Your name is Tommy Merrick.
While visiting your old family home, you stumbled across a strange box of tapes in the attic.
Out of curiosity, you decided to watch them on your old CRT.
You think they might be haunted.
While watching the tapes, you began to see and hear things that weren't meant to be there.
For some reason, they felt oddly familiar to you.
While visiting your old family home, you stumbled across a strange box of tapes in the attic.
Out of curiosity, you decided to watch them on your old CRT.
You think they might be haunted.
While watching the tapes, you began to see and hear things that weren't meant to be there.
For some reason, they felt oddly familiar to you.
Dreams Of An Insomniac is an Analog Horror series created by Pastra. The series centers around a small town, Eastridge County, being afflicted by a race of supernatural creatures known as the Veldigun, as well as the efforts of an organization known as the Lankmann Foundation to research and know more about the Veldigun.
The series can be viewed here.
This series provides examples of:
- Audience Surrogate: While the main videos do not necessarily feature a character for the audience to identify with, the start of Volume 0 as well as the descriptions for all of the videos center around a character named Tommy Merrick finding the tapes, whom said descriptions describe as being who the audience is.
- Bandaged Face: All of the Caretakers are shown with their faces covered in bandages.
- Bedlam House: While Lankmann's Asylum prides itself on helping research the Veldigun and assisting those afflicted by them, in actuality, the caretakers of the facility mistreat and abuse those afflicted and feed humans to Winfrey, one of the Veldigun.
- Bedsheet Ghost: One of Clyde's common disguises is to appear to be a child wearing a typical ghost cloth costume in order to lure and kill unsuspecting victim, namely Sammy's father.
- Body Horror: Getting into physical contact with a Veldigun deforms and warps a victim's body, with the most significant side effects being discolored skin, extreme loss of weight, tightened skin, bones and flesh fusing, teeth growing where they shouldn't, and bleeding from all orifices.
- The Darkness Gazes Back: Whenever Lankmann isn't completely shown on screen, the most the viewer can make out are his glowing red eyes.
- Death Faked for You: While Officer Kenneth Kruger is officially reported to have died in 1987, in actuality, the man was kept alive against his own will for research by Lankmann and would later die in 1996.
- Death Seeker: In Loving Memory shows Kruger begging to be killed and put out of his misery, while Lankmann keeps him alive despite his protests because he still sees there as being proper
- The Faceless: Outside of a few rare blink and you'll miss it moments, Officer Kruger's face is completely hidden from the audience after his encounter with Clyde and his subsequent malformities.
- Fed to the Beast: This is the fate of those whom the Caretakers bring to Room 66, to be killed and eaten by Winfrey.
- Goggles Do Something Unusual: The protective goggles the Lankmann Foundation gives out to employees are supposed to protect their wearers from any optical hallucinations while working in the asylum. In actuality, this is completely Subverted. The goggles not only do nothing to protect the wearers, but they exist to hide things from employees that they otherwise would never see, namely Winfrey and Room 66.
- Hallucinations: An ability the Veldigun possess is the power to cause auditory and optical hallucinations upon their victims, in order to make killing them easier.
- Hat of Authority: To signify his wealth and riches, Lankmann adorns the top of his head with a top hat.
- Horned Humanoid: Two of the Veldigun seen in the series so far, Clyde and Winfrey, both have striped horns, which in turn makes them appear akin to demons.
- Mad Doctor: Lankmann is also referred to as "The Doctor", and his lack of ethics and complete disregard for the lives of other people in favor of studying the Veldigun establishes the "Mad" part very well.
- Malevolent Masked Men: The Caretakers certainly fit the bill, wearing bandaged masks that cover their bodies and acting on Lankmann's behalf in abducting potential patients and "handling" those in the Asylum.
- Nightmare Face:
- The "First Contact" in Volume 0 shows Clyde's face in the darkness with him grinning menacingly. It later appears again to burn into the background of the Halloween PSA.
- After Alex encounters Winfrey in Room 66 in Volume 1, Lankmann reveals his true face to Alex, showing how rotten and vile the man truly is when he's not hiding in the shadows.
- The "First Contact"
- Number of the Beast:
- Clyde's break-in of the Grimmso's retail store occurs on October 6, 1986, at exactly 6 AM.
- Vol 1 features a mysterious room housing Winfrey which is labeled as Room 66.
- Ominous Knocking: One of the advised steps to avoid encountering Clyde in the Halloween PSA is to not answer any knocking any doors or windows no matter what. The video starts playing the sounds of doors being knocked on afterwards.
- Police Are Useless: The police do absolutely nothing to help anyone accosted by Lankmann's Caretakers, with the 911 Operator who gets called by Patient 66 leaving her to fend for herself as soon as he hears that the Caretakers are breaking into her house. It's implied that this is because the Eastridge County Police are being funded by the Lankmann Foundation.
- Production Throwback: The cartoonish version of Lankmann that appears in Volume 1 is made to resemble a version of him that appeared in an ARG Pastra previously made.
- Red Baron: Over the course of Volume 0, Clyde is referred to titles such as "The Smiling Snatcher" and the "Eastridge Demon".
- To Be Continued: Both volumes of the series end on a screen showing one of the series' monsters with the text "To Be Continued" beneath it, with Volume 0 showing Lankmannn, whereas Volume 1 shows Winfrey instead.
- Transhuman Abomination: While Herbert Lankmann evidently was once human, years of exposure to the Veldigun have made him barely even human. Concept art shows that, outside of his face, most of Lankmann's body has been replaced with mechanical parts.
- Voice Changeling: The Veldigun have the ability to mimic the voices of their victims in order to lure in anyone that knows them, with Clyde mimicking Sammy in order to kill his father, while Winfrey mimics Patient 66 when Alex finds him.
- Would Hurt a Child: Clyde's first appearance on Halloween led to him killing six children in Eastridge County.
- You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: Alex Williams suspects that as soon as he's done researching the person Lankmann wants him to, he'll be killed for knowing too much, as Lankmann and his Caretakers have grown more and more aggressive around him.
