So I had another one of my epiphanies that seem to be coming so frequently lately, you know, the ones where I wake up at some random hour of the morning and can’t fall asleep because my mind is so buzzing with activity that I have to exorcise my thoughts onto paper? Maybe you don’t know. The last one I had concerned the biggest nightmare I’ve had in a long time.
It was quite disturbing. I was surrounded by some bizarre carnivalesque backdrop that kept changing but somehow kept feeling the same. And it wasn’t a good feeling. Insane made-up creatures kept following me around as if I were slowly going mad, but the world itself was some version of the real world despite this. One of the creatures was some sort of bloody bird-man with scissors jammed through his penis. I know. Fucked up. I was stuck in some kind of half dream-world half-reality, and I kept waking up in my dream thinking that I’d gone back to the real world when in reality I hadn’t. New horrors were just around the corner. Tragic events from the real world haunted me: plagues, famines, global warming, cancer, and evil, serious evil. These events poked into my mind and images of the sick and dying would appear as incredibly vivid dream-world images. I was haunted by this twisted half world that made the real world seem ever more scary. And then I woke up. But the scariest part was, I still wasn’t completely sure I had woken up. Maybe I could never be sure. Maybe I’m still asleep now.
When I woke up from this nightmare I was pretty surprised, surprised that I had had a nightmare, but also surprised by its themes. For some reason I was incredibly inspired by this and I tried to push it out of my head but couldn’t. I grabbed my iPhone and started typing in the notes section ideas for a screenplay this nightmare had given me. An incredibly terrifying screenplay. Having this nightmare made me contemplate a bit about horror, and about what kinds of things are truly horrifying. Is banal reality with its true tragedy more frightening than these false specters that appear only in dreams? Is it more frightening to know you live in a bad world, or to not know whether anything in this world is truly real at all? I have never really been a fan of horror films, but having this nightmare definitely made me want to investigate into what about horror appeals to people and the kinds of horror films which are considered the pinnacle of a certain nuanced aspect of horror. In any case, I’m definitely going to think about this more. Where does our notion of horror come from and for that matter, where did the content of my nightmare come from? I’m not sure.
A few days after having this nightmare I remembered a movie from my youth that had also incredibly scared me with similar effect: “Little Nemo: Adventures in Slumberland.” Perhaps this movie is even the root of this most recent nightmare in some way. The movie follows this kid who has these frightening dreams which slowly bleed into his reality so that he can’t tell when he’s dreaming and when he isn’t. He has to fight the incredibly terrifying Nightmare King in order to end his nightmares and save the dream world. Now why would anyone show this film to kids? Kids already have trouble distinguishing fantasy from reality. They fear there are literal monsters under their bed. Why would you feel compelled to show them a movie with a premise ten times more frightening than any Cartesian evil demon scenario?
I’ll continue next post with another one of these midnight epiphanies, but until then here’s a clip from Little Nemo in which good King Morpheus gets gobbled up by the Nightmare King. Now tell me this isn’t frightening:
