Nightmare World

The Nightmare World, or the Nightmare Realm, is a dimension rarely mentioned in the Crusaders of the Constellations series. Like Dreamland, it is a separate dimension from Earth and Aether World and is where the nightmare monsters and spirits live, ruled over by the Boogeyman. Ranald and his Dreamland Parents go there to rescue the children kidnapped by the monsters.

## Description

Opposite Dreamland is a place so horrible that no one dare speaks of it. This is the Nightmare World, the territory of the Boogeyman and his nightmare monsters and spirits. It is so dark that no one knows its true size and shape, though it could still be a floating island like Dreamland. As the realm is devoid of hopes and dreams, the Bogeyman and his servants hunt for any child who strays from the watch of the Dream Defenders, and when they find one, spirit them away there to drain their hopes and dreams away from them to fuel their home realm. After all, children have the most hopes and dreams out of the age groups.

When Ra senses that a child is missing from the group he leads, he and his Dreamland parents Golden Heart and Hydara then head to this realm to save the child from being imprisoned in an eternal nightmare by the nightmare monsters and spirits. A lot of land features in this area are the end result of the clashes between the nightmare monsters and the Dream Defender family. When Ra rescues a group of children from the nightmare realm, he summons his Dreamland father Hydara in his boat form to carry them all back to Dreamland.

Interestingly, in Ra’s final battle against the Devourer of Worlds, his special move Visions of Tonatiuh involves bringing the target into an ever-shifting nightmare prison called Mictlan with a wave of his Wand-er. Whether Mictlan is an illusion or a part of the Nightmare Realm is unknown, though it resembles the Boogie-man’s Field of Nightmares. Only one thing is known about it that would scare even the most hardened villains: Once wicked people are brought to Mictlan, Ra can create nightmarish situations to teach them what happens if they continue to take the wrong path just like what he would do if he’s in the cloudscape of a wicked person.

## Areas

### Forest of Fear

A playground for nightmare monsters, it is where the spirits living there assume the form of the fears that children have. The trees are barren, but unlike the Realm of Saturn's forest, this area is devoid of the tranquility associated with the Realm. Pesantas, nightmare monsters that take the form of shaggy black dogs with steel paws roam this forest and chase the children there which they know to fear dogs.

### Caves of 10 000 Dark Secrets

The dwelling place of the nightmare monsters and spirits that look serpentine, scuttle on the ground or fly silently, it is where anyone who stumbles into them faces the deepest darkest secrets that they buried within their psyches. It can be a simple one such as a quirk you have kept hidden, or a sin one has yet to confess. The nightmare spirits who know these secrets are usually the ones commonly encountered in other people's cloudscapes feeding off their thoughts and leaving bad dust and thus are usually the first ones to be captured, sealed into and released from the crystallized pyramid on Ra's right hand when he wants to teach the most depraved and wicked people a nightmarish lesson by infesting their cloudscape.

### Area of Regret

This area is a plain where the things a person regretted doing such as past bad deeds materialize in front of him as tangible illusions. Sometimes, the dreams that a person used to have but since left behind are found there as ruined monuments. Spirits wandering around there tend to be trapped in the pools formed from the tears they cried in this area.

### Well of Grudges

A small area whose defining feature is the titular well found under a Nightmare Marble pavilion. Anyone who looks into the well sees the faces of the people who wronged them in their waking life, regardless of whether they meant it or not, and whether the offence is big or small. Worse still, anyone who drinks from this well would see a small and accidental offence as a conspiracy to destroy them, resulting in great tragedy in the waking world.

### The Boogeyman's Area

Where the Boogeyman, Mayor of the Nightmare World lives. It can be entered from a stone gate, and it's where you can find his house and garden. The Boogeyman would leave his home every night to hunt the spirits of sleeping children with his nightmare spirits, and when morning arrives, he tends to his Garden of Fear where he plants the seeds of fear to grow. Some of these seeds he keeps in his garden to grow into dark shadowy plants that produce more seeds of fear, others he lets alone, only for them to appear in the hearts of children who are scared by the nightmare monsters and spirits. No Dream Defender has been to this area so far, since the Boogeyman is wise enough to shroud it in a dark mist.

## Known Inhabitants

The Bogeyman is the mayor of this world, who sends his monsters to capture the spirits of good children from Dreamland so that he can power the Nightmare World with the hopes and dreams stolen from them. Opposition to him comes from Ra and his Dreamland Parents, the Dream Defender Duo, who thwart his plans. But the Boogeyman is persistent, while he has returned to his original self, he still regards Ra as his rival. He has his own rules too: For instance, he forbids his monsters and spirits from killing a Dreamland Beast or child. Any Nightmare Monster and spirit that disobeys him would be dumped to Dreamland to be killed by the Dream Defenders.

Beings of the Nightmare World haunt the dreams of humans without caring if they're old or young. They come in different frightening forms, and use their nightmare energy to perform frightening magical feats, but there are those commonly faced by Dream Defenders: Nightmare Monsters are brutish beings that guard prisons where they keep the kidnapped children. They represent the primal fears of man such as darkness, wild beasts and natural disasters. One example is the above-mentioned Pesanta.

The second kind, the Nightmare Spirits, are intangible and invisible, except when in someone's cloudscape. Nightmare Spirits consume the thoughts and cloudscapes of humans like head lice, and like head lice, they also leave behind bad dust that contains bad decisions, bad influences and wrong paths. Ranald goes into the cloudscapes of humans badly infected by the shadowy Nightmare Spirits and defeats these beings by infesting them with more of their kind sealed in his Wand-er. This creates a nightmarish situation that manifests in front of the infected's eyes as an almost real illusion. At this point, the Nightmare spirits overfeed themselves with bad thoughts and explode, cleansing the cloudscapes and changing a person's heart. Nocnitsas and Alps are examples of nightmare spirits.

The Nightmare Spirits who were unfortunate to have fought with Ranald as Ra and got slashed by his Crystallized Swords would be sucked into the crystallized pyramid on his palm. The pyramid fuels one of his Crystallized Swords, the Wand-er with their nightmare energy to create illusions called nightmares scenarios that teaches bad people a lesson for their misdeeds (whether they're asleep or awake), to warn them what will happen if they continue to take the wrong path. When Ranald and Ra merged with the energies of Heaven and the sun, the Wand-er was upgraded with the special move Visions of Tonatiuh, not only enabling Ra to bring a target or a group of them to Mictlan to make them go through nightmarish situations as punishment for their evil deeds, but to also have power over the nightmare monsters and spirits that would materialize in the nightmare prison. When a target or a group of them are in Mictlan, Ra would infest it with more of the black shadowy evil spirits sealed in the Wand-er and the bad thoughts they bring, causing a nightmarish scenario (or more depending on the number of people in Mictlan) to manifest in there as if it were a heavily infested cloudscape.

For instance, in the final battle with the Devoured of Worlds, the serpent was brought into Mictlan and was assaulted by nightmare spirits assuming the forms of the inhabitants of the worlds he devoured. The shadowy nightmare spirits trapped in Ra’s crystallized pyramid on his right arm obeyed him as he ordered them to go back into the pyramid after teaching the Devourer of Worlds a nightmarish lesson.