(ESSAY) 'Post-Internet Nightmares' by Jael Arazi

What cursed images haunt the screen of your retinas? Jael Arazi peels back the eyelids of an internet trained on the weird, worst denominations of human nightmare and exposes the affective, nocturnal economies therein.

‘“All dreams have meanings”

My dreams:’

This is the prompt of a TikTok trend populating my feeds as of recently. Innumerable versions and re-enactments of what dreams would look like if we could see them while awake, with their absurd and surreal storylines and characters, fast-paced rhythms that leave you breathless and a general sense of confusion at the one too many allegories. There’s something uncanny about them, maybe it’s the precise, unhinged impression of dreams they recreate, but in a more extreme way. Although the content is predominantly nonsensical, most of these videos incorporate weird elements that shift the atmosphere to the more eerie end of the dreamscape. 

My mom hands me cookies for the neighbours. She suddenly faints and vanishes so I ring the door and my friend opens, happy at the sight of cookies and immediately scared by my other “friend” behind me. I turn around and the Slender Man is standing there, so I start running but step over a banana peel. While I’m falling my friend catches me — she’s the banana now and has made a split! Drumroll, I’m at a lemonade stand. I’m offered some and the girl pours some milk in my cup, I’m confused. She suddenly rips her t-shirt to reveal a Starbucks apron underneath while spinning in the air and dancing to the rhythm of drums played by a dirty purple teddy bear. All this happens in the darkness of an empty parking lot and in just under 30 seconds. What is going on? What was the Slender Man doing in my dream? Why am I watching this? 

Oftentimes, while scrolling through digital platforms, it feels like my feed is haunted by nightmarish posts, in a way transcending my control. The Internet has plenty of disturbing content to offer, but there is a specific ensemble of images, stories, websites and videos that seem to have appeared on their own and not as the result of intentional posting by a human user. Just like the indecipherable deeper ends of our consciousness reaching up for air through our sleep, this type of content inhabits and moves through our platforms manifesting under inexplicable circumstances. 

This is the case of ‘Creepypastas,’ the digital brainchild of chain letters and weird cousin of copypastas, short for copy-and-paste. They are collaborative horror stories that propagate across the Internet like cyber legends. The origin of these stories, although traceable, is not as relevant as their effects and innumerable reworkings, which create entire universes on popular forums and platforms. A typical example is the Slender Man — who’s already come to greet us earlier in this essay. This unnaturally thin and tall faceless figure first made its appearance in 2009 out of Something Awful user Eric Knudsen’s imagination and rose to fame by haunting the set of an independent film project, corrupting the destiny of anyone involved in it, as depicted in the alternate reality YouTube series Marble Hornets (2009-2014).

The Slender Man can teleport in forests and abandoned spaces, in pictures of kids in a playground, or next to you. He will lead everyone he encounters to a mysterious and obscure fate. You can’t escape him, but beware, there are other entities that circulate in non-anthropomorphic forms, visible through what’s come to be recognised as the phenomenon of ‘cursed images,’ which first appeared on Tumblr around 2015. It’s hard to explain this to someone who has never encountered them, but these pictures portray things that convey a specific sense of discomfort. 

They propagate an opaque aura of uneasiness, implying a dreadful or weird background preceding the very moment that was immortalised. These images will make you feel like you’ve just walked in on some kind of ritual you were not supposed to witness. We don’t know where they come from, we just know that it’s too late to go back and ‘unsee’ them. Somehow, we are immediately attracted to the discomfort they create, like mosquitoes to a poisonous luminescent swamp. These interminable paranormal sights infesting the Internet traverse the layers of our consciousness, get under our skin and in our minds until it’s impossible for us to remove them. Eventually, they will come and haunt us in our sleep too.

On the Internet we also see an undergrowth of rotting content that is AI-produced and regulated by strange algorithmic rules we cannot decipher. This infesting phenomenon is called SLOP, Synthetic Language of Poor Quality, and its process ‘slopification.’ We co-inhabit the digital space with this type of content that exists independently from us, except when we come across it we are doomed forever. Most of it is generated to populate sites with ads, to further generate organic traffic and thus revenues. For example, YouTube is ripe with videos created by bots, viewed by bots and commented on by bots that more and more often infiltrate human auto-play routines — especially of children. These videos transcend the nonsensical dimension to land on Planet Eyesore, stopping at Dread, Disgust and Atrocity on the way. This is also the case with freakish/completely off items on sale on Amazon, like the ‘Keep calm and rape a lot’ t-shirts and phone cases, randomly generated without human supervision. The scariest part of it all is how this content becomes indistinguishable from its ‘legit’ human-made counterpart. It insinuates itself in our channels just like a nightmare creeps into our peaceful sleep.

In dreams, recent autobiographical events are mixed with past memories to form a new memory. Nightmares are the same, except their function is to create a strong negative emotional response. A fuming cauldron of unpleasant memories, scary imaginary characters, sparse realistic elements and an apocalyptic drive to escape reverses through the deeper phases of our sleep. Our imagination works through an archive of creepy materials and stressful situations we amass during our wakeful moments to craft the perfect freight, perfectly customised.

Maybe this is a similar process to what unfolds through our feeds, where creepy content, like a nightmare, just appears. Working like our brains during the lighter phases of sleep, the algorithms mix panic triggers with realistic content we have shown to be drawn to. Maybe the sophisticated algorithms sense our subconscious, they sense something is bothering us and present us with distressing content that is only horrible insofar as it mirrors deeper feelings and troubles already affecting us. We should name this phenomenon Post-Internet nightmares, where the lines between doomscrolling and sleep paralysis blur indefinitely.

Sources.

Bridle, James, 2017. ‘Something is wrong on the internet’, Medium [online] 6th November 2017. Available at: <https://medium.com/@jamesbridle/something-is-wrong-on-the-internet-c39c471271d2> [Accessed 21.07.25]

Edwards, Scott, 2015. ‘Nightmares and the Brain’, On the Brain (Harvard Medical School) [online] Autumn 2015. Available at: <https://hms.harvard.edu/news-events/publications-archive/brain/nightmares-brain> [Accessed 21.07.25]

Gallucci, Nicole, 2019. ‘The complex allure of cursed images’, Mashable [online] 27th Februaary 2019. Available at: <https://mashable.com/article/cursed-images-twitter-accounts-toilets-dark-stock-photos> [Accessed 21.07.25]

Hern, Alex and Dan Milmo, 2024. ‘Spam, junk… slop? The latest wave of AI behind the “zombie internet”’, The Guardian [online] 19th May 2024. Available at: <https://www.theguardian.com/technology/article/2024/may/19/spam-junk-slop-the-latest-wave-of-ai-behind-the-zombie-internet> [Accessed 21.07.25]

Marble Hornets, 2009-2025. ‘Marble Hornets’, Youtube [online]. Available at: <https://www.youtube.com/@MarbleHornets/videos> [Accessed 21.07.25]

Romano, Aja, 2021. ‘The definitive guide to creepypasta––the internet’s urban legends’, Daily Dot [online] 2nd June 2021. Available at: <https://www.dailydot.com/culture/definitive-guide-creepypasta-slender-man/> [Accessed 21.07.25]

Various authors, 2025. ‘What My Dreams Look Like Meme’, TikTok [online]. Available at:

<https://www.tiktok.com/discover/what-my-dreams-looks-like-meme> [Accessed 21.07.25]

Wofford, Taylor, 2017. ‘Fuck You And Die: An Oral History Of Something Awful’, Vice [online] 5th April 2017. Available at: <https://www.vice.com/en/article/fuck-you-and-die-an-oral-history-of-something-awful/> [Accessed 21.07.25]

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Text: Jael Arazi Image: Adobe AI Generator with prompts from the editors

Published: 29/7/25