7 Horror Books Involving Sleep, Dreams, and Nightmares
Anything can happen in a dream
We all need sleep.
Everyone knows that. But sometimes we don’t want sleep. Sometimes we wake up even more tired than when we went to bed. Especially if we’ve been busy running from monsters mashed up out of our own fears and secrets and insecurities.
Dreams and nightmare sequences fit well into horror stories. After all, anything is possible in our heads. It’s when the monsters come out of our heads that’s the problem.
There’s also the question of what happens if we don’t sleep. Long-term insomnia, over-reliance on sleeping pills, and lack of proper sleep can have both mental and physical effects on us.
Here are seven novels in which sleep, dreams, and/or nightmares play a big part.
Sleep well, everyone.
Contents
1. A Monster Calls (2015)
By Patrick Ness
“The monster showed up just after midnight. As they do … [Conor had] had a nightmare. Well, not a nightmare. The nightmare. The one he’d been having a lot lately. The one with the darkness and the wind and the screaming.”
A Monster Calls is an existential horror story about loss, love, and hope.
Conor’s been having the same nightmare every night since his mother fell ill.
One night, his nightmare shows up at his window and it wants the truth. Conor’s truth.
Average Star Ratings out of 5
Average: 4.47 | Amazon: 4.70 | Goodreads: 4.34 | LibraryThing: 4.38
2. Nocturnal (2012)
By Scott Sigler
“He’d left the dream, but the fear of the monster that hunted him came along for the ride … He had to find some paper, find a pen. He had to draw.”
Nocturnal is a paranormal crime horror story.
Bryan, a San Francisco homicide detective, is having incredibly accurate dreams of a series of gruesome murders he’s investigating. He’s appalled that the dreams make him excited, not disgusted.
The victims are all enemies of an ordinary boy who’s having the same dreams as Bryan. There’s also a vigilante killing other killers and a reluctance from authority to let the detectives discover the truth.
Bryan believes he’s stumbled into an underground war as he learns the truth of his connection to the killings and the role he’s going to have to play in stopping the ‘nocturnals’.
Average Star Ratings out of 5
Average: 4.08 | Amazon: 4.50 | Goodreads: 4.05 | LibraryThing: 3.69
3. Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1955)
By Jack Finney
“She says he looks like Uncle Ira, talks just like him, acts just like him – everything. She just knows it isn’t Ira, that’s all.”
Invasion of the Body Snatchers is a science fiction horror story.
Dr Miles Bennell slowly discovers that people just aren’t who they used to be – literally – in the small town of Mill Valley, California.
Aliens are replicating people in plant-like pods and when the human counterpart falls asleep, the alien replica takes over their life, being perfect duplicates except for the fact they have no emotions or feelings.
Average Star Ratings out of 5
Average: 4.07 | Amazon: 4.50 | Goodreads: 3.90 | LibraryThing: 3.81
4. Dreamfall (2017)
By Amy Plum
“I lie paralyzed on my four-poster bed, unable to do anything but listen to the footstep, and then the pause, and then the inevitable next step as the monstrous figure drags itself from the stained enamel bathtub in the room adjoining mine. Blood squishing between skinless flesh and hardwood floor.”
Dreamfall is a psychological horror story and the first in a series of two books.
Cata and six other teenagers sign up for a new experimental procedure designed to treat their debilitating insomnia. None of them can imagine anything worse than what they’re going through now.
After an equipment malfunction, the six find themselves trapped in a shared nightmare dreamscape with no memories of how they got there.
Hunted by their own nightmare creatures and secrets, they have to work together to defeat their dreams or they’ll never wake up.
Average Star Ratings out of 5
Average: 3.93 | Amazon: | Goodreads: 3.76 | LibraryThing: 3.64
5. Sleeping Beauties (2017)
By Stephen King and Owen King.
“The moth makes Evie laugh. It lands on her bare forearm and she brushes her index finger lightly across the brown and gray waves that color its wings … A coppery red rope leaks from a black socket at the center of the trunk and twists between plates of bark. Evie doesn’t trust the snake, obviously. She’s had trouble with him before.”
Sleeping Beauties is a dark fantasy horror story.
A mysterious sickness is sweeping the world causing women to fall asleep, cocooned in a strange material. The sickness causes the women to become homicidal if anyone tries to open the cocoons.
Women desperately try to keep themselves awake, leading to riots and mayhem on the streets.
In a prison, the chief psychiatrist interviews a new inmate who tells him she’s an emissary sent by an otherworldly being keen for women to start a new society free from war, abuse, and violence she says are caused by men.
Meanwhile, the sleeping women find themselves in an alternate dimension, in a post-apocalyptic version of their town.
Average Star Ratings out of 5
Average: 3.90 | Amazon: 4.40 | Goodreads: 3.73 | LibraryThing: 3.56
6. The Big Dark Sky (2022)
By Dean Koontz
“Every night for three weeks, Joanna Chase dreamed of Rustling Willows, both the ranch itself and the groves of trees for which it had been named long ago. Although none of these fabrications of her slumbering mind descended into a nightmare, they were ominous and filled her with a foreboding that lingered after she woke.”
The Big Dark Sky is a science fiction horror story.
Joanna lived on a ranch in Montana until she was nine years old. After her parents died, she went to live with an aunt in Santa Fe.
Twenty-four years later, she starts dreaming of the Rustling Willows ranch. The dreams start to become increasingly vivid and uncomfortable. She also receives phone calls from an unidentified woman, pleading for her to help her because she’s in a dark place.
Joanna returns to the ranch seeking answers. All sorts of people also converge on the ranch, haunted, obsessed, and seeking answers to a danger they all feel. However, one man lurks near the ranch, determined to save humanity through mass murder.
Average Star Ratings out of 5
Average: 3.89 | Amazon: 4.30 | Goodreads: 4.09 | LibraryThing: 3.27
7. The Sleep Experiment (2019)
By Jeremy Bates
“Why do we sleep?” Dr. Roy Wallis said … “It seems like a silly question, doesn’t it? Sleep is sleep. It’s an essential part of our survival. Sleep, food, water. The Big Three you can’t do without. Nevertheless, while the benefits of food and water are quite evident to us, the actual benefits of sleep have always been masked in a shroud of mystery.”
The Sleep Experiment is a psychological creepypasta horror story.
The Sleep Experiment is about what happens when humans don’t sleep.
The Russian Sleep Experiment is a creepypasta story about prisoners participating in an experiment in exchange for their freedom. They were kept awake continuously and after the fifth day they began to spiral into madness, murder, and self-mutilation, and none of them survived.
In The Sleep Experiment, Dr Roy Wallis attempts to recreate the experiment in 2018 on some young students over the summer break.
Average Star Ratings out of 5
Average:3.62 | Amazon: 4.20 | Goodreads: 3.67 | LibraryThing: 3.00
Published: 28 September 2022
