stripped of his weapons, trapped in the basement, and chased by a giant fetus-like monster. It can't be hurt or harmed in any way, so Ethan has no choice but to run until his pursuer is out of reach, hide when it shows signs of catching up, and find a way of escaping the basement.
Western Animation
- Archie's Weird Mysteries: In "Dream Girl", Dilton has made a dream machine and Big Ethel requests that he change a recurring nightmare in which she's chased by a monster to a dream where she's chased by Jughead. It turns out that the monster, Arnie, is an actual being in the dream world, but he's a Punch-Clock Villain.
- My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: Inverted in "Do Princesses Dream of Magic Sheep?", in which the protagonists must pursue the Tantabus nightmare across the dreamscape when it escapes Princess Luna's mind.
- Rick and Morty: Parodied in "Lawnmower Dog" with Scary Terry, who is a rather insecure Freddy Krueger Captain Ersatz encountered in one of the deepest dreams accessed. He will chase potential victims relentlessly... but is at a complete loss when Rick and Morty just hide from him instead.
