Everything I loved about this toy when I was a kid is summed up in its name: “Fright Factory.”
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Tag: toy
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Nightmare #121 – A Grisly Toy
(Male) This wasn’t long enough or detailed enough to be a nightmare but it’s a pretty striking image from a dream I just had. I was waiting in a relatively large room that was stately and dark. I was alone. I stood beside a piece of furniture, a long piece of darkly stained wood like either a bar or the desk at a hotel. Just sitting on this counter top was a toy that initially looked like a child’s wind up carousel. I picked it up and turned the key and that revealed its more grisly attributes. It was like a mechanism for public execution. As the circular portion spun slowly, a parade of human dolls mounted a set of steps, step after step. When they reached the top, the head of the dolls fit into a noose attached to the carousel. The next turn of the wheel whisked them off the steps and the dolls dangled by their necks as they spun around the carousel. It was accompanied by the most banal and cheerful music plinked out on metal tines. I looked around the room to see whose toy this might be or if it were a gift, for whom it might be intended but I was still quite alone.
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Nightmare #80 – Doll of Death
(Male, 30’s) The other night I dreamt about a doll, maybe 18 inches tall with the proportions of a baby. It was heavy for a toy and the surface of it’s skin felt like dirt, like soil with a high content of clay. The doll fell like it could have been made out of earth but it was solid like a like any other doll. It’s face was a cheery smile but it’s color, both of its fleshtone and its clothes were ashen grey. It was a doll that somehow represented death. Maybe it actually was death.
Its clothing was distinctive as well. Grey corduroy over-alls with a small satchel that it carried around its neck. The satchel represented a traditional item worn my people in my family (in the dream) an item that we received when we joined the family. The satchel is supposed to contain a few handfuls of seeds, some special variety of grain that the family had perfected over the centuries, I think it was a kind of rye that grows in particularly rocky terrain at particularly high altitudes. (I should mention that I don’t really come from such a family!) I think the idea here was that if you had that satchel, you’d never go hungry because you could always grow your crops again.
But the doll was dead. Somehow it had been allowed to die, as if dolls can die. I looked into the satchel and it only had lint and a few hardened clumps of something. There didn’t appear to be any seeds left.