The word "Nightmare" is in the title, and everything is based on actual nightmares from real people. Is it any wonder this series is getting its own section?
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2014
- Everything about Saturndjinni's description
◊ of their Dancing Fish dream is pure Surreal Horror, from the limited stop-motion animation style to the unsettling music. - Thulykos's dream has Bram from Sharon, Lois, and Bram's Elephant Show depicted with a disturbing growth from his chin resembling a fleshy toilet brush, and using this growth to tickle Thulykos while laughing maniacally.
- One anonymous commenter describes a dream taking place on a moon station, with a disturbing blubbery multi-eyed grinning creature◊ that is first mistaken for a fellow astronaut from a distance, before materializing inside the moon base and slowly coming down the hall toward the narrator as the lights turn off one by one.It corners me, the room now completely dark, with only the dim glow of a computer monitor casting any light. The creature stares at me intently, and its form begins to deteriorate, degenerating into a amorphous mass of white putty, which begins to envelop my entire body. I close my eyes in fear, and when I open them again, everything has disappeared. The base, the moon, and the earth are all gone, and I am left floating alone in space.
- Phosphenes' "Chicken". Good god. Even Bogleech, one of the most notorious horror-lovers on the internet, was at a loss for words....I was trapped in a chicken yard full of mud. In place of a chicken was a mud-covered human body, alive or dead I'm not sure, walking around on its hands like chicken feet, with its legs broken backward at the hip and tied down over its spine. Its beak was that it had no head, just a torn V of throat flesh flopping out stupidly in the mud. It made sounds like a chicken.
2015
- One of Bog's own dreams has the Walrus. The description is scary by itself, its face looking like a spandex mask with a real muzzle and teeth and painted-on eyes. But it's also described as moving quickly through the air like sped-up video footage, and killing everyone in its path to catch and kill an innocent young boy.
- Fallingfeather has a very long and elaborate dream story◊ about a high school boy whose parents buy strange eyed tomato-like fruits that make laughing sounds when ripe. It's later revealed that these fruits, when eaten, will grow and completely parasitize their host. The boy's family is killed by these parasites, but the boy is able to use fireworks to defeat the plant monsters that have grown from the fruits. At first, it seems like a decent (if bittersweet) ending... However, the boy reads the final entry in his mother's diary, revealing that she sneaked some of the fruits into the soup that she fed her son.His jaw drops open. A small giggle erupts from his throat. It's not his.
- Volkstag's dream has all of the students in their classroom being replaced by living puppets that wish to feel pain and pleasure. So what do they do? They violently tear the narrator apart and wear their organs like clothing.
- Can't Breath describes a dream where they're swimming in a gigantic and well-lit pool. They look down, and end up seeing a pale corpse-like woman◊ sinking towards the pool bottom with Creepily Long Arms and big round eyes staring back at them. This dream may end up making you paranoid of the deep ends of public swimming pools.
- The premise of Thecorpseking's dream is bad from the beginning, having a car that's stuck in the middle of a blizzard, but imagine this thing◊ sliding at you through the snow, moving faster the louder you get. Now imagine it bursting through the car window at a hundred miles an hour.
- MasterBarf's Palm Tree looks disturbing on its own◊, but the fact that the dream utilizes the Adults Are Useless trope makes it even worse. The narrator's parents ignore their child's pleas, and as a result are implied to have been eaten by the thing offscreen. The sounds of them being eaten, described as "someone loudly chewing on cereal and slurping soup at the same time", don't help matters.
- The circumstances leading to Violet K.'s dream are bad enough (they had been hit by a car in real life and was high on painkillers), but imagine waking up and seeing a slimy baby doll with empty black eyes and an impossibly wide mouth with More Teeth than the Osmond Family staring down at you from the ceiling and quietly mourning you in an old woman's voice.
- There's also illustration of the thing pictured above, which resembles one of Stephen Gammell's illustrations from Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark.
- Demonlemon's "Bogwatch". It invokes Nothing Is Scarier, being visually just a long spindly hand and arm, with fingers that have "too many knuckles", sticking out of a pile of leaves◊. The story◊ accompanying it, meanwhile, is even worse—Demonlemon realizes that the only way to save themself is to say "And to the Bogwatch I say, good morrow, good morrow, good morrow and good night", making sure not to say it directly to the Bogwatch or else it'll eat them. The logic of the phrase is to wish the Bogwatch luck in finding people to eat for three days and a night (one person each time), and the Bogwatch lets them live because they were polite to it...but they must remember to do it again next time they pass it by. As Bogleech points out, the Bogwatch almost manages to feel like a genuine folklore monster.
2016
- Everything about Squid's dream of Mr. Oogle◊ is unsettling, from the description of Mr. Oogle himself to the idea of a child being held captive (and later devoured alive) by that thing. Is it any wonder that Mr. Oogle became probably the most popular being in this series?
- Rhetco's "Sasquatch" looks disturbing, being described as a skeletal ape creature with glowing red eyes, but it gets worse when it's revealed the creature is also able to control its victims' movement, and ends up making the narrator stick their head into its mouth.
- doomydoomydoomdoom◊ had a very twisted take on, of all things, Homestar Runner. What the heck happened to you, Marzipan!?
- ODD's Stilt Clowns◊ are quite unsettling. Not only is it difficult to tell whether these beings are actual monsters or performers in unusual costumes, but the fact that they appear in a cemetary adds to the horror.
- Connor Buffington's long dream story◊ about the Triffids (no relation to the movie monsters of the same name). Imagine living in a world where horrible monsters examine your house for something unknown for an unclear reason, and if you break any of their rules, they gruesomely kill and devour you. And the only reward you get is a tax break from the government.
- Entomancer's Sewer Polyps look scary enough◊, but the nightmare they came from◊ is downright horrifying; Entomancer, as a 13-14 year old, dreamt that they had tripped and fallen into a sewer by accident on the way home from school and saw several of said polyps, ranging in size from a small bird to a small cat waking up and quickly discovered that they were hungry. Entomancer panicked and tried to climb up to the grating as more and more of the creatures woke up and crawled towards them. With each polyp that awoke, they seemed to get bigger, moving up from bird and cat-sized, to dog-sized, to horse-sized, while the water they were contained in just kept rising below Entomancer. Eventually, Entomancer finally managed to reach the grating and was seconds away from freedom...and then a massive polyp burst out of the water (its mouth alone being the size of a bus) and devoured them.Entomancer: Then I woke up and decided I was taking the bus home that day instead of trudging through the swampy school grounds.
Just in case.
2017
- This entire multi-part nightmare Bog himself had back in 2001. Everything from the people who have melted and fused to a beam and the floor, to the transformed half-goat man who ends up being Driven to Suicide while laughing maniacally makes this feel like something David Lynch would direct.
- The Insignificator◊ is unsettling enough in appearance at first glance, being a fleshy skinny humanoid with a featureless bird-like head... but its name comes from what it does if it touches you: it turns you completely insignificant, meaning that while you still exist, nothing you do matters anymore, and you no longer have any effect on anyone else's lives.
2018
- Luke Harrap describes their nightmare about the Nan Dumpster as being "laughable", which is true... if your definition of laughable involves a giant talking rusty dumpster made of dolls' parts, complete with teeth made from giggling doll heads and a tongue made from doll hair◊.
- Barayas' dream about DOG starts out creepy from the get-go, with the narrator reading a forum thread about the titular Animalistic Abomination appearing on various Disney rides, stretching its limbs and neck out, and letting out a bloodcurdling scream... then Barayas wakes up in the middle of a sleep paralysis episode, with DOG appearing at the end of their bed and screaming at them.
- The Bathroom Stalker◊ is unsettling not just for its design, but because it's implied to be the first ever nightmare being to have lustful intentions.
- Lukas Reimer's dream starts out with them being stalked by a Mall Santa, which is already bad... but during the night, the Santa appears in their room, and reveals its grotesque true form◊, which has a bunch of stolen faces on its torso. It then violently sucks off Lukas's face in unpleasant detail, by sticking its thin worm-like tongue in Lukas's brain and making wet, quiet licking noises.
2019
- The titular figure from Somnambulist's "Grandma" dream looks bad enough◊, with her elongated birdlike head and long tongue, which she inserted into Somnambulist's ear to feed off of their negative emotions, but the really disturbing part is how she acts, with Sugary Malice that could put Mother Gothel to shame and generally giving off major Abusive Parent vibes, especially with that last set of lines...She cradled my head and brushed the hair from my face.
I remember what the hag said:
"I know, I know this is all your fault, but it can't be helped. This is just who you are."
I sobbed harder into her chest, and felt her warm embrace.
The last thing I saw before I woke up was her malicious smile.
2021
- Cornelius Featherjaw describes a nightmare about a girl cursed by a being known as "Mother Goose". While the curse (which caused the girl to come a little closer to transforming into a monster every time she lost her temper) is horrible enough, the image of Mother Goose takes the horror cake: a massive, featureless form resembling a goose's head and neck, with many other similar, smaller shapes clustered beneath it. Since it was silhouetted by the light of the full moon, there was no way to tell whether these shapes were the being's offspring or a part of its body.
