M290--Nightmare by Green-Mamba on DeviantArt (original) (raw)

Nightmare

First Appearance: Strange Tales #110 (July 1963)

The Mindscape was the web of collective consciousness that stretched between every thought in the universe. But running perpendicular to this was the Dreamscape, the lattice of collective unconsciousness that connected minds across universes. Unconscious thoughts, deep rooted instincts, and dreams made their home in this unseen multiversal mesh, and whenever one of these became disconnected from the minds that created them and drifted without an anchor, they could become self aware beings in their own right, residents of the Dreamscape. Most of these entities were benign, their societies policed by the Sleepwalkers who kept the peace, but those that arose from nightmares had the potential to turn into something far worse. Given the opportunity to coalesce and grow, they could turn into Fear Lords, dream beings who fed on negative emotions they gleaned from terrorizing the sentient minds the Dreamscape was tied to.

It was the ultimate goal of most Fear Lords to eschew the psionic world and escape into a physical plane of existence, but the worst of them all was content to grow their influence in the dream dimension alone. Known only as the Nightmare, it was the Sleepwalkers' public enemy number one. Possibly the oldest Fear Lord still in existence, it used its ancient power to carve up sections of the Dreamscape, transforming them into a nightmare world of its own making that it could use to influence entire universes in the physical realm through the unconscious minds it connected to, trapping victims in a never ending bad dream that fed their enormous appetite for suffering. Across the infinite planes of eternity the Nightmare's favorite targets were the Sorcerer Supremes of each universe, their mystical abilities letting them extend their control over the Dreamscape with ease--a fact that Stephen Strange and all of his mystically inclined variants were all too aware of.

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Part of the training at Kamar-Taj that Doctor Strange went through were methods of protecting yourself from an unseen attack from the Dreamscape, particularly from Fear Lords, and *especially* from Nightmare. *Our* Stephen Strange in particular has a target on his back the size of Galactus due to this universe being the plane of Eternity that the Dweller-In-Darkness broke into, as the Dweller was the Nightmare's greatest rival amongst the Fear Lords prior to its escape into physical reality. So while Strange and the Defenders fight a war against Dormammu and Mordo on one front, on the other, Strange is stuck in an eternal battle in the Dreamscape against the Nightmare.

Loooot of world building in this entry, particularly in the nature of how minds, thoughts, dreams, and the multiverse are all connected in my concept. Also a lot of explanation for what "Fear Lords" are here, as well as a mention of... the Sleepwalkers? I liked the concept of dreams specifically being a multiversal idea from the second Doctor Strange movie--and I think that was specifically a leftover from older revisions of the story that used Nightmare as the main villain, which is where a lot of these ideas came from. So across my multiverse, there is just one Nightmare, who acts as this truly multiversal threat, entire universes stuck in endless nightmares that feed their power, and this makes them another primary nemesis of Doctor Strange's. And for those keeping track, this is the third Fear Lord of mine I've mentioned thus far in this project, the other two being the Dweller-In-Darkness, who is physically in our primary reality and is the father of Venus, and the tiger locked inside the White Tiger's amulets.

But enough about that, let's talk about my design. This was one of my all-time favorites to do in this project. The nature of Nightmare being a metaphysical being let me just run hog-wild. What I really wanted to do was come up with the absolute scariest thing I could imagine. Like the freakiest sleep paralysis demon you could wake up to sitting next to your bed, or peeking from your closet. Started with just drawing some really creepy looking silhouettes with no boundaries and ended up with this... thing. It's hard to even describe, like this bizarre half-human half-beast abomination with some sort of freaky Cheshire Cat looking smile and bulging eyes. Bunch of eyeballs on its tail, which is sloughing off its skin. Of course, as a being with no physical form, this is just one way Nightmare can appear to its victims. Still worked in a couple of call backs to the classic comic Nightmare design, with the crosshatched green pattern, pointy shoulders, white skin, black hair, etc. This was a lot of fun to do.