The 50 State Nightmares 

There's something hilarious about the brutal simplicity of "You're stuck in a fridge that's been turned to face a wall."

"Florida has no official state nightmare." Yeah, that tracks.

hey guys currently in church I hope there’s no sharks in here edit: OH GOD

i love how urgent neil is when saying "YOU PICK UP A HAT FROM THE FLOOR AND THERES A BRAIN UNDERNEATH"

I wish Neil Cicierega was real 😔

i feel like these could all be lemon demon songs

the delivery of the second "Grammy warned you!" gets to me every time

"Not a nightmare, so much as a genuinely sad dream about the death of Mario" March 31, 2021, it became real.

"washington: heath ledger's joker won't stop asking you to prom" aint that just the plot of the lego batman movie

The fact that you had to loudly proclaim "evil sexual genie" in a crowded room tickles me to no end

Missouri makes me laugh every time, everything about it is perfect from the lack of context, the way he delivers it and to the fact that the entire time, it looks like he's about to burst out laughing Also, when he said 'fell for a human sized mousetrap', I immediately assumed it meant you fell in love with said giant mousetrap and I was sitting there trying to figure out why that's considered a nightmare

this is enough material for 5 years of uninterrupted comedy. it's like the nuclear fuel of jokes

I accidentally opened this and Mouth Dreams and they were playing at the same time and I really thought that this was part of Mouth Dreams and I was really frustrated that I couldn't hear the list of state nightmares clearly under the increasingly louder "yahooooo"s.

"Colorado: You Find a Tiny Dead Human Body in a Vacuum Bag" Otherwise known as, the darker ending of My Trains

1:48 this is an amazing idea for a game

1:40 Is this the plot of Soft Fuzzy Man?

A lot of the state shapes are intentionally wrong for jokes but the thing about South Dakota being wrong is you wouldn’t even know it was wrong unless you lived here and that’s why im crying right now.

Some of these could also work as alternative state mottos. "Rhode Island: You Somehow Just Know That Your Soul is Gone"

The quotation marks around the small “Human” skeleton makes me wonder what the skeleton actually was

i love the absolute conviction which he says "THERE'S A SHARK LOOSE IN CHURCH!" with

"You find a room in your house that you never knew about and all your old pets are in there just starving to death" This one is genuinely unsettling

I like to imagine that this video was filmed in real time and Neil and the cameraman were just teleporting across the 50 states.

2:27 I was just waiting for Ohio, and then North Dakota hit me like a truck.

2:43 im from pennsylvania and im honored

Puerto Rico: you’re halfway through trying to put on a long sleeved shirt but there’s always a ceiling fan directly above you.

2:46 cracks me up. "you somehow just know."

This is actually really well made, and i'll explain why The simplicity of all these nightmares is fantastic. "You're stuck in a fridge that's facing a wall" sounds creepy on its own, but when you add "It's been turned to face a wall" it makes it more clear that somebody manually forced the fridge to face a wall, and it sounds a lot more brutal. Most of the other nightmares have the same thing. "Your dad dies from a small static shock from a doorknob" manages to make a parental death funny. Adding the words "small static shock" makes it even more hilarious from knowing that static shocks don't kill people, especially if it's a small one from a doorknob. One of my favorite parts about this video is the variation. Some of the nightmares are barely 5 words long, and some of them are a whole ass paragraph with way more details than it needs. It makes the video much more jarring in a way thats hard to explain in words. Nightmares such as "Multiple Crying Babies" could include a lot more context, but you chose to make it as small as possible. However, nightmares like "You're in a clawfoot bathtub, and you look behind you and etc etc etc" could simply be shortened to "You look behind you while you're bathing and see Jesus Christ" or something similar, but you chose to add much more context than you need, such as mentioning it was a Clawfoot bathtub, and even adding "so" at the beginning, along with hand motions to signify how long and lengthy the nightmare is. I also want to point out what you did with Florida. The addition of one of the states having no nightmare is quite ingenious. I've always liked it when people add things like this. You made the video feel way more realistic just by this one small detail. What's funny is that there's a lot of people who live in Florida, and your intent was to confuse or piss them off. I like how you used Florida as oppose to any other state, because Florida is one of the more well known places, and lots of people talk about how many hurricanes occur there, and how hot and sunny it always is. Normally someone would expect a significant nightmare, but all you hear is "Florida has no official state nightmare." Which manages to make the video more jarring than it already is. What I'm saying is, I love this video and everything about it. It manages to be so stupid and yet so ingenious at the same time, and I just have to applaud you for that.

i'm from kentucky but "you accidentally break a flute that represents your imagination" really hit me

I feel like these are all nightmares Neil has actually had.

"Oregon" (shows Abraham Lincoln) "South Carolina" (shows Batman logo) "South Dakota" (shows North Dakota, but upside down) "Virginia" (shows a fish)

2:34 I remember this episode of adventure time

This feels so distinctly like a Brian David Gilbert video that I am shocked every time I see it and realize it is, in fact, the other unreasonably funny internet guy.

took me a while to notice the state shapes were all fucky wucky

I hate that in some weird terrifying coincidence, I (a minnesotan) actually had a nightmare about not a surgeon, but a dentist opened up my torso and poured spaghetti O's into me and sewed me back up and I woke up crying because of how scary it was

3:03 pardon-

This was shot entirely in Salem MA, which is freaky, because it's my home City. That giant ice cream cone is extremely recognizable to every single local here, and I cannot believe that Neil stood next to it. Small. World.

We got yelled at by a testy, townie weirdo in Salem while shooting the first shot for this.

i like how most of them are really specific and elaborate and then theres just *Meat Ghost*

Honestly, every nightmare here could be a really funny or interesting writing prompt.

Jokes on you, every Lemon Demon song is about North Dakota. All of the songs are in some way related to being pregnant with Invader Zim.

How the hell did I even manage to notice that your South Dakota is just an upside-down North Dakota

These aren’t nightmares, they’re just ideas for OK Go music videos.

Some how the thing that shocked me the most about this whole video was just the mention of Invader Zim

0:35 JERMA?!

"You're pregnant, with invader zim" is a statement that knocks the wind out of me

I was excited to see Florida, and got a little disappointed there was none, but then I realized that living here IS the nightmare and sleep is the only time Floridians can be truly at peace. Unless we dream of the Great Gator Invasion of '94. *shivers*

3:18 he walks up and says that with such confidence that i am simply left here flabbergasted

Neil looks genuinely concerned when he says "You pick up a hat and there's a BRAIN underneath it"

"North Dakota: youre pregnant with Invader Zim" I AM W H E E Z I N G

"Julie Andrews Yells At You To Shut Up" made me involuntarily shout, "NO!!" in horror.

"you're pregnant with invader zim"😭

"rhode island: you somehow just know that your soul is gone" so true neil. thanks for putting my deepest darkest thoughts into words

i appreciate neil because for florida, he just said "florida has no official nightmare" but he didnt follow that with "because florida is the nightmare" like the idiots in the comments because he knew that'd be over explaining the joke. it was perfectly subtle. people need to take notes.

I appreciate that these all sound like genuine dreams people might have. When people make up dreams they never sound real. But these all hit the "bizarre and frightening but just enough logic" sweet spot of a real dream.

Imagine if someone took all of these ideas and made a horror game out of them.

"New jersey, you find a room in your house that you never knew about, and all your old pets are in there just starving to death"

Ah yes, Oregon, the head-shaped state. The nostril lake is beautiful come springtime, the green water teeming with fish and the pollen-laden wind blowing through the trees.

Grammy warned you not to talk to the wind, But you went ahead and talked to the wind didn't you? Grammy warned you.

As a texan I can confirm that being buried alive in the big bird costume is indeed, a state wide nightmare

Neil seems like he gives great hugs.

The cool part is how these perfectly capture dream logic

That New York one explains Vinesauce.

i don’t know why, but i just love the dude playing the sax while neil describes ohio’s state nightmare

I don't know what's worse, the North Dakota nightmare or the fact that Florida ironically has no state nightmare.

Florida *_is_* the nightmare

America isn't the only country with official state nightmares. Australia has them too!: New South Wales- After doing a yard sale, you realize you unknowingly sold all of your organs. Queensland- You wake up to find that the government is turning your house into a tourist trap. South Australia- You go to your parents for dinner one night, and they're forcing you to eat sand. Tasmania- In order to pass gym class, you have to act in a direct-to-video movie about Garfield becoming a pirate. Victoria- You drop your grocery bag, which initially just annoys you, before you realize that it contained the antidote to the poison you're inflicted with. West Australia- You start a job at a mine, only to realize that you're mining the corpses of your in-laws.

i watch this so often i now have the nightmares memorized lmao

As an Ohioan, I can confirm, I have once had a dream about being caught in a human mousetrap..if you count a car as a human mouse trap..and it's flying of a cliff....and also there is a deer right beside you reading you the lyrics to YMCA while crying about his dead wife he just saw on the road, which is the reason your car if flying off a cliff because you tried to swerve around it but you flew off the road.

“YOUR PREGNANT WITH INVADER ZIM.”

I love how Florida doesn’t have a state nightmare it’s Florida, every day is a nightmare

1:59. I like that his description of Nevada fits Project Nexus.

2 years later, and this is still one of my all time faves. This needs more views, I feel like half of them came from me.

these are great writing prompts

2:20 As someone who lives in NY that feels surprisingly accurate.

I live in New York and I can confirm, we are still mourning Mario's death. Poor guy. Got run over by a taxi. I still miss him.

I have no doubts that Neil has actually had half of these nightmares

So THAT'S why I keep dreaming about sitcom skeletons

"You're pregnant with Invader Zim" legit caught me so off guard

0:53 is just the scene from shrek 3 you cant fool me, Neil

I'm gonna pick a state to live based on which nightmare resonates with me the most

I never knew I was pregnant with Invader Zim.

I love how South Dakota here is just North Dakota upside down, and that both their shapes are so nondescript that no one that’s not from the Dakotas would probably even notice.

i love this guy

"Your pregnant with Invader Zim" WHAT?! NEIL CICIEREGA KNOWS WHO INVADER ZIM IS?!

This is classic Neil Cicierega content with production value. What a world we live in.

Is “Evil Sexual Genie” not just the premise of Hellraiser?

Dude! I'm a texan and the first nightmare I had I was playing chess with some kid on a screened porch my grandpa had and I opened the door and bigbird was there

I love how he can hold his laughter so well

How many social studies credits can I get by watching this video?

"Tennessee: A Realistic Medieval Prison Experience" I thought we were talking about nightmares, not reality.

these would all make amazing goosebumps stories

2:50 🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇

I can see why that nightmare is popular in Missouri, considering our surplus of both wind and grammie.

You forgot about the territories: *American Samoa:* All the dead members of the Beach Boys are trying to get to enter a pyramid scheme *Guam:* Your blood turns into 7-Up for a millisecond randomly throughout the day *Northern Mariana Islands:* You can only hear sound in degraded VHS audio *Puerto Rico:* You check under your bed to look for something, only to find a civilization of Lego people currently ruled by the main characters from the Rock Raiders theme *Virgin Islands:* A Great Pyrenees keeps licking you and reviewing the taste of your skin

This sounds like something you'd hear in Welcome to Nightvale

"A surgeon pours spaghetti into your chest" I think that may be my nightmare

This is a weird episode of Animaniacs

Every time I watch this, I continue to be impressed with how accurate these feel as nightmare concepts. I wonder how many of these were made up for the bit, and how many were based on actual nightmares had by Neil and perhaps Kevin.

1:24 I thought it was gonna be a crab with a knife. God knows we've done some shit to crabs.

1:15 neil is an iceberg