Description
One of my entries to the annual Bogleech "Actual Nightmare Creatures" posts.
Pelican β’ 3 years ago
I had a dream recently (not a nightmare exactly, because by the time it got really freaky it was more like I was reading it in a book than actively participating) that had an interesting creature. The dream started out really innocuously as well, and the pleasant backdrop never changed which only made the overall effect stranger when the monster appeared.
It started with me and some friends driving along through a lush green valley between these rolling grassy hills covered in trees and with wild pigs and horses grazing--all bright colors and idealized nature imagery. We were just making conversation and stuff--for a while it was really vivid; every detail was perfect, and everyone was saying exactly what they would have said in real life, but at one point one of my friends referenced a really creepy dream I had had a wile ago (and didn't even consciously remember) as if it were a movie, and at that point the dream suddenly became almost like a sequel to that original dream. (I'm not sure why I get the sense that it's a sequel, since I don't remember enough of the original dream to see anything that ties the two together, but somehow it definitely was.)
At this point we got out of the van and met up with some kind of government agents. They had hunting dogs which were tracking something (apparently the only way to find this thing) and we were following them deeper into the end of the same lush green valley (though without all of the animals, which had ominously disappeared by then) and as we walked along the guy in charge was explaining the situation to us. We had been brought in to fight a creature which he described as "nature gone wrong" (but which the "book"/narrative voice of the dream referred to as an angel for some reason) and told us it had "strong psychoactive properties." Apparently everyone who had confronted the beast so far had emerged physically unscathed, but they all deeply believed that they had been seriously maimed or dismembered, and felt the pain of their third degree burns or severed limbs even though the injuries were only imaginary. There was a whole network of these "survivors" including Paul McCartney and a couple of unnamed members of the British parliament, and months after their encounter with the creature when they had finally recovered mentally, they would die in horrible accidents; Paul McCartney's house had collapsed on him and the members of parliament had both jumped into a volcano. I think their deaths matched their imaginary injuries as well (though I don't remember if that was actually stated in the dream or just an inference on the part of my waking mind) The government agency had been watching these people and discovered that the monster was spying on them and from this information they managed to trace its "headquarters" to our current location.
When he finished explaining the situation the government agent and his comrades, along with the hunting dogs and all of my friends disappeared and everything was silent and the monster was floating in front of me. The creature was essentially a perfect sphere made entirely out of incredibly skinny human arms in various colors (grays and purples and dark blues and teals) The arms didn't move like arms would, however; they were perfectly static. The creature's "face" or maybe just its mouth was a grid of four pure white nubs shaped like rounded pyramids that looked really soft and maybe even glowed a little. It was using this appendage to somehow suck on the air; not breathing in but sucking on it like a catfish sucks on the walls of an aquarium. In addition, it had a few other random appendages; on its lower right hand side it had a giraffe leg sticking out, and on its back, only visible through an ornate mirror behind it, was a long multi-jointed, incredibly detailed insect arm with all of the bristles and things you see when you look at a fly's leg under a microscope, ending in a clawed hand with three fingers (kind of like the claw in the arcade game where you try to grab prizes) and on its left side it had a huge wart or tumor covered in a cluster of little yellow sucker-like tubes, some of them curled up and some of them actively pulsing. It also had a pair of spread owl's wings. The creature had already started moving towards me when the wings started to "wake up" and even when it moved them they didn't flap so much as awkwardly jerk up and down, pseudo-randomly and completely out of time with its movement. Once it started moving towards me, the dream ended and I woke up, so maybe that's all it had to do to kill me, I don't know.