Nightmare Sequence / Western Animation

• Adventures of the Galaxy Rangers:
  • The opening scene of "Psychocrypt". Made worse when you realize that it isn't a nightmare, but a form of Mind Rape the Queen is using on Zachary and his wife...
  • There's also one of these in "Scarecrow". Niko has a nasty nightmare after the Scarecrow attacks her. She dreams of waking up in her own grave, and the Scarecrow jumping in to strangle her with his bare hands.
• Arthur:
  • In "Arthur's Lost Library Book", Arthur has a truly terrifying nightmare about being haunted by ghosts, captured by the literal long arm of the law, and punished in a barbaric manner for losing a library book (by having the library books he checks out chained to a crank the librarian operates). It's so scary Arthur even lets out all of his usual Stock Screams, including of course his Catapult Nightmare wake-up.
  • In "Sick as a Dog", Arthur has a nightmare about bad things happening to his dog Pal at the vet.
  • "Arthur's Underwear" focuses on Arthur being afraid due to his Not Wearing Pants Dreams.
  • In "Francine Redecorates", Francine has a nightmare where she is attacked in her room by an enormous, menacing bat sporting a Translyvanian accent. The most spine-chilling part is that it shifts to Francine's point of view before the bat dives at her with bared teeth, making it look like the bat is directly attacking the viewer, and it gets dangerously close to the proverbial camera just seconds before the nightmare ends.
  • In "D.W.'s Time Trouble", D.W. has a nightmare where she goes back in time and makes it so that she is the oldest. It starts off good, but turns into a nightmare when Arthur starts acting like a Bratty Half-Pint and D.W. gets lost.
  • In "Binky Goes Nuts", Binky has a nightmare where Mrs. MacGrady doesn't let him eat anything and makes him sit next to some sloppy kids with bizarre allergies.
  • In "Germophobia", Buster has a dream where germs are visible and doing an Evil Laugh.
  • In "D.W.'s Furry Freak-out", D.W. has a nightmare where a giant cat is attacking Elwood City.
• Avatar: The Last Airbender:
  • In Season 1, Aang has several nightmares about the day he ran away and was frozen in the iceberg. The last one we see starts off fine, with Aang flying with Appa while his friends ride on his glider and a giant Momo. Then he sees the storm, and when he warns his friends, he notices that they are not there. Then Monk Gyatso shows up and asks him why he ran away before disintegrating.
  • In "The Avatar State", Aang also dreams of losing control of the Avatar State, and being outside his body while it's killing people.
  • Zuko's dream in "The Earth King", in which he's being crowned Fire Lord with dragons representing Azula and Iroh at his side when the audience turns to dust, and we then see Zuko's mother sinking into the ground, while the Azula dragon tells him to "go to sleep, just like mother". This scene was originally supposed to show her being eaten by the Azula dragon, but the showrunners decided that was going too far. He then wakes up and walks around before noticing that he's bald with airbender tattoos, and then wakes up for real.
  • Comes with a severe case of Mood Whiplash in "Nightmares and Daydreams". Aang is nervous about the invasion of the Fire Nation, and is having nightmares. The first two are funny, with Aang about to face a giant Fire Lord but missing his pants and forgetting to study for a math test. The third however, is an insane and freakish affair that looks like it came straight out of The Ring (sorta). It features Toph missing her eyes, Sokka, Katara, and Aang being engulfed in mud, fire, and ice while a giant fire takes the shape of Ozai with an evil laugh and attacks Aang, Momo eerily putting his finger to his mouth, and finally Aang suddenly in a field, watching as it is symbolically destroyed by Sozin's Comet. You can understand why he decides to stop sleeping. Then he starts having hallucinations of Momo and Appa arguing and getting into an epic sword fight.
• Batman: The Animated Series: Both parts of "Two-Face" have one. The first opens with Harvey Dent trying and failing to escape from "Big Bad Harv" persona, foreshadowing his eventual fall. The second features Bruce suffering from a nightmare early on of his guilt for failing to keep Harvey from becoming Two-Face.
• Bob's Burgers:
  • In "Friends with Burger-Fits", Bob is worried that his burgers have contributed to Teddy's high cholesterol, and has a nightmare where disembodied hands sprout from his body, pull out Teddy's still-beating heart, and cram it with hamburgers until it swells grotesquely and threatens to explode.
  • In "The Millie-churian Candidate", Louise has a nightmare about her Stalker without a Crush Millie winning the class election, and using her power to force Louise to be her best friend, going so far as to have the marching band make an anthem to their "friendship" and get the Home Ec club to sew their clothing together.
  • In "The Grand Mama-Pest Hotel", Linda has a nightmare about growing apart from Tina that ends with Tina running away and Linda getting trapped in a giant scrapbook.
  • In "PTA It Ain't So", Linda discovers that Joanne, the PTA president, has been Stealing from the Till, but is pressured into keeping quiet about it. Linda eventually has a nightmare where Joanne tries to get her to sign a contract in blood, then pulls off her face to reveal a Big Red Devil, then pulls off that face to reveal Linda's own head as Joanne lets out an Evil Laugh and the two are surrounded by flames.
  • In "Pig Trouble in Little Tina", Tina has a series of nightmares about being tormented by the ghost of a fetal pig she had to dissect in science class.
• In the Catscratch episode "Evil", Waffle wakes up to find out his fur is falling out — Mr. Blik tells him that it's because he's cursed and evil. Waffle actually believes it. he has two nightmares in one he turns into a lizard-like beast and then some bug monster — then he eats Gordon and Human Kimberly, in another one he zaps Hovis the butler with a beam from his eyes and laughs manically. He is heard doing Evil Laughter in his sleep but then he covers up his mouth.
• The Chipmunks: In the episode "No Chipmunk is an Island", Alvin, Simon, and Theodore move into separate bedrooms after a fight, only to have nightmares about what would happen if they were left unchecked by each other's presence:
  • Alvin dreams of living in a ridiculously opulent house with an enormous artificial wave pool. However, it uses so much electricity that a torch-and-pitchfork mob, led by Dave, Simon, and Theodore, chops a tree down onto his power lines, causing the wave pool to malfunction and send him spiralling down a whirlpool.
  • Simon dreams of being a multi-Nobel Prize-winning scientist and inventor who is assisted in his discoveries by robotic versions of Alvin and Theodore. However, they quickly break their programming and destroy Simon's experiments, then pursue him around his lab before throwing him into a glass tube that shrinks him to a height of six inches.
  • Theodore dreams of life in an idyllic country cottage, where he is free to cook elaborate recipes with enormous portions. However, he eats so much that he and his teddy bear inflate like balloons and float away, attracting unwelcome attention from the US Air Force.
• Classic Disney Shorts:
  • "Der Fuehrer's Face": Donald dreams of being an overworked, underpaid laborer in a munitions factory in Nazi Germany.
  • "Pluto's Judgement Day": Pluto is scolded by Mickey for his habit of chasing cats, which prompts the dog to have a nightmare where he is lured into a courtroom composed of a hellish cavern where everyone else in the court is a cat... a demonic black cat, at that. Poor Pluto doesn't even get a chance to defend himself, as the cats cruelly torment him throughout the brief trial before finding him guilty and sentencing him to be executed by being lowered into a bonfire. When he wakes up it all turns out to have been an Opinion-Changing Dream, because now he'll be nice to kittens.
  • "The Mad Doctor": Mickey attempts to rescue Pluto from a very insane and sadistic Mad Doctor/Scientist who tortures the pup with a glee, having to face a lot of horrors that the doctor/scientist's lair provided, and waking up only after almost being cut in two while being Strapped to an Operating Table.
• The Color Classics short "Play Safe! Play Safe!" has the scariest trains ever.
• Courage the Cowardly Dog's final episode was full of these, the worst being a horrifying CGI monstrosity quietly telling Courage, "You're not perfect."
• Daria has some.
  • In the episode "Monster", Daria and her friend, Jane, make a documentary for class about Daria's sister Quinn. Daria dreams that she has become her fashion-obsessed sister. In the nightmare, Daria has the body and voice of Quinn and her own head, while Jane has the bodies and voices of Quinn's equally vacuous friends and her own head.
  • In "Through the Lens, Darkly", Daria believes herself to be vain for getting contacts and so has a nightmare where she goes through a Hall of Mirrors and her body gets distorted by the mirrors.
• An episode of Doug has Doug suffering from reoccurring nightmares when he can't bring himself to see The Reveal of the monster's true form in the horror movie The Abnormal. He is finally cured when he is dragged to the film's final showing by his dog Porkchop, who holds his eyes open so he can see that the monster's costume is depressingly lame (one can even see the zipper up the back). It also turns out that his friends were too afraid to see the monster, and Roger denies it.
• DuckTales (1987): This happens to Scrooge twice, at the beginning of "Earth Quack" and the beginning of "The Unbreakable Bin". Both dreams involve Scrooge in his money bin, being attacked by the Beagle Boys.
• In the DuckTales (2017) episode "The Other Bin of Scrooge McDuck!", Lena has one of these due to a magical dream catcher. It includes Magica regaining her physical form, Webby calling Lena out, Magica turning Webby into a doll, which proceeds to give Lena a brutal Breaking by Talking. The dream ends after Lena disintegrates the Webby doll by accident.
• The Ed, Edd n Eddy episode "Rock-A-Bye-Ed" is centered around Ed having a nightmare about Jonny 2x4 being his mother who immediately sides with Sarah over a disagreement over her brother's paddleball. Things turn surreal as the nightmare escalates to Johnny punishing Ed by dropping into a shark-Kanker hybrid tank after a Kangaroo Court. By the time the plot kicks into motion, Ed can't even look at Jonny without suffering trauma. Then, in a twist, the whole episode turns out to be a nightmare Jonny was having!
• Futurama:
  • In "A Head in the Polls", Bender has a nightmare where he sees a two in the middle of some binary.
  • "The Sting" focuses on Leela having comatose dreams after being stung by a space bee, some of them fall into nightmare territory (being accused of killing Fry, etc.).
• Gargoyles: The episode "Future Tense" is essentially an extended Nightmare Sequence, wherein Goliath returns to Manhattan to find that four decades have passed since he left. In that time, Xanatos appears to have taken over the city, Hudson has died, Broadway was blinded (and is killed during a heated battle), and Lexington has crossed the Moral Event Horizon and turned against his clan. Luckily, it was all just a dream engineered by Puck to convince Goliath to hand him the Phoenix Gate.
• Hey Arnold!: In "Part-Time Friends", Arnold and Gerald work together at a flower shop with Gerald being the boss since the owner injured her leg and appointed him as the temporary manager. After Arnold gets into a fight with Gerald and says that he doesn't want to be friends with him, Arnold's Grandpa tells him about a similar incident that happened to him when he was Arnold's age. Arnold then begins to have a dream where he and Gerald are old, still former friends, and can't remember what they were fighting about. The dream takes a turn for the disturbing and into a full nightmare when it cuts to the old, withered, zombie corpse of Arnold's Grandpa where he says "Well, what did I tell ya, Shortman?" while some ominous music plays. He then proceeds to laugh in a really, creepy way, only for his jaw to crack and fall off his skull. Cue Arnold waking up via Catapult Nightmare.
• The Russian short His Wife Is a Hen has the main character go through one. It's telling about the rest of the short that the only real indication that it is a dream is the fact that the character awakens from it.
• Jellystone!: In "Face of the Town!", the stress of trying to pick someone to be the new face of Jellystone leads to Huckleberry having a bad dream wherein headless versions of Yogi, Jabberjaw, and Peter Potamus attack and decapitate him in a ruined version of town.
  Huck: Well, that there was a tad bit strange. [realizes his headless body is lying next to him] ...Oh, alright, I get the symbolism-slash-metaphor. AAAAAH!
• An episode of Jimmy Two-Shoes has Lucius suffering from these after Jimmy casually says You Owe Me. Even though Jimmy would probably never collect, he has nightmare about having to do degrading things for him.
• Kim Possible begins the Post-Script Season with a reprise of Kim and Ron dancing at the prom in So the Drama... until Kim shrivels up and melts into synthodrone goo. Ron then wakes up screaming.
• King of the Hill:
  • "Hank's Unmentionable Problem" has one where Peggy dreams that Hank dies of complications relating to his constipation, which ends with Cotton flushing the coffin into the ground. This scares Peggy when she wakes up and finally convinces Hank to see a doctor.
  • In "The Man Who Shot Cane Skretteburg", Hank experiences a disturbing hallucination of himself and his friends being (paintball) gunned down by the episode's antagonists. The sequence plays like a bad acid trip — probably a little too effectively.
  • "Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret Hill" has a scene where Peggy dreams about dooming a convent to Hell for posing as a nun to get a full-time teaching job.
• Little Bear: In one episode, Duck has a nightmare where some geese are chasing her.
• The Famous Studios Little Lulu and Little Audrey cartoons have a few of these.
  • In "Musica-Lulu", Lulu is knocked unconscious and in her ensuing dream, she is tried by a Kangaroo Court of musical instruments who then chase her.
  • In "Butterscotch and Soda", Audrey eats too much candy in a dream sequence, leading to her being chased by menacing candies. She is then kidnapped and forced to eat all the candy she bagged.
• At the beginning of the Miraculous Ladybug episode "Sentibubbler", Marinette has a nightmare that took place at the Césaire residence where she, Alya, her family, and Nino are having a meal. Her nightmare has Alya betraying her to Shadow Moth that got hold of the Miracle Box.
• Martha Speaks:
  • In "Martha Fails the Course", Martha has a nightmare where she is balancing on a rocky ledge and giant versions of her friends are laughing at her.
  • Martha's dream in "Verb Dog, When Action Calls!" is only a nightmare at the end: it ends with herself muzzled, Helen petrified, Ronald about to take over the world, Alice frozen and T.D. tied up.
  • In "Too Much Martha", Martha has a nightmare where she's literally paper-thin.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic:
  • Rainbow Dash's dream that introduces "May the Best Pet Win!". All the cast's pets appear, merge into one creature, then Opal pops out of the thing's mouth◊ like a xenomorph's tongue. Freaky.
  • Scootaloo's dreams in "Sleepless in Ponyville" turn into nightmares based on Rainbow Dash's Ghost Stories.
  • Sweetie Belle's dream in "For Whom the Sweetie Belle Toils", fueled by a guilty conscience and directed by Princess Luna, ends with a nightmarish montage of a Bad Future for her sister.
  • All three of the Cutie Mark Crusaders get nightmare sequences in "Bloom & Gloom" — starting with Apple Bloom's recursive dreams, and later as Princess Luna shows her Sweetie Belle and Scootaloo's dreams fuelled by their own anxieties.
  • Everypony gets them, including Princess Luna herself, in "Do Princesses Dream of Magic Sheep?", caused by the Tantabus, a creature that creates and feeds on nightmares.
  • Starlight Glimmer and Luna have their own nightmare sequences in "A Royal Problem", Starlight because she regrets her rash decision to swap Luna and Celestia's cutie marks, and Luna because she is failing so badly at performing the role Celestia normally fills.
• Nightmare Ned. The entire show is a string of nightmare sequences inflicted upon Ned every time he slept, and every episode ends with him feeling terrified and paranoid.
  • Nightmare Ned also had a PC game made by Disney Interactive. The entire game is one big sequence of nightmares, and to get the good ending you have to solve puzzles and reveal the shadowy monsters that plague Ned's dreams.
• Pepper Ann: The eponymous character's overactive imagination frequently leads to such, often in the form of an Opinion-Changing Dream:
  • In "Reality Bytes", Pepper Ann gets addicted to using the internet and is gradually spending her entire Spring Break surfing the web, putting her, Milo, and Nicky's plans to go hiking that weekend in jeopardy because she cannot unplug herself from the computer. Eventually, Milo and Nicky give up when Pepper Ann jilts them to go into an electronics store and use their computers when they're supposed to be getting supplies for their hiking trip, leading to Pepper Ann wondering if she's doing the right thing. We then segue into her with her friends in nature, Milo and Nicky happy that Pepper Ann has finally joined them. But then a mouse cursor appears and changes a rabbit into an angry pterodon and Milo and Nicky into a monkey and a pig through drop down menus. Then the "computer" starts to delete everything because of a computer virus and freezes Pepper Ann in place to delete her as well as she fruitlessly cries for help. She then wakes up still in the electronics store and it finally dawns on her that she is wasting her entire week. She shuts down the computer, catches up with her friends, and has a great weekend on their hiking trip (though she panics and runs for the hills the moment she sees a rabbit, much to Milo and Nicky's confusion).
  • In "Hazelnut's Finest" Pepper Ann finds her uncle's job as a police officer boring after going with him to work for a school project and being disappointed when she sees him only doing small helpful jobs around town instead of going on wild police chases after crooks like on television. Afterward, P.A. asks him why he doesn't look for more exciting police work instead of wasting his time fixing seemingly trivial problems. The next morning, Uncle Jojo seemingly decides to transfer to a more exciting job in Reno on P.A.'s suggestions, and everything in Hazelnut proceeds to go to Hell without him. The small jobs Uncle Jojo did before but now didn't do balloon into enormous problems, causing the town to descend into chaos with everyone in town looting stores and breaking things, before a bunch of natural disasters (an earthquake, a tsunami, and a tornado) simultaneously strike the town with enough force to throw the planet off orbit and send it hurtling toward a black hole. At this point, Pepper Ann wakes up screaming for her uncle to come back, and immediately goes to apologize to him for taking his job for granted.
• "Dream Scheme," an episode of The Powerpuff Girls (1998) featured the Sandman as a villain who puts everyone in the entire world to sleep. The girls defeat him in this crazy and disturbing dream sequence...thingy featuring chickens, a praying mantis, and trippy oil projector backgrounds.
  • "Power-Noia" pitted the girls against Him who was infiltrating their dreams and mainfesting their worst fears into nightmares. Bubbles' fear was being attacked by her toys, Buttercup's was a fear of spiders, and Blossom's was a fear of failing in school (although she wound up figuring the scheme out and set about making things right again).
• Ren & Stimpy began to take its decidedly surreal and insane turn near the end of its run. E.g, an episode called "Hermit Ren", which was deeply bizarre right from the beginning with Ren and Stimpy living in a decaying carcass, but didn't get truly horrifying until Ren, frustrated by Stimpy's stupidity and bad habits, decides to become a hermit. The head hermit assigns him a cave, in which he is sealed for eternity. Once inside the cave the real disturbing nature of the cartoon is shown, with Ren's slow descent into complete insanity rendered in disturbing detail and depth. At one point Ren takes an ancient, decayed scarecrow of a previous hermit and attempts to talk to it, only to have it verbally mock him in return, changing its position with each jump cut back to it. At one point, he starts suffering severe delusions where the flesh on his hands melts off (in graphic detail), and he runs gibbering and screaming throughout the cave. When he looks back to his scarecrow dummy companion, he finds that suddenly it's sporting a horrifying, watery eyed version of Ren's face. And that's only scratching the surface of the traumatizing imagery of that episode.
• Rugrats:
  • In "The First Cut", Tommy gets a minor cut from a thorn bush and has a disturbing dream in which his leg is torn open and stuffing comes out (inspired by a damaged teddy bear that appears in the same episode).
  • In "The Santa Experience", one of the show's Christmas Episodes, Angelica has conned Phil out of his Reptar Doll and Lil out of her coloring book, and as a result, has a nightmare in which Santa found out about her dastardly deed and gave Phil his new doll and Lil her new coloring book, and all of Angelica's presents are lumps of coal. Cue a Big "NO!" from Angelica as the Dream Santa buries her in piles of it! As a result of that nightmare, Angelica resolves to make amends with the twins before Christmas.
  • Angelica gets another one in "Angelica's Worst Nightmare", where she finds out that she might have a baby brother/sister. It begins with Angelica hearing a baby crying and finds her parents fawning over the new baby, saying how "precious" and "adorable" it is while not knowing who Angelica is. After the mom and dad leave, Angelica talks to the baby, and, much in the same matter as Tommy and the gang, Angelica's new baby brother can talk. However, he's more like Family Guy's Stewie minus the evil humor and with horrifyingly deep and raspy voice (that is in fact, a dead-on impersonation of Edward G. Robinson), and tells Angelica that this house isn't big enough for the both of them, and says that Angelica (the "old baby") should be gone permanently. Angelica tries to tell her parents about it, but of course don't believer, and then they force her to live in the garage. The baby finds her, and for not following his advice he plans to "teach [her] a lesson". She flees from him, but the baby keeps finding her, and growing every time there's an encounter between them. The dream enters its horrifying climax as Angelica's now Godzilla-sized baby brother catches Angelica in her getaway car, wondering "what a toy car would taste like". It all ends with Angelica screaming, "No! You can't eat me, I'm your sister!" with the baby replying, "WELL NOW YOU'RE NUM-NUMS!" This episode undoubtedly carries the scariest dream sequence in the show.
  • "Curse of the Werewuff", a Halloween Episode of the later series, had Chuckie having a nightmare in which he turns into a Lon Chaney Jr. style wolfman after Angelica tricks the babies into thinking they will turn into their costumes.
  • Then there's "In the Dreamtime", which is the Monster Clown episode that Chuckie, and at the end, Chaz, had:
    "I'm not Tommy! HUHAHAHAHAHAHA!"
    [at the end of the episode, Chaz sees Stu at his front door]
    "I'm not Stu! HUHAHAHAHAHAHA!"
• The Simpsons:
  • The episode "Bart The Murderer" features Skinner's corpse appearing in several places including rising from the grave, sinisterly droning, "You've killed me, Bart!"
  • Another one in the episode "New Kid On The Block", where Bart falls for Laura, the neighbour girl next door; upon finding out that she already has a boyfriend, he has a dream sequence where she says "I have something wonderful to tell you: I have a boyfriend!" then grabbing his still beating heart saying "You won't be needing this!" and throwing it against the wall.
  • The entire story arc of "Treehouse Of Horror II" is built around Bart, Lisa and Homer's nightmares from eating too much candy.
  • Bart dreams that the bus crashes at the start of the second act of "Treehouse Of Horror IV".
  • Again, in the second act of "Treehouse Of Horror VI", the children have nightmares in a parody of A Nightmare on Elm Street.
  • "The Girl Who Slept Too Little" has an unconscious Lisa experiencing a series of nightmares, ending with her being confronted by the creatures from an expy of Where the Wild Things Are, who turn out to be friendly and teach her that it's okay for so-called "smart" people to get scared.
  • In El Viaje Misterioso De Nuestro Jomer Homer's hallucinatory Dream Sequence — due to the effects of eating Guatemalan insanity peppers and candle wax — provides many opportunities for surreal animated sequences. It starts off as a nightmare, but after a while Homer gets more used to it and it becomes a dream.
  • In "Love Is a Many Strangled Thing", Homer has a nightmare based on his therapy sessions addressing his abusive behavior towards Bart, dreaming of himself as different people with Abusive Parents (who are of course portrayed by Bart). First, he dreams of himself as The Jackson 5 with Bart as Joseph Jackson. Then, he dreams of himself as Ben Meechum from The Great Santani, with Bart as Wilbur ("What are you gonna do, write a book about me?! You couldn't get in the door of Random House if your name was Bennett Cerf III!"). Finally, he dreams of himself as the title character of Precious, with Bart in the role of Mary.
• Tom and Jerry: In the short Heavenly Puss, Tom seemingly dies and got rejected from Heavenly Express unless he got Jerry to sign in a certificate of forgiveness, but he got it too late, and he's thrown straight to Hell to be tormented by the Devil who disturbingly looked like Spike the Bulldog. It was All Just a Dream, but the short is one hell of a Nightmare Sequence of Tom.
• In Twice Upon a Time (which is about a Dream Land), the fool heroes Ralph and Mum are briefly trapped in a waking nightmare in which they are attacked by sentient office supplies — making matters worse, the heroes are only inches tall...

---