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Our minds can come up with some pretty scary characters especially in our sleep. But our dreams aren’t the only place nightmarish monsters live.
I bet you can remember some time in your life when you were afraid of the monster under your bed, or maybe it was in your closet. Maybe, if you’re like me, something lived deep in the toilet…
Let’s bring our night terror monsters to life with this creative (and terrfiying) makeup look.
Just about everyone has dreams while asleep. It’s during our most deep, restful sleep (called the REM stage of sleep) that we experience these visuals we call dreams.
Dreams can vary from wild and fantastical to downright horrendous, and there’s a reason we see the things we see. What we experience in our dreams often comes from our subconscious mind.
Our brains have a great deal of storage, and many of our memories live deep down in our consciousness where we don’t need to access it for everyday use. But, the memories are still very much alive inside our minds.
During our sleep, our naturally creative minds bring out these memories as movies playing behind our closed eyes.
Sometimes those memories can get distorted and warped, and because we are in our deepest sleep, our mind is free to play out whatever it wants.
Any fears we have, any bad experiences, they can resurface inside our dreams. Sometimes the dream is recognizable, while others seem completely off the wall.
It’s common for children to have vivid dreams of all sorts of characters, monsters and ghouls. It’s why I envy a child’s imagination; their minds are not bound by reality. Instead, to them anything is possible.
When a child plays make believe with their toys they come up with a whole world outside of reality, and they’re capapble of doing this all while awake. Imagine the possibilities inside a sleeping child’s mind.
When I look at monsters drawn by children I can’t help but giggle. They’re so whimsical, even the ones intended to be deadly and dangerous. Somewhere along the way to adulthood our monsters lose their charm.
Monsters created from the minds of adults are of a different breed. Instead of drumming up the fantastical, adults’ monsters are piercing in (most often) the most grotesque ways. Then there are the almost cuddly creatures that scare young minds.
Somewhere between the two lives a monster that would stir up anyone’s nightmare.
To create your own monster creation, think about what is really, truly scary…to you:
You know I like to dig into things before coming up with a makeup idea, and these are some great questions to ask yourself before you get started.
I hope this helps you find some ideas on creating your own nightmare makeup look.
If you have any other tips, leave them in the comments!
Stay up-to-date with a few interesting emails about creative makeup.