Welcome To My Nightmare World

From the same issue that gave us The Slave Pits Of Uranus, Issue #3 of Weird Tales Of The Future from 1952 not only had one of Basil Wolverton's wilder pieces of cover art, but also one if his most hallucinatory stories. Nightmare World is a tight tale lasting only 4-pages long whose prime message appears to be "science bad!". Herman Lasher is a chemist trying to probe into the secrets of the subconscious mind which would later on be known as dropping acid. His newest formula looks promising and like all comic book scientists he tests it on himself. It whisks him to a dreamscape right out of Super Mario Bros. Herman's vision starts out like an M.C. Esher base drawing, only to be interrupted by a grotesque humanoid that comes gliding in on a large skin membrane that makes it look like a zombie fused with a flying squirrel. The bat-like creature captures Herman and flies him up to the top of a mountain where there is a similar looking abomination with its skull pulled off like it was a jar of jelly. The monster pulls out a knife and makes it pretty clear that it will take Herman's brain and put it inside the empty shell of his comrade. Our cringing chemist then passes out in the dream and wakes up to find himself now in the body of the bat-mutant who quickly cuts the throat of the other monster and flies off a ledge. Herman's nightmare ends, but in horror comic tradition he discovers that he is still stuck in the body of the mental monster he got a brain transplant into. How Herman went through a complete metabolic change from just taking a homemade roofie like something out of Altered States is deliciously dodgy. Wolverton might have been trying to enlighten scientists to the idea of using rabbits for experiments instead of shooting yourself up full of literal nightmare fuel.