It should come as no surprise that I, The Gore Monger, am deeply, passionately in love with Freddy Kruger. Something about a traumatic burn victim that expresses his rage by slicing and dicing his way through movie after movie full of nubile teenagers just gives me a shutter. It's where he gets them though that means the most to me. He catches them in their sleep, where they can't escape, where the evil and the freaky meet. He catches them in their nightmares.
As you know The Gore Monger is research minded. In this spirit, I turned my computer toward the internet and spent my obligatory five minutes learning all there was to know about nightmares. Here's what I learned; science knows squat about why people dream at all let alone why they have nightmares. The best scientific explanation that I could come up with for dreams is that the pons, a bulb shaped guy at the back of the brain doesn't fully shut down in sleep and whenever it gives a gurgle, a little flash of activity rolls around your head and you dream. This is disagreed with of course by other scientist who say that dreams originate in your long term memory. Myself I like the belief held by some Australian aboriginals. They say that spirits come out of the earth to dance and that, if one passes through you, you dream. Or the beliefs of the dream people of Borneo are nice. They believe that you are not one person but two; your waking self and your dream wanderer. Each of you have your own life and inhabit your own world. Your worlds can interact however when things happen in your dreams that are hints for your waking life, and your life can offer clues for your dream wanderer.
The subject of why some dreams turn into nightmares is even vaguer. Sometimes they are clearly recalled memories of traumatic events. Other times we seem to recall in sleep the fears that haunt us during the day. There are other nightmares though that seem to defy easy description. My mild mannered alter ego, for example has a recurring nightmare where he is fishing only the fish are very creepy. Whenever he catches one he doesn't want to reel it in but he has too.
History has its fair share of nightmares. Julius Caesar's wife had a prophetic dream shortly before his assassination that she was holding him while his robe was bloody and he was covered in stab wounds. In another, possibly far fetched story, it is reported that Hitler was in his fox hole during WW I when he woke from a nightmare where his mouth was full of dirt. Unnerved, he got up to pace around only to have a shell land in the foxhole he had just vacated.
And are they gory? You bet! While the real world is a least some what restrained in its gore by the bounds of physics general outlines of human anatomy, the world of nightmares is free to explore. Yards of entrails ripped out someone's mouth? You bet. Bees with knife like stingers peeling the flesh off of a shrieking victim? Bring it on. Whatever you can imagine can inhabit the world of dreams. Never mind knives and axes. The world of nightmares is a world where slugs crawl out of the eyes and packs of rabid dogs chase you down.
Naturally, movies and books have taken up the theme of nightmares. A quick look at The Internet Movie Database suggests that Hollywood generates a movie on the theme of nightmares about every four or five years. Some of these are straight horror genera, like the seven "Nightmare on Elm Street" titles. Others are more creative and wander away from strictly defined horror, i.e. "Nightmare Before Christmas" which above all was a musical. Yech! The most curious of the IMDB reference I found was also the oldest. The 1903 film "Nightmare" purports to be about a man who eats some bad foi gras (goose liver) and then hallucinates about trolls and other bad guys.
You had to know goose liver was trouble. Now get out there and write.
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