 I have a complex relationship with nightmares. I don't understand why your brain would willingly want to throw back at you all the scary stuff you've experienced throughout your existence when you're trying to de-stress and prepare for a day of societal functioning. I'd say I have an above average concentration of nightmares compared to most people. Some of the earliest memories I have of my life consist of nightmares I've had. They've happened to me all my life, but as I got older and more perceptive of things, they gradually became not only more developed, i.e. they have plots that don't just amount to I get eaten, but also significantly more traumatizing than most of the actually scary things that inspire them. I did eventually manage to find a workaround, I found that material for dreams, and nightmares by extension, is harvested from the near front of my mind, which basically means anything that I've thought about recently, but isn't currently an active thought. So, I keep a mental compendium of everything that I don't want to dream about, and think about all of them at once before disregarding them, so that they're at the front of my mind, and thus ineligible to be dreamt about. This method works for not dreaming about specific things, but that just leaves nightmares to be created from exciting new concepts that I would never have thought about otherwise. The following is a documented summation of a nightmare I had relatively recently that left a substantial impact on me. The framework was that I was watching an episode of Garfield and Friends on YouTube. I'm not super familiar with the show in real life, but I've seen bits and pieces. From what I remember, the episode revolved around Garfield confronting a monster that lives in his closet at night. For some reason, my dream self was scheming throughout the episode intermittently, though a lot of details are missing. The monster itself was kept in shadow the whole time, and never left the closet. Appearance-wise, it appeared to be a hunched over bipedal creature with a long proboscis and no visible hair, about the same height and proportions as Garfield. It kind of reminded me of that purple thing from Heart of Darkness, but not as tall. From what I could tell, the monster was in line with the art style of the show. Big feet, head that was bigger than the body, with two large lumps around the head area, where the big cartoonish eyes would go. The only actual joke that survived my crossover into a reality was as follows. The closet opens, the monster is standing there, holding up a sign that says in all caps, Weenie, and Garfield says, Weenie, I don't know any one named Weenie. After that, I entered the second portion of the episode, which is where it gets rather odd, to say the least. The plot had completely vanished by this point, and it was replaced by several repeated shots of the closet door opening, and the camera zooming into complete darkness. But instead of the established monster, there was a series of horrifying faces and other such images. They looked like something you'd see on Lomando, or some other surrealist horror indie project. Some of them were my brain's own creation, while others looked blatantly lifting from Markiplier's scary game thumbnails. In particular, I'd like to single out one image that stood out to me. It was a grainy black and white photograph of three people in business suits, clutching their hands to the sides of their heads, which were largely obscured by their ginormous eyes and toothy smiles, which had been crudely cut out and resized, and were frantically waddling around rapidly. The third portion was the last part before the dream ended, and the culmination of all the horror that had been building up thus far. Any semblance of this being a Garfield episode was completely done, and the video had devolved into the aforementioned scary images from before, flashing between each other, while horror ambience droned in the background, and a voice resembling Vincent Price recited a poem about the concept of fear. I really wish I could remember the contents of the poem, because it sounded really well written for being in a dream. After I woke up, I couldn't stop thinking about it all day. I decided that posting it here would be a good way to purge it from my consciousness. However, one question does remain. Are these nightmares purely my only imagination, or is there something else at play here?