You Could Tell I Was No Purple Worm

The idea that the dreams we create in our minds while we sleep could emerge into reality is a rich seam for creators of imaginative fiction to mine. But what if monsters dreamed? Do monsters dream of electric sheep, and, if not, what do they dream of? What would come out of the mind of a dragon, beholder, orc or purple worm if its dreams could be made flesh?

Assuming that dreams make visual the emotions we experience in our daily lives, it seems fair to say that monster dreams would reflect their fears and desires. From this, we can make some preliminary guesses about the type of things that visions that would result.

Dragons, as we all know, lust after treasure and guard it jealously. And beceause of their great size and power they have basically no natural fears; due to their immense longevity they presumably do not even really fear ageing, or death. This would suggest that their dreams likely revolve around anxieties about thieves (or burglars, to cast it in Tolkienian language) and the almost erotic obsession with gathering more. Perhaps their nightmares involve the presence of small, scrabbling, scuttling creatures that steal their possessions; perhaps their ordinary dreams revolve around envy of bigger and better treasures. Made flesh, their nightmares might manifest themselves as scarcely visible entities that come creeping quietly in the night to burgle homes or backpacks - perhaps indeed when people lose items around the house they attribute it to an infestation of dragon dreams. Their ordinary dreams, on the other hand, may result in the presence of impossibly large hoards of treasure, or impossibly large jewels, which at any given moment may dissipate and turn into vapour.

Orcs live in a dog-eat-dog world - quite literally an orc-eat-orc world, even - and their greatest fears likely therefore revolve around weakness, impotence, frailty. But they probably also have an inflated sense of their own size, ferocity and importance. This would suggest that they are only intimidated by extremely large and powerful enemies. So their nightmares would manifest either as scrawny, ineffectual, wastrel beings emitting a miasma of debilitation and weakness - or else as exaggeratedly aggressive, mighty, rapacious monstrosities bent on absolute domination. Their dreams would rather be suggestive of the things that orcs most desire - perhaps extremely subservient and readily commanded natural slaves, who wander about the landscape until somebody chooses to take mastery of them?

Elves' nightmares are, undoubtedly, to do with barbarism and filth. They despise the dirty and the debased, the grubby and the profane - they probably, it can be assumed, have nightmares about the uncouth, the unclean, the uncivilised. The visions that ensure correspond to these fears: elf-nightmares made real are the very expression of not just barbarism but the glorying in it - humanoid embodiments of gluttony, lust, ugliness, depravity. The good elf dream-visions on the other hand can be imagined as the opposite - visions of beauty and perfection that leave the viewer transfixed, or maybe the seductive, siren-like appearance of music or a hyper-real natural landscape that the human viewer longs to enter and cannot be induced to leave.

Goblins, flighty, self-interested, undisciplined, rivalrous, fear anything that is disciplined and solid - really anything that imposes order in the world. It seems plausible that their nightmares would be of strong, stolid beings with the power and wherewithal to enslave them and boss them around. Perhaps these would manifest as big, unquestionably and unchallengably authoritarian entities given to imposing apparently arbitrary demands on any they encounter. Goblins' good dreams, on the other hand, may look like sheer luxury as a goblin would understand it - bacchanalian revelry taken to the most orgiastic extreme? 

The question then arises as to whether perhaps some existing D&D creatures are merely the figments of others' dreams. Goblin nightmares sound rather a lot like they might just be stereotyped dwarfs. Elf nigtmares sound a bit like they could be orcs. Orc nightmares might be trolls or ogres. And are dragon nightmares just hobbits?