Beyond the Dream - Dreams and Nightmares

Nightmares

Most nightmares are the product of a dreamer's unconscious mind, her fears and obstacles in daily life taking on a visual form. There are other kinds of nightmares, though, that don't respond to analysis; free-floating parasites that whisper through the world of dreams until they find a victim. Some of these nightmares will only visit a sleeper once, quickly gorwing bored with her predictable responses, while other nightmares seek residence in someone's mind for as long as they live. No one knows with any certainty where these nightmares came from. Some of them probably escaped from a dream, others may have spontaneously generated from stray dream matter. Others may have been the deliberate creations of powerful dreamers, haphazard experiments to test the depth of imaginality; and still others may, at one time, have been human.

These nightmares attach themselves to sleepers; viewed from the Interstices, they seem like barnacles stuck to the bottom of a sleeper's body. Someone who is consciously travelling the dreamworlds can also fall prey to them; upon touching the physical form of one of these nightmares, a character needs to make an EGO roll or lapse into a waking dream of the nightmare's monomaniac vision.

Buried in Witches
A dreamer imagines she is buried alive, in a swirl of countless struggling bodies, who all seem somehow strange. There is no respite in the shrieking, no communication to be had.
This nightmare actually collects sleepers. It attaches itself to a dreamer, and consumes her dreamself over a period of years. Every night her dreamself shrinks a little more. Ultimately, the nightmare will take her dreamself with him, as another prop with which to torment its next victim.

Living Darkness
A darkness that breathes and screams psychotically, that lives with its own alien intelligence as it presses all around a sleeper. The Living Darkness prefers to taste the terror of people who are consciously dreaming, so it tries to conceal itself in the path of anyone travelling the Interstices.

The Glass Skin
There is glass where your skin was. You can't move, or the glass will shatter, and you'll die. Hammad al-Sufi sometimes punishes people by sending them this nightmare, which grows like fungus in a dry well near him. He sends one of his servants to collect the petrified-to-glass dreamselves of those who have been a particular nuisance to him, and then keeps the thousands of glass-encased, fully-aware dreamers on display in one of his worlds.

Encountered by itself, this nightmare is actually pretty harmless; it holds you in place for a few hours, and then moves on.

Throatful of Bugs
A sleeper starts choking, then begins to vomit, only what comes out isn't food, it's insects, thousands of them. The nightmare doesn't like to happen to the same person twice; it's a juvenile little thing that gets a rush out of the look on someone's face when she pukes up a few thousand living insects.

Chicken Rock
Three beautiful women with the legs of chickens. Two of them murderously attack the third, tearing at her skin. If the character tries to intervene, all three of them will turn on him. If he doesn't intervene, the brutalized third will rise up and promise to hunt him for the rest of his days. She won't. This dream is a mysterious one; just about every gifted dreamer has had it at some point, and no one understands its motives.

Gluttonous Cobweb
A scrawny old woman who moves from dream to dream, eating whatever food she can find. While not technically a nightmre, the gluttonous cobweb is a strange creature that originates in dreams.

Elemental
This nightmare always unrolls in the character's home town. A little girl, cute as a button, runs around starting fires. Anyone who touches her will feel chilled to the bone and let her go. Anything she destroys in dreams will burn in the waking world as well.