(Male, early 40′s) This nightmare sounds almost funny when I write it down but it wasn’t at the time. I had this dream around the time I was moving my mother out of her house and into a retirement-sized apartment. Box after box of things we didn’t know what to do with but that we couldn’t discard ended up at my place.

…They were sort of like large, cardboard marionettes. DANGEROUS cardboard marionettes….

In the dream, there were boxes everywhere. Plain brown corrugated cardboard boxes with no markings would appear in tall stacks, for instance up against walls, blocking doors, etc. This was one of those dreams where it feels like you’ve really woken up from another dream and now, you’re REALLY awake. So in the dream I was sitting in my bed, surrounded by stacks of boxes and I wondered if there were even boxes UNDERNEATH the bed. I was a little scared to look but then I told myself that it’s not like I was a kid and there were monsters or anything under the bed. Except that when I looked, there in fact WERE boxes under the bed and further they in fact WERE monsters. The lids of the boxes pushed back and inside were these monsters made of brown corrugated cardboard. They were sort of like large, cardboard marrionettes. DANGEROUS cardboard marrionettes. They had huge sharp teeth like triangles but the teeth actually WERE sharp, not like cardboard but more like box cutters. They started attacking me, biting at my feet and their bites drew blood. I tried to run but the doors were all blocked with stacks of boxes. Finally, I hid in the closet, all curled up. I could hear them just outside the door snapping their jaws. Weird, isn’t it?