(Male) Strange dream. I actually woke up from it in the middle of the night with my heart pounding like I’d been running.

I was on a normal street that was covered with snow. There were piles of snow up to my hip. I don’t know if they were snow drifts or piles caused by shoveling but I was standing in one of these piles, like I had tried to climb up and it wasn’t strong enough to support my weight. I was a little out of breath because I was playing tag… with a car! It was a blue Corvette, a deep, slightly metallic blue with a sun roof and the sun roof was open. It might have been slightly smaller than full size but not much. And I was playing tag with the car because there was no one inside it. Its engine rumbled with a horrible growl but it was all in good fun. It would roll up to me and just touch my leg with its bumper and then it would race off. And I’d catch up with it somehow and touch it. Then I got away from the car by running between some trees where the Corvette couldn’t fit. And to taunt it, I scooped up an armful of snow and poured it in through the sun roof.

And off of a sudden, things got serious. I guess I’d ruined the upholstery or something. The engine went wild, a growl like a wild animal. The car started hammering itself against these small trees trying to flush me out like I was prey. We weren’t playing anymore. The car was going to run me down if it could. The trees splintered. The car pulled back for another run. This time I was sure it would crush me.

I darted out from among the trees. And I was on the street where I grew up. It was a cold grey afternoon and there was no one around. I knew I didn’t have the key to the house where I grew up. I could hear the car racing toward me. I ran and leapt over a chain link fence in a neighbor’s yard. But I heard the car coming for me. So I kept running and hopping over the fences as fast as I could. I woke up as I was swinging my legs over one last fence.

I don’t mean make a zombie FOR yourself. I mean make yourself into a zombie.

Len Peralta makes these nice cartoon renderings of your face as if you were a brain-gobbling undead.
(http://flipface.me/zombie/)
These ‘toons are perfect for use as a social networking avatar. And for the less-undead-minded out there, Len also makes more conventional cartoon portraits.

I’ve blogged about Len’s work in the past, back when the only thing he was doing was Monsters by Mail. I commissioned a portrait of what he imagined the Grim Gnome looked like and this is what he came up with:

A fair likeness, wouldn’t you agree?

As the .sig file on her professional e-mail account, a friend of mine has the phrase “Hating Clowns since 1987.” She’s been coy and evasive when I’ve tried to find out more about this statement but it’s clearly not a joke for her. I knew her experience is not unique but I thought I would be over-doing it if I devoted an entire section on the the DailyNightmare to the fear of clowns / scary clowns. Then today, I hear of this wonderful site that examines the topic specifically and in-depth.

This is the link he asked me to post:

Scary Clowns – The secret fear of clowns is finally revealed. Shocking information about evil clowns , Coulrophobia and ghosts caught on tape.

(Pardon me if I snickered when I read the phrase “Ghosts caught on tape” because I immediately thought “Ghosts Gone Wild.” I’d sure pay to see a bunch of spectral entities cavorting drunk on the beach. I mean aren’t you at least a bit curious what’s there to see if a ghost lifts its sheet to flash you?)

There is some really wonderful stuff on this page including a quotation from Fellini that everyone is either a White Clown or a Red Clown. Even without knowing precisely what he meant, doesn’t that intuition really explain a lot?

Clowns, to put it mildly, are not universally loved. One of our contributors submitted a nightmare awhile back Nightmare #118 – Clown Town about a particularly scary clown he called “Stove Pipe,” due to the tall top hat it wore. The dream was so vivid that it prompted one of our long time readers and expert artist, Mark Barrera to paint a picture of Stove Pipe. I printed up a few dozen over-sized postcards with this image on it and while they last, I’ll mail them out to anyone who submits a nightmare, phobia or strange dream. They’re really rather cool. Mark achieved a really creepy glassy dead-eye and a bizarre skin tone that’s either grease paint wearing thin or an extremely pale flesh tone turning pink at the edges. Life-size it’s quite un-nerving.

As always, share your nightmares and strange dream, phobias and odd aversions with grimgnome (at) dailynightmare (dot) com If you would, please include your gender and your age rounded to the nearest decade. And if you want one of these spiffy over-sized postcards of Stovepipe, include a mailing address.

I came across this newspaper ad while scanning some decades-old clippings. Whoever did the clipping obviously wasn’t interested in wigs made of imported human hair (or is that supposed to be imported wigs made of human hair?) and so the bottom part of the ad is lost to the ages. But how could you NOT be excited about 100% Human Hair Wigs?

They’re every bit as creepy as a shrunken head… with perhaps fewer ethical qualms, I guess. And doesn’t EVERY young impressionable child want a shrunken head… I mean, of course, to own a shrunken head, not to have their own head shrunken. My mom owned several wigs when I was growing up, but they were all synthetic, “hairs” that felt like nylon fibres. And since nothing was every thrown away in my house, especially nothing disturbing, I presently own a couple of these weird wonders.

The other aspect I love about this ad is the early-60’s glamor. Covering your head with the skullcap of human hair, well, isn’t really to much away from wearing a fashionable “fun fur,” right?

(Male) I can’t believe I’m telling you this and if you don’t think it’s a nightmare that’s fine but it was about the house where I grew up. I haven’t even seen that house in probably ten years but it’s where I spent my entire childhood. It was getting dark and I was working outside doing something that was a mixture of yardwork and cleaning out the stuff that was in Mom’s basement. For instance there was a dumpster full of papers but I was gathering them up with a leaf rake. Weird, right? I had just put a load of papers in the dumpster when I turned around and I looked into the front windows of the house. They are a long picture window almost as wide as the whole house. It was dark as I expected…

… Except I could make out clear as day that my mother was sitting in a chair. It was like she was sitting directly under a spotlight because she was so brightly illuminated. The colors of her clothing were so vivid. She was wearing a blue crushed velvet pant suit. Her hair was still a vivid red, not the gray it had turned after chemo. She had her legs crosses at the knee and she was drinking a cup of tea. She was smiling and so very happy looking.

I was struck in my tracks because of course, she’s dead. And it had been so very long since I’d seen her so healthy, so happy. I wanted to just stand there looking at her because I thought she was just an apparition, an illusion… maybe just a happy memory and it’s been so hard to come up with many of those happy memories. But she was there. She was right there and I would have been a fool to keep standing in the front yard with her sitting there.

So I ran in through the front door. And I found the room completely dark and empty except for the gray light of twilight spilling in the windows. I was for some reason afraid for my mother’s safety, that now she was dead, somehow she was in more danger than when she was alive. The house felt a strange combination of being haunted and at the same time, very, very empty. I woke up crying.

(Male) This nightmare is probably more weird than scary but it’s more than a little weird. I went on a hayride but it wasn’t a traditional hayride in the fall around Halloween. This was during the summer, in the bright afternoon sunlight. There wasn’t even really any hay. And it didn’t take place on a farm but in a junkyard in a run down industrial part of a city. There were chain link fences around the whole area with loops of razor wire at the top. At no point did I even get the sense I was anywhere else but in a decrepit junkyard and I was riding around in a hay wagon with a couple dozen bored folks all being dragged by a coughing diesel tractor.

But there were some attempts at scary things, though they felt more than a little like they’d all been thrown together out of parts on hand at the junkyard. At some point we were shown the mandibles of a huge spider. They were easily as long as my arm and covered with coarse bristles of hair. These were genuinely terrifying because they actually looked real. We were told that for some reason the spiders in the junkyard grew to tremendous sizes and had done so for decades. They didn’t need a junkyard dog with so many of these huge spiders roaming the place. In fact, they couldn’t keep a dog alive on the premises.

Then the ride was just about over and the tractor turned the last corner toward the double wide that was the main office. And I don’t know if I just didn’t notice it before or if it just wasn’t there before but beside the mobile home was a giant spider. It was easily as large as the trailer itself. The spider was black and covered with dusty hairs. It looked very old and very tired and very much the worse for wear. However, unlike all the other scary things we’d been shown, the giant spider actually looked real. There was a large hand painted sign that said “Do NOT look the spider directly in the eyes.” So of course I looked at the spider’s eyes. It had a cluster of eyeballs, probably more like a housefly and come to think of it, they really looked most like a cluster of huge frog eggs. Each round eye glared back like it was trying to hypnotize. Then all of a sudden two of the spider’s arms reach into the bed of the wagon and snatch up the guy who was sitting next to me. We’d struck up a conversation during the tour and had been trading wisecracks back and forth about the exhibits. The spider grabbed him under his arms and effortlessly lifted him out of the truck. He was spun around, tied up with web and the spider started sucking out his juices. I was amazed that the ancient creature could move so fast. All of us in the wagon were in an uproar but the tour guide said, “It’s his own fault. He shouldn’t have looked her in the eyes.”