It's Only a Nightmare! is the thirty-second book in the Give Yourself Goosebumps series. It was published in 1998.
The cover illustration depicts a bed with gargoyle-like figures on the bedposts in front of a window with lightning flashing outside. A strange blue creature with the words "Sleep Master" embroidered on its night cap was in the bed under the quilt. The creature's left hand is slightly transparent and gripping the quilt.
Blurb[]
LIFE IS BUT A SCREAM...
You know it's silly — but you're creeped out by the weird old inn where your family is staying. You're even afraid to go to sleep! Dumb, right?
Wrong. You should be afraid. Because in this place sleep is when the evil Sleep Master rules. And your nightmares become reality.
Like the one where you turn into a bat. Or the one where your parents become hideous aliens. Can you escape? And can you survive the ultimate showdown—with Lord Morphos the terrifying ruler of the Dream World?
The choice is yours in this scary GOOSEBUMPS adventure that's packed with over 20 super-spooky endings!
Plot[]
You are in a hallway being followed by something. Then you are suddenly on a roof, and you fall off trying to escape. When you suddenly wake up from this dream, you soon remember that you're staying in an inn with your parents, who are in the other room asleep. They like the inn, while you are finding it beyond creepy. As you start to try to relax and get back to sleep you hear a sound, and then turn to see an actual gargoyle in the room.
It turns out to instead have been a decoration on the headboard of your bed. You soon believe it was the decorations that caused you to have a nightmare. You sit up, trying to think about the nightmares you have had since you came to this inn. Many of which involve the same character called "The Sleep Master." Every time you've encountered him, he has said the same thing, "Wake up! Your whole life is a dream. What you call the dream world is reality. Wake up and live it!" Which leads you to wonder if you'll get any sleep while in this place and you decide to try to find a way to relax yourself...
Story A (Page 63)[]
You decide to go downstairs and spy an old bookcase in the nearby room and decide that maybe reading a book would help you sleep. While searching the bookcase you notice one of the books titled "Dr. Morphos' Sleep Remedies" and you decide to read it. You assume it is too old to be of any use but then decide to try it anyway. Soon you also notice a warning near the top of the page, but you decide to try it out despite the warning and soon you find yourself asleep...
You realize your in a dream as you fly around and soar around in the air! Things are going fine... until you eat a moth and realize you turned into a bat! You head to a cave while trying to figure out exactly why you lost control of your dream. The sleep master appears and you try to escape! Throughout this dream you alternate between various forms while trying to escape the dream master to escape to the real world.
Story B (Page 122)[]
You decide to stay in bed and to calm down you keep telling yourself that the gargoyles are not real. Only for one to insist it is real! At first your scared but then force yourself to speak to it anyway. They tell you that you are in a dream, which calms you down until realizing you would rather be awake instead, so that you may fall back to sleep and have a nicer dream. One of the gargoyles then stops you from trying to wake up and tells you that there is a secret to this bed that allows you to choose what you dream about, and it will come true.
From there on, you can either dream about:
- Becoming rich (Page 15)
- You’ll become a billionaire CEO of a massive company, and you’ll have to make a decision to buy or sell shares. The dream will then shift to you selling burgers at Buddy’s Burgers (a fast food restaurant) as a cashier and you have to decide whether to give a teenage customer extra mustard or cheese.
- Your home (Page 59)
- You’ll dream that your new home as a high-tech futuristic mansion - and many of the mechanisms and robots inside go haywire after misunderstanding your instructions, so you must avoid getting killed and shut down the mansion! If you do manage to shut down the mansion, all that’s left is a black hole where your home once was, and you’ll encounter the gargoyles.
- Going to school (Page 68)
- You are asked to report to the principal’s office once you reach school. From there, you can choose whether to go or not. If you do go to the office, the principal will put you into an extremely hard national exam - and the penalty for failing is spending eternity in kindergarten! If you don’t go, you can either spend time with the popular kids or the outcasts.
- Becoming a king (Page 136)
- You arrive at what seems to be a castle and a shadowy figure welcomes you… But choosing this option will reveal that you’re not in a kingdom, but rather Marky World (A parody of Walt Disney World), a theme park for little kids, and the shadowy figure is revealed to be Marky Mouse! (A parody of Mickey Mouse) Your parents force you to go throughout Marky World, making you do all sorts of little-kid stuff…
It also warns you to be careful, for that very reason but you assume that this is just part of the dream. But at the same time you are highly curious. So you decide to try it out and choose what to dream about. But you must remember at all times to keep calm and make sure the dreams do not get out of control since the dream is real and they are still not completely under your control...
Side story C (Page 133)[]
In Story A, instead of trying to escape the Sleep Master you decide to confront him and listen to what he has to say. He begins to tell you of how he began as an ordinary child from the real world until he fell asleep and became the Sleep Master. He is unable to return to the real world because of the ruler of the Dream World: Lord Morphos. Who is not allowing him due to trapping people while they dream in order to keep them there.
The Sleep Master then tells you that you may be able to escape, if you can defeat Lord Morphos in either one-on-one combat or a debate. Which of course, is way easier said then done considering he can manipulate the dream world whenever he pleases...
List of endings[]
There are thirty-three bad endings and seven good endings.
Bad endings[]
| Ending | Paths |
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Using a wrong method with the Sleep Remedies of Dr. Morphos (Lord Morphos before he entered the dream world and became its ruler) causes you to fall into a deep slumber for 7 decades! |
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You lead the Sleep Master's army against Lord Morphos's troops. But Lord Morphos makes your soldiers deaf and they can't hear your command. (They are apparently blind as well, because they seem not to see you charge.) What's worse, your horse is also deaf and can't hear your order to stop, so it takes you forward to battle alone against 10,000 enemies. |
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During a sword fight with him, Lord Morphos transforms your sword into chocolate, and then he decapitates you. |
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You are trapped in a nightmare of being on stage, wearing only your underpants, in front of a huge audience in a debate with Lord Morphos. The audience then laughs at you, obviously, and the Sleep Master tells you that you are trapped in this nightmare forever thanks to the evil powers of Lord Morphos. |
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You wake up from your dream of defeating Lord Morphos in a debate, but your head is now the size of a beach ball because it needs to hold your new giant, intelligent brain. |
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Lord Morphos boils you in a pan of spaghetti. You don't know whether you will drown, or boil to death first. |
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After ejecting yourself from a jet plane, you're trapped forever in a nightmare of falling through the air without ever hitting the ground. |
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You are sucked into a sinkhole and buried alive after trying to sleep on the ground in the dream world. |
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The Sleep Master tricks you into saying the wrong words (This is reality), and because it is now indeed your new reality, you can never leave the dream world. |
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You wake up, but you're still in the Sleep Master's world. He claims that this is and has always been your reality; the life you knew before was just a dream. |
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After pressing the "Rewind" button on a remote control, you're forced to re-live your entire dream backwards, and then your real life before you entered the dream. (You’re then fittingly met with a “DNE EHT” instead of a “THE END”). |
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You wake up from a dream where your parents transform into aliens, but the dream causes your parents (and perhaps you too) to have been transformed into aliens in reality. |
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Trying to wake your parents traps them in your dream world, and now none of you can ever escape. |
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While in a meadow, you decide to swim in a nearby lake. This somehow changes your dream so you are now in a desert and the lake is just a mirage. You are then burned up by the sun's heat. |
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When you dream of being a billionare CEO and suggest to your executives to buy shares, you are ejected from a skyscraper through a chute that sends you plummeting 100 stories to the ground. Bye indeed. |
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You wake up in the real world but you have been turned into a French fry, since you fell into a fat fryer during your dream. |
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You are trapped alone inside a fast-food restaurant as the place fills up with mustard, which will drown you within moments. |
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You're vaporized by a robot’s laser when you instruct it to clean your home (It’s justified because you’re the dirtiest thing in your home during that moment). |
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You and your parents are trapped in a black hole. Somehow your teacher is there as well, so you still have to go to school. |
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You're stuck switching places with the gargoyles for four decades (one for each gargoyle) after you say “If there’s anything I can do to help you” to one of them. |
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You ignite a match (trying to light an oil lamp with it), but your dream changes so that you're sitting on a pile of dynamite, and you're blown up in an instant. |
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You wake up to find that your parents have bought the inn and you'll all be living there from now on. You beg them to let you sleep in their room. |
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When you ask to have a party in your new home, you're killed by the force of the sound coming from a giant loudspeaker. |
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In a dream, you (accidentally) turn your parents into robots, which (because you're their child) results in you turning into a robot as well. Because robots do not dream, you are unable to change back (and are presumably stuck in this dream forever). |
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In your dream, you fail the national exam and have to spend eternity in kindergarten. |
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Answering an exam question about "why did the chicken cross the road?" literally turns you into a chicken trying to cross the road. You are then hit by an eighteen-wheeler truck. |
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When you announce yourself as the principal and set rules of your liking, an angry teacher comes to attack you, and when you attempt to dodge him, you hit your head on the microphone. You spend the rest of your life in hospital with delusions of being the principal of the school. |
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You're turned into a plate of food and eaten when you hang out with the popular kids in the cafeteria at your school - now you’re the favorite of everyone! |
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You're trapped in a computer, forced to play chess against a child. The match lasts an eternity to you because time is so much faster for a computer than a human. You then crash the program just to get out of your job. |
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You're about to be killed by a chess knight during a jousting match. |
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In your dream, you're playing championship football (soccer), and you accidentally score an "own goal" against your team. They proceed to violently beat you for losing them the championship. |
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Alternatively, they win the game and you become a football (soccer) star playing in the World Cup. You wake up in the real world, but it's presented as a bad ending - you remember your dream as a nightmare, because you were playing for free and got no lucrative sponsorship deals. |
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Thinking that you’re headed towards a castle to become king, you and your family end up instead in a theme park that resembles Walt Disney World for little children. Your parents force you to go on all the silly rides and have your photo taken with Marky Mouse (a parody of Mickey Mouse). |
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Good endings[]
| Ending | Paths |
|---|---|
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You defeat Lord Morphos and go home. Suddenly, home becomes a spaceship with you and your parents as the crew. The Sleep Master is free now, but he can still change things even while awake. You decide this new reality is really cool. |
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After defeating Lord Morphos, you and the 'Sleep Master' stay in the dream world, as its new rulers. |
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The phone rings, and it's your dentist, who tells you that you need your tooth removed. You joyfully realize that this can't be a dream, so you must be back in the real world. |
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You wake up but choose to go back to sleep for the rest of your life, because you were having a wonderful dream of being rich and famous (You become president and have your own show on MTV) after breaking the marathon world record. |
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Waking up from your dream as a salamander - it is implied that you were always one. This is presented as a good ending because you're happy to be back in your real life. |
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You wake up at the inn, but you still have a million dollars that you acquired in your dream after giving the owner of Buddy’s Burgers extra cheese on his burger. |
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You wake up and are told that because you're so intelligent because you were the only kid in the entire country who passed an extremely hard national exam, you never have to go to school again. |
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Page map[]
International releases[]
| No. | Book | Country/Language | Translated title | Release date | Publisher |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 32 |
It's Only a Nightmare!  |
United Kingdom
English |
It's Only a Nightmare! | August 17, 2001 | Scholastic |
| N/A | 食人黏液植物 • 爸妈变成了外星人  |
China
Chinese |
The Slimy Man-Eating Plants • Your Parents Have Turned Into Aliens | 2012 | 接力出版社 |
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Artwork[]
Trivia[]
- This book confirms that Give Yourself Goosebumps books do indeed exist in the Give Yourself Goosebumps universe, as on page 128, you can read a fictional in-universe book titled Give Yourself Goosebumps #456 - Nightmares Are No Fun. If you choose to read it, you are then sent back to page 1, as the fictional Give Yourself Goosebumps book has the exact same plot as the book you are reading in the real world.
- This implies that in the Give Yourself Goosebumps universe, at least 414 more Give Yourself Goosebumps books were written after All-Day Nightmare. By extension, it implies that Stine's fallout with Scholastic never occurred in that universe.
- Although these books typically use gender-less pronouns as both boys and girls read them, you are referred to as "He" twice during this book.
- The name of King Morphos bears resemblance to that of King Morpheus, the benevolent king of dreams from the old comic strip, video game, and movie entitled Little Nemo: Adventures in Slumberland.
- The tagline is a play on the phrase "Life is but a dream."
- The cover art is reused on the cover art of It Came from the Internet as a poster on the wall.
- The ending involving the reader's dentist is presented as good because tooth extractions tend to be painful, and as even the tiniest prick is enough to arouse a person from sleep, it's impossible to suffer pain in a dream.
- In one ending, it says "you should have watched Goosebumps instead."
- This book references Mickey Mouse and Walt Disney World.
- This book references MTV.
- The Chinese title of the book references the ending where your parents have transformed into aliens.
- This book has the most endings of all the Give Yourself Goosebumps books, with 40.
Reference in other Goosebumps media[]
- An achievement in Goosebumps: The Game is called "It's Only a Nightmare!", which is earned by completing the game without ever using the cell phone.
- The Sleep Master is an unlockable character in Goosebumps HorrorTown, and there is a questline based on the book, where the Gargoyle makes an appearance.