You Will Never Sleep in Again
"Can't sleep, clown will consume me. Can't sleep, clown will eat me."
There's been a string of weird killings lately. The victims come up from all walks of life, with only one matter in mutual. They were asleep at the time. It's time to break out the Coffee and Ruby Balderdash to fight Sleep Impecuniousness because no one can get a good night's residual until whoever or whatever did this is caught. Depending on whether or not the killer works internally (kills you in your dreams) or externally (merely plain kills you) a master character who does succumb to sleep, and doesn't become killed off, might have to fight a Battle in the Center of the Mind in order to defeat the monster one time and for all. This isn't necessary for the trope, but it nevertheless happens a lot.
This is a Horror Trope where the monster or killer targets people who are asleep or otherwise unconscious, and the main characters have to stay awake to stay alive. The "Killer" is loosely defined here, it tin be a disease or inanimate object, what's of import to the trope is that the victim is at risk, or at least at a essentially greater run a risk of death if they fall asleep. Tin can make pretty potent Paranoia Fuel every bit it ties in with basic primal fears of the scary monster in the closet or under the bed who'due south merely waiting for the lights to go out and you to fall asleep to come out and become you. As we all know Dark Is Evil, and since we sleep in the dark, it's only a short step to "slumber itself is dangerous." After all, a person is about vulnerable while sleeping, as there is no way to see, and fight their attacker.
Meet besides Things That Go "Crash-land" in the Night, Your Worst Nightmare, Sleep Paralysis Creature and Your Listen Makes It Real. Not to be confused with Fatal Familial Indisposition, a Existent Life prion disease that progressively erodes a patient's ability to sleep until they die from not sleeping.
Not to exist dislocated with The Sleepless, which is where someone never needs to become to slumber.
Examples:
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Anime and Manga
- Gaara in Naruto is possessed past a powerful demon that gains more ability over him equally he sleeps. If he should sleep for too long, the demon would take over his body completely and he would no longer exist.
- Later he was branded during the Eclipse, Guts from Berserk cannot go to slumber at night because of all of the demons and ghosts that are attracted to his make, and must spend the night fighting them off. But daybreak can eliminate them for skilful.
- JoJo'south Baroque Adventure: Stardust Crusaders: Decease thirteen, Mannish Boy's Stand. It controls a Dream Land and attacks sleepers— and Users who are sucked in tin can't admission their Stands. Those who dice in Death xiii's dream globe dice for existent.
- Sword Art Online:
- Some player killers in the decease game accept figured out how to claiming sleeping players to a Duel to the Death so they can murder players in safe zones.
- In the Phantom Bullet Arc, a series killer breaks into players' homes and poisons them while they are logged in to Gun Gale Online (and thus functionally asleep).
Comic Books
- Hack/Slash villain Ashley Guthrie initially had the ability to impale people in their dreams.
- Dr Destiny, who invented a machine that allow him enter dreams (later retconned as based on Morpheus's powerstone) in Justice League of America.
Fan Fiction
- In Oh God Not Over again! after returning to Hogwarts to teach Sirius plans to go along the Marauders' reign of terror over Snape, but with more than subtlety than before.
Sirius: It'south going to take every ounce of my considerable self-control, but I want to wait until [Snape's] and then paranoid he can't sleep before I outset in on him.
- The SI in Sleeping with the Girls, is shunted to a dissimilar fictional universe, always in a girl'due south bed, whenever he falls asleep. He can barely become a few minutes of sleep before the girl inevitably notices him and angrily attacks. At ane bespeak he fears if he falls comatose, he will end up in Alma Wade's bed and be slaughtered before he has a run a risk to react. After a few dimension hops, he'southward a wreck from lack of sleep. Fortunately, the dimension hops become in a bicycle. After befriending the people whose beds he arrives in, they let him sleep when he arrives.
Film — Blithe
- Paul Berry's 1992 brusk blithe movie The Sandman, in which the titular ghoul sneaks upward to a pocket-size boy's room while he sleeps, and...permit'due south simply say he doesn't give the boy sweet dreams.
Picture — Alive-Action
- The Alpha Incident is about an conflicting microorganism that causes the brains of those it infects to quickly expand, to the point of making their heads crack open, if they fall asleep.
- Dreamscape. Tommy Ray Glatman assassinates people by using his psychic abilities to enter their dreams and impale their dream selves.
- The pods in Invasion of the Body Snatchers could only replace people while they were comatose. In the 1978 version, there was a scene where Leonard Nimoy's character tells someone to "get some sleep" and merely later do y'all find out he was a pod person at that signal.
- In The Last Witch Hunter, the Dream Walkers can enter people's dreams, manipulate their memories and even wound or kill them. The terminal two translate to reality. Kaulder mentions that during the war confronting the Witch Queen, dreamwalkers were her deadliest assassins.
- The villain of the Nightmare on Elm Street series, Freddy Krueger, possesses the ability to impale people in their dreams, with impairment from the dream world crossing over into the real world. The Ironic Nursery Rhyme sung by the little girls in the dream world is the Trope Namer, ending with "...ix, ten, never sleep once again."
- Although it's the dreams that are unsafe, and non the sleep itself. A drug that completely blocks out dreams is a desperately sought McGuffin at 1 signal.
- In Earlier I Wake, a young boy named Cody has his dreams manifest in the real world... which would be fine, except he's eight years quondam, and his nighttime terrors manifest equally well in the form of the Canker Man, who attacks and absorbs people effectually it.
Folklore and Mythology
- Vampires in folklore were quite fond of feeding from sleeping people, the almost famous example existence Dracula.
Literature
- Bains, a character from William Hope Hodgson's The Hog, is nearly drawn into a hellish otherworld - source of his chronic nightmares - because he falls asleep while undergoing one of Carnacki the Ghost-Finder'due south occult experiments.
- Dreamsnatchers from the Dora Wilk Series tin can assail you in your dreams, hurting yous in real life. And Albin'southward charms turn on when an infected vampire is comatose, making him/her go out in the mortiferous daylight.
- The Dresden Files: Grave Peril has the Nightmare (aka Leonid Kravos), who kills by entering his victims' dreams.
- Ursula Chiliad. Le Guin'due south Earthsea: In The Other Wind, the wizard Alder is plagued by dreams of his married woman in the land of the dead.
- The Goosebumps book Don't Go To Sleep! had the main graphic symbol be shunted to a different alternate universe whenever he roughshod asleep.
- The H.P. Lovecraft story Hypnos involves a sculptor and his mysterious new friend using astral projection to explore the universe and other dimensions, though eventually the latter does something that makes it so that he and the sculptor can't sleep, lest they start prematurely crumbling and be plagued by unspeakable nightmares. The friend eventually falls into a permanent slumber, which causes the narrator to faint. When he wakes up, his neighbors and the police inform him that at that place is no friend, but there is a sculpture of him in the room engraved with the word "ΥΠΝΟΣ" (Hypnos, the Greek God of Slumber).
- A Lullaby Sinister has the Surrogate Schoolhouse that students get pulled into when they hit REM cycle. Dying there ways dying inexplicably in your bed in real life. To brand things worse, the Surrogate Schoolhouse induces amnesia during waking hours, making people forget about its being until they find themselves back in the location. The simply rubber style to avoid the Surrogate Schoolhouse is to simply never hit REM. But of form a lack of REM sleep forces your trunk to induce REM more often.
- Star Wars Legends: Galaxy of Fearfulness: City of the Expressionless has Zak Arranda repeatedly plagued past guilty Past Experience Nightmares about his expressionless parents, sometimes seeing them as zombies, and non wanting to slumber... aaaand and then while he'south asleep an bodily zombie starts trying to pry open up his window.
- In The Wheel of Time epic serial, there is Tel'aran'rhiod, the Earth of Dreams. Conscientious Dreamers can navigate this world while they sleep to gather data or meet with each other. It's never a safe place though, considering any wound or physical damage carries over to the real globe, and any object can be created simply by imagining it, including weapons. Occasionally ordinary people accidentally pop in while dreaming unremarkably, normally to disappear after just a few minutes or seconds, unaware that they'd been there at all. On the other hand, sometimes hitting the basis in your dreams tin stop up existence fatal after all...
Live-Activity Tv set
- The 1000 Means to Dice segment "I'll Sleep When I'm Dead" had a human being die of a stroke subsequently staying up for days on finish considering he was being haunted by nightmares involving someone he accidentally ran over.
- Are Yous Afraid of the Night?: In "the tale of the water demons", the watery grave robber can't permit himself to sleep for more a few minutes at a time, or the expressionless he robbed will come up to drag him nether.
- Inverted in an arc of Dark Shadows where a character turns into a werewolf and kills people in his sleep. He is able to trap his curse in a portrait, only needs to stay awake until it is finished.
- Medico Who:
- In "Amy'south Choice", the characters are presented with two worlds, one real, one a dream, but they don't know which is which. Both worlds accept a deadly peril, but the real-globe i (whichever it is) tin can impale them while they're dreaming of the other world. It turns out that both worlds are dreams.
- The very premise of "Sleep No More": The Doctor is stranded on a infinite station with monsters that assault whenever someone sleeps — and the simply way to keep them abroad is to sing the Mister Sandman tune loudly! The twist is that the monsters are actually fabricated of eye-sand, which generally occurs when someone awakens from slumber.
- Inverted on Kolchak: The Night Stalker, when a walking-weed swamp monster turned out to be a psychic projection from a immature man undergoing an experimental slumber-drug therapy. He had grown upwardly hearing ghost stories about such a brute, and the drug gave him the ability to manifest his childhood fear.
- Mystery Science Theater 3000: In the The Behemothic Spider Invasion episode, the host segments featured an extended parody of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, with Mike, Crow, and Tom Servo trying to stay awake to avoid being replaced by pod people. Crow has no trouble staying awake, just he nearly overdoses on caffeine and sugar.
- A Sliders episode depicts a world ruled by a sinister cabal that can kill people in their dreams.
- The Stargate SG-1 episode "Morpheus" has the curse of Morgan Le Fay (which is really a parasite that creates and feeds on melatonin and serotonin, which makes ane very sleepy and then kills you).
- An episode of Star Trek: Voyager had a species which attacks ships by putting its crew to sleep and killing them in their sleep. It turns out the aliens themselves are perpetually asleep and finding and threatening their vulnerable bodies is how the Voyager escapes them. At the end of the episode information technology's unsaid many of the coiffure have trouble sleeping because they're worried the victory was merely another simulated dream given past the aliens.
- A villain of the calendar week on Supernatural killed people in their dreams out of envy.
- The Twilight Zone (1959).
- "Ninety Years Without Slumbering". A man is afraid that if his grandfather clock runs down he volition die, then he has to stay awake to keep it wound up.
- "Maybe to Dream". A human being is afraid to go to sleep because he has a weak heart and his nightmares could give him a heart attack.
- In The X-Files episode Via Negativa there is a cult leader who projects himself into the dreams of people he meets and kills them through their dreams, which beginning once the victim falls asleep.
- A rare humorous example: Prior to the start of The Immature Ones, Neil decided never to sleep again when he constitute out that sleep causes cancer.
Music
- Inspired by The Simpsons, the Alice Cooper song "Tin can't Sleep, Clowns Will Eat Me".
- Likewise, off the anthology "Welcome two My Nightmare", the vocal "Caffeine", which describes the protagonist drinking coffee, taking drugs and sitting in a cold shower so he won't have to face up the nightmare globe.
- "Enter Sandman" by Metallica.
- Vladislav Delay'southward "Anima" quotes this trope in its ending dialogue: "I might never go to sleep again, I might stay awake forever".
- From the Nas song "N.Y. Country of Heed," : "I never sleep, 'crusade sleep is the cousin of death."
- The ending theme to Hanna likewise as its recurring musical motif, "Anti-Lullaby" by Karen O, is a calming, pseudo-soothing song alarm the singer'due south dearest starling not to sleep or else a monster will kill them in one case they do. The song is a metaphor for Hanna and the other Utrax girls having to live constantly looking over their shoulders due to existence highly secret regime experimental super Kid Soldiers, deprived of living a normal childhood.
Tabletop RPG
- Dungeons & Dragons
- The night hag monster would visit Neutral Evil characters while they slept. The hag would force the victim into the Ethereal plane and ride them until dawn, permanently reducing their Constitution by one point each fourth dimension.
- Ravenloft setting supplement The Nightmare Lands. The Nightmare Court and their agents target people who accept nightmares or who endeavor to thwart them past sending them into madness-inducing dreamscapes. (The Abber Nomads, the primitive man natives of the identify, don't accept to worry about this; they don't dream.)
- The bastellus, a creature native to the State of Mists, preys on sleepers' life energy.
- Also in D&D, we have a dream larva, a monster born of a god's nightmare that has gained sentience — which makes it a cantankerous between the Balrog and Freddy Krueger. When ane of these breaks free from any dimension was meant to hold it, this trope can hit an entire planet.
- This trope is the central premise of the aptly-named Don't Remainder Your Head.
- Shattered Dreams, a small-scale-press RPG from the belatedly 90s, was all near this trope.
- Warhammer xl,000: 1 Affiliate of Loyalist Marines started hearing their victims screams in their sleep. This existence less than helpful for restful sleep, they chop-chop fell to Chaos.
Video Games
- Catherine revolves around Vincent, the protagonist, along with many other men, being pulled into a dream world where everything is trying to kill him considering he cheated on his girlfriend.
- In Fatal Frame 3, Miku researches the Tattoo Expletive and notes that the avant-garde phase includes the target non waking up anymore, until they vanish into an ashen outline.
- Grandia Two features a sidequest with the demon hunters shacking up in Mirumu, a boondocks where people are becoming trapped in their sleep. This is a long sidequest and will take some figuring out: Apparently, a flock of Eyeball Bats are attaching themselves to peoples' faces at night, making them dream of a garden paradise which they never desire to go out. The heroes seemingly take out the nest of monsters in the catacombs beneath town — but the existent culprit is the Monster Progenitor, which is hiding within a little girl.
- The final episode of Sam & Max: The Devil'south Playhouse is named "The City that Dares not Slumber", which is about a monster, Max every bit an Eldritch Abomination, releasing spores that resemble Max'due south head in flames that feed on the denizen's dreams and make the monster stronger. Which is why the whole city has spent a whole week without sleeping.
- Sunless Sea has the Tireless Mechanic, ane possible master engineer, who stole a hugger-mugger from the Fingerkings: the "serpents who rule dream". They'll do something horrible to him if he ever falls asleep, then he has to take a drug to proceed himself awake 24/7. (He notes that this would kill him on the Surface, and information technology'southward only possible because he's a Neather.)
- Invoked in Xenoblade Chronicles X in the lyrics of the battle theme "Blackness Tar".
"Stealing their body and breath
'Til merely a beat out is left!
Witness to Hell in the flesh!
A fight to the death!
Screaming "Where'south the relief?!"
Perchance no more than slumber!"
Webcomics
- Zeno of Charby the Vampirate decides that not sleeping is the all-time fashion to avoid the nightmares caused past The Wraith's attempts to take over his mind.
- Karkat of Homestuck warns all the other trolls to stay awake, or else they will have to face the Horrorterrors (who actually aren't malevolent, Karkat'south just really scared of them). He himself has refused to slumber for nearly a month, the just rest he's gotten being a couple of occasions where he was knocked out.
- Subverted in Sluggy Freelance's "KITTEN Ii" storyline. Riff rescues a girl from homicidal kittens, and so says, "Don't get to sleep, or the kittens will eat you." He and so explains that he fabricated that up, but he needed a good dramatic opening line.
- Gunnerkrigg Court: Gamma acts as a kind of stabilizer for Zimmy, suppressing Zimmy's uncontrolled Reality Warper powers and hallucinations. Unfortunately, the stabilizing upshot doesn't function when Gamma'due south comatose. She tries to stay awake for as long as possible for Zimmy's sake, simply she can't go without sleep indefinitely.
Web Original
- "DON'T READ THIS YOU WILL Get KISSED ON THE NEAREST POSSIBLE Friday BY THE LOVE OF YOUR LIFE." Y'all know you've read an obnoxious, reposted comment that tends to begin that style. These comments often tell a story most someone who died and now returns every night only to take revenge on those "likewise foolish" to spread their story across the net. Unremarkably there volition also be a reward promised for those who exercise repost, such as a adventure to learn who is your true honey (which is often merely a trick to get you to shut your browser). Sometimes, though, instead of telling a story nearly a vengeful undead, these comments just say that yous will randomly die at midnight, with no specified method.
- In The Fright Mythos weblog The Mind of the Nightmare, Devin Shaw has been unable to sleep since The Rake visited him one night, causing him to flee for his life. Only half a bottle of Nyquil together with extreme slumber deprivation finally gave him a few hours of residue.
- Eyeless Jack of Creepypasta fame kills people in their slumber and eats their kidneys, for some reason or another.
- The Russian Sleep Experiment details a Soviet attempt to invoke this by mode of sealing v political prisoners in a gas chamber and artificially keeping them awake with a gas based stimulant. The first few days were alright, until on the 6th 24-hour interval one of the prisoners screams for so long and then loudly that his vocal chords tear and render him mute. It goes downhill from the there By the end of the experiment several researchers and soldiers take been killed while all of the prisoners devolved into barbarous, self-cannibalizing ghouls that will do annihilation to avert falling comatose. When a researcher asks the sole surviving test subject what he is, the ghoul states that he is that hidden madness that lurks within all of flesh that we (unknowingly) keep pacified by sleep. The researcher shoots the prisoner through the heart afterwards receiving their respond.
Western Animation
- Stan from American Dad! eventually kills one-hundred people, which causes his repressed conscious to manifest as an donating split personality that takes over whenever Stan falls asleep, so Stan feebly tries to stay awake until he can figure out a way to beat "Sleepwalking Stan".
- The Daria episode, "Legends of the Mall" has Stacey tell the story of the "Rattling Daughter of Lawndale", where a popular girl from The '60s, who decides that her eyelids are too fat and then she goes on a diet and loses so much weight, her basic cease up rattling when she moves. She takes revenge on other pop girls at the school for laughing at her by haunting them in their dreams and trying to bite off their eyelids, scaring them so bad, they end sleeping.
- In The Fairly OddParents, Timmy's guilt over framing Vicky as the kidnapper of Dimsdale's town mascot, a goat he freed, gets to him so much that he makes outlandish wishes (Like raining ducks) when comatose. His solution? This trope.
- An episode of Family Guy had Stewie reminisce about the time he had Willem Dafoe living under his bed:
Dafoe: Hey (sliding out from under the bed) you asleep yet?
Stewie: Uh, north-no!
Dafoe: (slowly sliding back under the bed) Just checking. - A variation occurred in one episode of The Flintstones. A doc saw what he thought was a report of Fred's test, which showed he had a germ that unremarkably only dinosaurs become. Information technology'south harmless to dinosaurs, but lethal to a human who catches it, unless he manages to stay awake for 72-hours. Not wanting to tell Fred to avoid panicking him, Wilma, Barney and Betty try their hardest to keep him awake by taking him out on the town, simply later a whole night of this, he can barely stay awake, so Wilma finally tells him. He does panic briefly, merely then he finds out that information technology was actually Dino's examination, gotten when he took Dino to the vet. (Moral of story: It's best not keep the bad news from someone when you lot want to help him.)
- The Crackler, a Kaiju featured in Godzilla: The Series episode What Dreams May Come, was created when a repressed man underwent an experimental process for his insomnia. An apotheosis of his rage, information technology usually showed up when he was about to nod off.
- Co-ordinate to the increasingly paranoid writings in Journal 3, the Author who studied Gravity Falls underwent a period of this; That's because he'due south upwardly against a near-omnipotent Dream Weaver who can enter and possess his body anytime he falls comatose. When he appears in the present storyline, he reveals that at i betoken he had a metal plate installed on his skull to avert possession without this trope.
tin can't sleep tin can't sleep can't slumber can't slumber
- In the Justice League episode "Only a Dream", Batman and the Martian Manhunter fought the aforementioned Doctor Destiny, forcing both of them to stay awake (specially trying as Batman had previously spent three whole days awake), take hold of Destiny, and pause the others out of his mortiferous nightmares.
- The Sandman, a Monster of the Week in Martin Mystery, could trap sleeping people in their dreams.
- In the My Fiddling Pony: Friendship is Magic episode "It's About Time", Twilight Sparkle gets a cryptic warning from her time to come self, and grows increasingly neurotic trying to place and finish the vaguely-defined disaster about which she was trying to warn herself. She eventually resorts to staying upwardly for a week direct trying to "monitor everything" in Equestria.
Twilight Sparkle: There are just three days left until next Tuesday! I tin can sleep all I desire subsequently that!
- An episode of Sidekick ripping-off A Nightmare on Elm Street had a dream-dwelling house ghoul who fed on the fear of his victims; attempts to avoid him via the title of this trope failed rather rapidly.
- In The Simpsons Treehouse of Horror story "Nightmare on Evergreen Terrace" (a Whole Plot Reference to A Nightmare on Elm Street), Bart and Lisa try to non sleep because the vengeful spirit of Groundskeeper Willy volition kill them in their dreams. They realize apace that they just can't practice it and resolve to fight Willy off themselves.
- A canonical episode did it also: "Lisa's Outset Word", where Bart has to deal with Homer's infamous Monster Clown of a abode-fabricated bed, who Bart even hallucinates saying, "if you die before you wake...".
- The Smurfs dealt with a recurring villain named Morphio the Dream Demon (related to the Greek god of dreams In Name Only) who could assault victims in their sleep and inflict them with eternal nightmares, but For the Evulz.
- Superjail!: In "Dream Machine" a paranoid Warden uses said gadget to get a Dream Walker and spy on the subconscious of the staff and inmates. This plainly horrifying, every bit they sleep poorly before refusing altogether.
Inmate 1: I no go to sleep no more. That way, he tin't get in my dreams.
Inmate: If I ever fall asleep, yous'll punch me in the face! Let's go take a coffee shower together. - During one of the episodes of Xiaolin Showdown every fourth dimension Raimundo roughshod asleep, a giant jellyfish monster would attack the temple and almost destroy everything, then disappear instantly when he woke up. After several sad attempts to keep him awake, he falls asleep again, the monster comes back and a sort of Battle in the Center of the Mind ensues.
Existent Life
- Fatal familial indisposition is an illness that leaves the victim physically incapable of sleeping. The lack of sleep results in increasingly severe psychological symptoms, rapid weight loss, dementia, and eventually, death. There is no cure.
- Undine'southward Curse, a disease that makes the victim forget to breathe when they sleep. This can be fatal.
- Similarly, Sudden Unexplained Nocturnal Death Syndrome.
- SIDS: Sudden Baby Expiry Syndrome, can occur while a baby is sleeping.
- An old wives' tale says that a person who has had a concussion shouldn't exist allowed to fall asleep or they could autumn into a coma or die. This an oversimplification of the truth. People who've had a concussion shouldn't be left alone, sleeping or awake, because if their brain starts to smashing from the injury, they'll pass out and volition demand someone to rush them into emergency care before their respiration shuts downwardly. Waking them upwardly if they doze off is necessary to determine if they tin can exist aroused from their unconscious land; it'due south non because sleep is unsafe in itself. In fact, keeping them from sleeping at all tin can make matters worse every bit it slows down healing and can even do further damage; the accepted rule of thumb is that you just desire to keep a concussion victim awake until they go medical attending, at which signal yous should listen to the experts as to how often you should try to rouse them.
- Typically domestic gas poisoning causes drowsiness. When dealing with it, try as hard every bit yous can to not fall asleep, as you will inevitably die. Same thing with freezing, carbon monoxide poisoning, high-distance hypoxia, and actually a lot of life-or-expiry situations dealing with hazardous environment. Though it's not the slumber that kills you, it's the environment finishes you off one time you stop resisting it and searching for a mode to safety.
- Serial Killer Gerald Parker, who earned the nickname "the Sleeping accommodation Basher" due to this habit.
- Falling comatose while suffering from hypothermia can accelerate heat loss due to lack of concrete activeness, and drowsiness is i of the side effects of a drop in body temperature.
- Goddamn bedbugs! Not fatal, but creepy and uncomfortable.
- Occasionally a story volition circulate virtually someone who supposedly doesn't sleep living somewhere in the globe. The veracity of these is always suspect, though. Information technology's far more than likely that these people accept a condition that prevents them from recognizing their sleeping state every bit such.
Source: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/NeverSleepAgain