"If a promise you don't keep, it will haunt you in your sleep, and as you lie beneath your quilt, you'll have a conscience full of guilt."
— Stu Pickles, Rugrats, "Grandpa's Bad Bug"
Guilt can be a powerful emotion. You think, or even know, that you did something wrong, and it gnaws at you. Even falling asleep might not stop your misery, since you may have a Guilt-Induced Nightmare.
Guilt Induced Nightmares usually involve the dreamer getting punished for their misdeed, usually in an over-the-top way such as being Grounded Forever. If they attempt Corporal Punishment or straight-up execution, the dreamer will usually wake up before they experience it, possibly resulting in a Catapult Nightmare.
The nightmare may also include the consequences of the wrong thing the dreamer did, which are, like the punishments, usually exaggerated from what really happened. For instance, if Alice hurt Bob, she might dream that she killed him.
Upon waking up, the dreamer will usually try to correct things (if they haven't already) and/or apologise profusely to anyone they wronged, possibly confusing the other person, though sometimes they may not. Sometimes, the nightmare will come true.
Can be an Opinion-Changing Dream if it convinces them to correct their transgression. Compare Acid Reflux Nightmare, Anxiety Dreams, Irritation Nightmare, and Past Experience Nightmare - with which this may overlap if it happened a while ago - for other specific reasons to have nightmares. If the nightmare is visualised to the audience, it's also a Nightmare Sequence.
Note: Do not include a Fantasy Sequence or Imagine Spot that results from guilt.
Can happen in conjunction with It's All My Fault, All Just a Dream, Dream Episode, It's a Wonderful Plot, Guilt Complex, The Atoner, Heel Realization, Jerkass Realization, Honesty Aesop, Being Evil Sucks, Recurring Dreams, Scrubbing Off the Trauma, or Yet Another Christmas Carol. Compare Angst Coma, Bloody Hallucinations of Guilt, Terrible Ticking, and What Have I Become?. Contrast Never My Fault. Sometimes The Sandman or a Dream Walker can invoke this trope— in which case, it's overlapping with Laser-Guided Karma and Set Right What Once Went Wrong.
Examples:
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- "American Honda Presents DC Comics Supergirl": Steve Gordon is driving to his little sister Ellen to the theater, refusing to wear his belt because it is unnecessary, when they are hit by another car. Before losing consciousness Steve sees Ellen getting hit on the head and believes her dead. During his coma, Steve experiences an endless stream of nightmares where he relives the car crash: sometimes he is a courier, an adventurer, a detective...but the single unifying constant is that he must drive Ellen to somewhere, and they have a deadly car accident because he refused to listen to her and buckle his seat belt.
- Played for laughs in a classic 1989 French ad for Wolkswagen-Audi
: a used car seller still has nightmares about the one time (in 1967) a client came back to complain that the ceiling light bulb of his used car wasn't working.
Anime & Manga
- Digimon Adventure: In "Princess Karaoke", Mimi has become stuck-up as a result of all the praise she's been given for her Beautiful Singing Voice, alienating her friends as a result. She has a nightmare that she's being stalked by Devimon and Etemon and her friends abandon her for her actions. Even Palmon refuses to help her. Sora (in her Dream Within a Dream) lampshades this, saying that her dream was trying to teach her the error of her ways. When Mimi wakes up for real, she realizes how much of a spoiled brat she's become.
- Fate/Grand Order - Divine Realm of the Round Table: Camelot: Combined with Flashback Nightmare, Bedivere has a dream in which he witnesses the last moments of Camelot, warped through his own perspective. He keeps calling out to the other Knights of the Round to help save Altria, but all of them are fighting each other and ignore him, while he is rooted in the spot unable to move. Finally, when Altria collapses from her wounds and he holds her in his hands, she suddenly transforms into the Lion King and curses him for failing to kill her. All of this reflects Bedivere's guilt at being too powerless to help, but also helps foreshadow - as anyone who has played Fate/Grand Order already knows - that it was his failure to follow her last wishes that led to the Lion King's birth.
Comic Books
- Beasts of Burden: In Wise Dogs and Eldritch Men. Miranda, whose duties have taken her away from Burden Hill, has a nightmare about Ace being dead with crows pecking at him while the others blame her for her absence.
Jack: You said you'd come back to Burden Hill. You said you'd help us.
Pugsley: But you didn't.
Rex: And now Ace is dead.
Miranda: [waking up] No—! - Subverted in Les Innommables, where Colonel Lychee is seen dreaming of all the people he had thrown into locomotive furnaces during World War 2, their ghosts crying for vengeance... and is smiling happily about it.
Comic Strips
- Calvin and Hobbes: In one story arc, Calvin dreams about doing some schoolwork. His answers jump off his paper and his paper suddenly bursts into flames. Miss Wormwood then turns into an alien and sets him alight with a jerrycan. This dream gets Calvin to remember that he forgot to do his homework.
Films — Animation
- Winnie the Pooh: Springtime with Roo: After Rabbit has angrily canceled Easter, he dreams about the narrator showing him what will happen if he doesn't overcome his Control Freak tendencies or uncancel Easter; everyone will move out of the Hundred Acre Wood, leaving him all alone. This convinces Rabbit to bring Easter back.
Films — Live-Action
- In the Soviet adaptation of And Then There Were None, after the characters have already been subjected to two and a half days of psychological torment, Lombard, who has previously left twenty-one Africans to their deaths, has a Deliberately Monochrome nightmare of being back in the African jungle and fighting and strangling a zombie African who lunges at him from a swamp. This being Lombard, however, the nightmare doesn't change his attitude to the better.
- Full Contact: Sam, the Number Two and best friend to the film's hero Jeff, have a nightmare where he gets flung into a pool and shot dead by Jeff, the night after he's forced to double-crossed Jeff by their villainous employer, the Judge, resulting in Jeff being shot and left in a burning building. This leads to Sam's quick Heel–Face Turn when Jeff turns out to be still alive later in the film.
Live-Action TV
- Cheers: In "The Executive's Executioner", Norm is tasked with being the one to fire accountants. He gets a Catapult Nightmare from the stress. He describes a dream where he is pushing a line of accountants one at a time into an empty elevator shaft, but the last accountant is Norm himself.
- Le Bureau des Légendes: Malotru has a nightmare of a dinner party where all the attendees are those whose deaths he directly or indirectly caused.
- My Parents Are Aliens: Played for laughs in one episode where Mel accidentally ends up killing the school's beloved old canary by feeding it popcorn, and manages to keep it a secret. Whilst we don't get to see it, the next day she describes to Trent about a weird dream the night she had the night before where she was covered in yellow feathers and spelt out the word "murder" with blood-soaked pieces of popcorn, she then wonders what it could possibly mean. Causing a disbelieving Trent to declare it means he needs to find new friends.
- Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: In "Business as Usual", Quark sells some weapons and then has a nightmare where several of his acquaintances are zombies and telling him off for "killing" them.
- Star Trek: Voyager:
- While the nightmare Harry Kim has in "Favorite Son" is partly related to his receiving alien DNA, it's also partly a guilt-induced nightmare since his actions in the daytime got B'Elanna injured, and in one scene he dreams about the injured B'Elanna scorning him. When he wakes up and goes to visit B'Elanna in Sickbay, the normally short-tempered half-Klingon is OK and doesn't blame him.
- In an earlier episode, Neelix has a nightmare in which his crewmates, standing in for the victims of a disaster that destroyed his homeworld, blame him for their deaths. An unusual example in that Neelix doesn't actually have anything to feel guilty for, as he was not in any way responsible for what happened; rather, what he feels is entirely Survivor Guilt, as he blames himself for being away when the disaster happened (even though his being there wouldn't have changed anything). In this case, the purpose of the dream is simply for him to realize that he's carrying this around so that he can begin to resolve it.
- In The Young Ones, after Rick thinks he's killed Neil, he has an argument with his conscience, and then has a nightmare that he's in court with Vyvyan as the prosecutor. A group of young women then show up in court, saying that they'd kill themselves if Rick dies, and then start taking their clothes off in support. Rick's conscience then tells him "Stop having a wet dream, you pervy! You're supposed to be wracked with remorse!"
Theatre
- The Book of Mormon: Mormon missionary Elder Price, traumatized by what he has seen in Uganda, decides to break the rules and leave his mission companion to go to Orlando, where he had hoped to serve in the first place. While waiting for the bus, he falls asleep and experiences a "Spooky Mormon Hell Dream" in which the guilt of leaving his companion (and his other greatest crime, blaming his brother for eating a donut in childhood) manifests in the form of Jesus calling him a dick, dancing coffee cups, and history's greatest monsters (Adolf Hitler, Genghis Khan, Jeffrey Dahmer and Johnnie Cochran) shunning him.
Video Games
- God of War: This is the one thing Kratos fears; that his nightmares about all the horrible things he's ever done, up to murdering his own family, will never end. Unfortunately, he desires freedom from guilt rather than atonement, so he ends up murdering even more innocent people and incurring deeper nightmares in a mad quest to rid himself of the ability to feel guilt. It doesn't work. When the gods refuse to help him heal from his nightmares and would sooner make him a god, he loses his mind. Even killing himself just causes the guilt to solidify his godhood. It takes the Norse saga for him to realize he should have been listening to his guilt all along.
- Mass Effect 3: After being forced to leave Earth when the Reapers arrived and invaded the planet, Commander Shepard receives a lot of nightmares where they dreamt of a young boy who they failed to save after his shuttle was hit by a Reaper. As the game progresses, Shepard also begins to dream about their teammates who died throughout the story.
- OMORI: Most of the nightmare areas in Headspace are representations of Sunny's guilt about accidentally pushing Mari down some stairs and killing her.
- In Octopath Traveler, a plant known as slumberthorn causes intense guilt-fueled nightmares in anyone pricked by it. After Alfyn figures out Vanessa's scheme and realizes that she would have an escape route planned, he knocks her out with slumberthorn so the guards can retrieve her without a fight. He reveals slumberthorn's nightmare-inducing properties in an optional conversation with Therion, who is visibly disturbed at what Alfyn did.
- Tide Up: The entire game turns out to be a nightmare the unnamed protagonist is having over her believing that she caused her sister to hang herself by asking her to not leave their abusive mother so the protagonist wouldn't have to bear it alone.
Visual Novels
- Last Window: Ed ends up having a dream of Kyle lying dead on the road a few days after firing him. It's enough to convince Ed to give Kyle a second chance.
Webcomics
- The Order of the Stick: Vaarsuvius runs out of magic during the Battle of Azure City and hides under an invisibility spell, leaving the nearby soldiers to be slaughtered. The memory of a soldier cursing them with her dying breath becomes a recurring nightmare that provokes Vaarsuvius to stop resting entirely, with disastrous results.
- Tower of God has Ja Wangnan wake up from one of these in the middle of Season 2. His high threshold for damage absorption and Healing Factor allowed him to survive many offscreen desperate situations, but at the cost of his traveling partners dying or getting left behind instead. Wangnan, unfortunately, thinks about every companion he failed to save, including his companion Nia and his Sweet and Sour teammates Prince and Hon Arkraptor.
Web Original
- In Brig Scarlet Flamingo, after accidentally killing his lover Veronique, Anthony is plagued by a nightmare where she appears to him as a glassy-eyed walking corpse. It is one of the steps that lead to his gradual Heel Realization.
- In the Creepypasta Guilt, this is subverted. Victoria keeps dreaming about a creature appearing and telling her off for supposedly doing something to his family. She assumes this nightmare is this trope, as she believes her subconscious must be bothering her about something she's done in the past. She turns out to be right, as she finds a journal of disturbing illustrations she made when she was five. At that age, she was convinced she was an evil queen who had villagers burn down a family's house. Since Victoria believes in life after death, she thinks she may have committed these atrocities in a previous life. Then the creature's visits are revealed to be real when he possesses her and psychically forces her to burn down her own house (and herself) with gasoline.
