Mike’s Dreams

For this part of the theory discussion I thought that we would go into Mike’s dreams as a cohesive whole in the FNAF movie and what they might tell us about the story and his nature, along with the thematic implications of dreams in the series overall. FNAF4 is deeply interwoven with normal dreams and waking dreams and it is the central hub to which so much of comprehending the series is tethered.

The previous parts of this movie theory series are below, and you can access my FNAF4 guide in part one if you’d like to know more.

Part 1 – First Shots, Nightmare Machine and Intro

Part 2 – Jeremiah, Timeline, Steve Raglan and Abby’s Friends

Dreams

Scott himself has mentioned dreams more than a few times, hinting at one point and it seems like he has a sleep disorder one of my family members has known as “hypnopompic hallucinations” which as known as waking nightmares. This is an uncommon type of sleep disorder where dream visions linger upon waking and are typically horrifying in nature if it’s dark. Sleep disorders tend to signify some stage in the waking up process going wrong, while we sleep our bodies shut down movement to protect us from harm, but when this fails, we sleep walk or (as in my case) when it fails to switch off, we have sleep paralysis. The kind of terrifying things people might see in sleep paralysis or waking nightmares are something incidentally that we see in FNAF. I know I’ve certainly seen tall slender figures not dissimilar to Nightmarionne or the Puppet in my own sleep disorders.

When asked which animatronic he’d ever dreamed about, Scott admitted that it was Bonnie, giving a brief summary of his experience.

“In real life I tend to have waking-nightmares, meaning that I walk in my sleep, etc. One night I dreamt that Bonnie was in the hall outside my door, as I jumped out of bed and rushed to hold the door shut. I discovered that the door was locked and it filled me with dread. In FNaF 1, when the doors don’t work, it means something is already in your office. So when I felt that the door was locked, I felt Bonnie was in my bedroom and was about to get me! Thankfully, I woke up.”

Dreams and nightmares are interwoven with this series intricately and it’s evident that the movie is no different at all.

Pining for Fun

Mike has a poster on his ceiling depicting Nebraska, which informs us that was where they were when they lost Garret. This might seem obvious and pointless, but it means the family were on a camping trip in what was a very remote area. This means this disappearance is a complete and stark divergence from everything we understand about William Afton’s modus operandi.

William takes kids from Freddy’s in the suit. For him to drive all the way out to Nebraska seems exceptional, and there isn’t really much way he could have been wearing the suit and not of remark at this point either.

I am of the belief that the Schmidt family in this particular continuity are Henry’s family members. I think the dark haired, dark eyed man we see in the flashbacks is in fact William’s business partner as we know him in the games and I think that targeting Garret was essentially a repetition of what happened in the main game line where William actively targeted Henry’s daughter.

However, I think we have to take this whole situation with some degree of caution as this would not at all be the first time we have been bait and switched using Henry’s twins.

In the Silver Eyes, Charlie spends the majority of the series having flashback after flashback to the moment that William stole her brother Sammy away, only for us to find at the very end that in fact Sammy was never taken at all and Charlie was experiencing nothing but a series of false implanted memories. In actuality she was the one who died that day and “the dead do forget”. Given the precedent of this series, it is entirely reasonable for us to be skeptical about these dream sequences and what we are told by the story as flawed narration is part and parcel of the FNAF.

“You remember,” Elizabeth mocked. “Are you sure you were there for all of those memories?” Charlie searched her thoughts for anything that could confirm the memories she clung to. “Look down,” Elizabeth whispered. “What?” Charlie whimpered. “Your memory. I’m sure it’s crystal clear, since you were there and all.” Elizabeth smiled. “Look down.” Charlie returned to her memory, standing in front of her father’s workbench. She was immobile; she didn’t have a voice. “Look down,” Elizabeth whispered again. Charlie looked to her feet, but didn’t see feet at all, only three legs of a camera tripod anchored to the ground. “He was making memories for you; making a life for his little rag doll, making her a real girl. “I’m sure many of those memories have been elaborated upon, edited, and embellished, but make no mistake, Charlie wasn’t there.”

Something about the situation Mike relives feels off, the child kidnapping strange and off-point for William who primarily does research on fear and the transferral of energy into the suits.

What happened in Nebraska also cannot be substantiated by almost anyone around Mike, Abby wasn’t present (which is questionable in itself) and he has no remaining family to confirm one way or the other if this was actually what happened. The audience is denied direct confirmation via anyone other than Mike himself.

Dream Theory

We talked about dream theory earlier in this series of articles, but I’d like to loop back to the only real excerpt we get from this non-existent book.

“And though the dreamer remains asleep, he walks through memory as if experiencing it for the first time anew, no longer a passenger but an active participant.”

To me this sounds very reminiscent of astral projection or lucid dreaming, which is a mysticism based belief in the ability of a dreamer to influence their dream, except in this world it appears to go one step further and permits the dreamer to revisit memories stored deep within their psyche.

“So there’s this theory that, uh, we can’t forget things. Basically, it says that every single thing that you see in your entire life, down to the tiniest of details, gets stored inside of you. You just have to know how to look.”

Mike explains this further to Vanessa later when he says “I just know that he’s in here. But he’s just…he’s…” “It’s buried.”

It’s also worth noting their whole conversation takes place in front of a literal BROKEN HOME.

I think that Mike might be right, but I think instead of the memory of his brother being in his mind, I think that he might very well be haunted by the spirit of his brother in some fashion. This sounds like it is full of holes, he wasn’t there when his brother died, right? Well, as I explained, we don’t know if he was. We don’t know if this Nebraska kidnapping is something put there to absolve him of guilt but which he won’t let go of.

Another thing that Mike says to Vanessa that immediately made me stop and pay attention was comparing his family to old TV shows.

“When… when Garrett and I were kids, they were like those perfect parents you’d see on old TV shows.”

We know Mike in the games is prone to very intense escapism in front of the television as we see in Sister Location, eating popcorn while his life falls apart. It makes sense that his idea of an ideal family might also align with those perfect shows.

William snarls at Mike “You couldn’t just leave it alone, could you?” and maybe what he couldn’t leave alone goes far beyond Freddy’s.

Mike is trying to unlock doors that perhaps should be best left forgotten.

Memories

Memories in FNAF are complicated and flawed. The ghosts we see are in some part related to emotions and memories of the individual shaping together to become what is almost like a reborn version of the individual who was once there, Henry and William seem uncertain if they are dealing with souls or vessels shaped like what souls once were.

However, it is apparent from the examples that we have in the books that memories can be reshaped by spirits and utilised as a prison, something that William Afton himself appears to have figured out. The animatronics at Freddy’s do not remember what happened to them and are trapped forever at their favourite party with their best friend the Yellow Rabbit who they obey without question.

We see how this can be used in the epilogues of the Fazbear’s Fright novels, where Jake, our stand-in for the Crying Child finds himself trapped in a birthday party that is not his own and rejects it.

“Blow out the candles!” Jake’s friends, wearing pointy cardboard party hats, surrounded him at the table. Right in front of him was a round, white-frosted cake decorated with nine rainbow-colored candles. Somehow Jake knew that the cake was red velvet with cream cheese frosting, his favorite. Jake laughed at his friends’ cheers, took a deep breath, and then huffed and puffed like the Big Bad Wolf in “The Three Little Pigs.” He extinguished all the candles at once. Jake’s heart was full of happiness. There were smiling faces all around him, smiling faces that were soon to be stuffed with cake and ice cream. But wait. None of this was real. It wasn’t even a memory. “

False memories used as prisons.

Jake in turn uses this same power to contain Eleanor, the agony creature at the root of so many of the evil events in the stories.

“Using the ability that Jake had discovered after his confrontation with the trash rabbit, Jake reached into those years and found a moment of seething anger and anguish. He figured if he could stuff Eleanor into a bubble of that moment, he could subdue her. He was right. With that one intention, Eleanor was defeated, contained. Her foul spirit folded in on itself and was silenced.”

Memories are a weapon and a means to give someone or a spirit their happiest day. Jake finds a homeless man and looks back into the man’s past and sees the tragedy that has befallen him.

“Jake concentrated, and he sent his thoughts back through the soup of memories he’d just seen. Maybe he could pull one out, a good one, and make it bigger and brighter than the rest. If he could, he could ease the man’s pain. He had to try. Jake knew exactly which memory to make the biggest. It was the first one—the happy family dinner. Jake put all his focus on that memory. He pushed his intention into it so it puffed up in his mind; it was almost like blowing up a balloon—only the balloon was a memory and the air was Jake’s will. Jake made the memory bigger and bigger, and then he gently suggested it back to the man’s unconscious mind. In a way, he put the man’s mind inside the bubble of that one happy scene.”

I don’t think that it’s a coincidence this man’s happiest memory is a “family dinner” in a series with a “family diner” but your mileage may vary.

What I am trying to establish here is that memory manipulation is not unprecedented by any means and illusions are pretty par for the course in FNAF, with illusion discs, hallucinogenic gas and memory alteration at the hands of spirits pretty standard fare. We cannot always take what we see at face value, and therefore cannot entirely rely on the veracity of a memory viewed through the lens of a single character.

Blonde Kid

I would argue that the fact that Abby receives a perfect vision of Mike’s dream from the blonde kid is a telling turn of events, Mike asks her about it and she evasively confirms that it came from the blonde kid. Abby wasn’t present for Garret’s vanishing, and yet she is shown this memory that Mike believes is locked deep within his own psyche in the labyrinth of his mind.

I would argue that the fact that the spirits can share this vision implys something more ominous about the blonde kid and his potential role in altering Mike’s memories

After all, it is the blonde kid who also offers Mike his “happiest day” with his family, in exchange for his sister, only for Mike to wake up in the nightmare chair.

I think that the blonde kid is a dangerous actor and one who has learned to use his abilities for dark ends. Once again looking back to the Fazbear’s Frights, there is a kid called Andrew who we are introduced to. He has latched himself to William Afton and will not let him die, but we do not find out how or when this happened.

“My memories are kind of fuzzy.”“Fuzzy. Yeah. So are mine,” Andrew said. “But I do remembering wanting to get back at someone who hurt me. I think I attached myself to him. I got into his soul, made sure he couldn’t move on when he shoulda died. I remember I wanted him to suffer, the way he made me suffer. But I don’t remember what he did. I just know I hung on, no matter what they did to him to try and save him. I wanted him to hurt!”

He is twisted up and it seems like his proximity to William for so long might have contorted his intentions.

“The moment the light drilled into him, Jake felt the same evil he’d fought in the trash compactor. Only this evil felt stronger, like it was the core of what Jake had sensed in the things Andrew had infected. Jake also felt something else; some of that badness was inside of him! He hadn’t noticed it before, but now it was unmistakable. A piece of the evil he’d battled—cold and cruel—had been hiding in Jake’s spirit. Just as it had hitched a ride in Andrew, it had apparently burrowed its way into Jake as well.”

It’s worth mentioning that even in the short story epilogues that the crying child analogue is clearly seperated from the furious and spiteful vengeful spirit who kills people simply with his raw hatred.

The two touch a man to push him away and he dies horrifically

“The man screamed and grabbed his head. Collapsing on the gravel behind the truck, the man’s body began to wither like he was a sponge being wrung out by an invisible hand. As his body sucked in on itself, his eyes fell inward, disappearing. And black streaks ran down the man’s cheeks.”

When Jake confronts Andrew about it, he says “It’s probably me.”

“Nah, it’s me, I bet.” “You want to kill people?” “No!” “Then why … ?” “I just want to scare people, okay? Like, you know, give them a zap.” “The zap is killing them!” “Well, that wasn’t what I wanted.”

Aunt Jane’s fate might well be related to this same callous or accidental brutality.

Proximity to William Afton seems to infect the kid’s souls with something that twists their intentions. It is possible that William experimented on this child in some way that deviated from the four animatronic kids which changed the nature of his existence. He seems to have been a powerful ally, but also in the end becomes a very very dangerous enemy.

One he should not have killed.

Now I do want to stress that I am not certain if this blonde kid is THE one you should not have killed as we know them from the games, but there is certainly something off and different about them.

They retain their face the whole time while the children in the animatronics have their faces blur and vanish in the background when he is there. He is able to communicate and negotiate with Mike, the kids do not. He is sitting drawing the yellow rabbit in the dirt, implying he might well know his identity in a nuanced way that differs from his companions. Mike is asking him who did it and he essentially gives him the answer.

He manifests as the Fredbear or Golden Freddy suit when he is outside of the Freddy’s location but NEVER inside. When he’s inside there are only three places he could really be, Cupcake, Balloon Boy or whatever remains of the Fredbear (which could be the mask on the nightmare machine or some other unseen place in the location). However cupcake is the most aggressive and ferocious of the animatronics and is the one who trips William’s springlocks and maims various others. On just that gut vasis would wager that the blonde kid has been inhabiting the cupcake. Balloon boy has a more mischievous element to his jumpscares, more reminicent of oh… I don’t know.

A little brother spooking his sibling in return for some pranks in his youth?

The idea the the blonde haired kid’s body cannot fit inside cupcake doesn’t matter so much to me when every indication we have of the golden freddy figure is that they are somehow “broken” and in parts, a spirit more destroyed and fractured than the others in some way.

Every depiction of the golden freddy victim is of a mangled and twisted thing and I think this is intentional. William’s experimentation seems to have created a monster, but it is uncertain if the spirit he corrupted this way was Henry’s son or his own.

I think there are two extra figures, as does shock, a dark haired kid who is unaccounted for and the blonde haired kid.

Four animatronics, blonde kid, dark haired kid and Abby. The blonde kid doesn’t appear in this image.

Abby

I think we should talk about Abby.

Abby doesn’t fit properly within the continuity of events. She’s in a strange place. She’s not present when Mike loses his brother and is a fraction of his age, young enough to be mistaken for his daughter, and yet it seems like she was born at some point between losing Garret and their mother’s death “a little while back”. Their mother looked young in the flashback, certainly, but it could be almost 20 years since Garrets death if it happened in the 80s.

We don’t find out how their mother died, we don’t find out if their father left or killed himself. We are given precious little information about the situation, but any FNAF fan on hearing about a father who couldn’t handle it is almost immediately going to think of Henry, who is represented by deep grief and depression. He kills himself with a robot in the Silver Eyes and in the game continuity specifically mentions “It keeps me awake at night. I could make myself… sleep. But not yet.” Once again blurring that line between sleep and death in the most overt way.

For me the thought was immediate, and as Mike said that to Vanessa, I realised that we very well might be looking at a continuity where Mike was either raised by Henry or believes that he was, and might actually be caring for the robot Charlie created by him. This would immediately explain the strange ages.

Abby also is almost put into a springlock suit which unmistakably resembles the frights depiction of the Ella doll that we see in connection to the Charlie robots. It is outright an inversion of the scenario where Charlie has the spirit rag doll inside her, placing her inside a robot herself.

The whole thing put me concerningly in mind of Egg Baby again.

I think that Abby (whose name is still a very concerning anagram of Baby) has obvious connections to the Charlie bots and therefore has connections to Charlotte and Henry.

There’s the “box” fort she sleeps in and her desire to share this security with others, her drawings (which may have been the first in the restaurant)

“They had always been there, and Charlie wondered now where her father had gotten the first ones when the restaurant opened. Had he used her own childish scribblings, or had he made them himself and stuck them up, forgeries to encourage actual children to display their art?”

This would also explain her ability to influence the children with her own drawings, with hers connected to the earliest ones and a piece of that original location.

Abby also has lots of “friends” and a large collection of stuffed toys. This once again sets us in mind of Charlie, who in her youth had numerous friends her father made, such as Stanley the unicorn and Theodore the rabbit.

She also sleeps under a quilted blanket. Henry has books on quilting on his shelves in the novels.

“There were volumes that claimed to be about trickster gods, about quilting bees, and about football cheering squads and their mascots.“

Abby is a fascinating character and I really can’t wait to find out where Scott is going with her in this iteration of the story.

Henry

I went into this movie hoping that we’d get some sniff of Henry, William’s co-founder and partner and found his omission a yawning one. Scott knows the fans would be expecting to see him in there and I think he slipped him in without most people even realising. As I’ve stated the dark haired dark eyed bearded man in plaid in the flashbacks seems to be Henry, but why do I say that?

There are lots of descriptions of Henry in the novels, but the best summed up example I have is an infographic that shock and I made to sum up Henry and William’s “canon” appearance for the sake of fanfiction. There were a lot of people depicting them in wild and whacky ways, which was fine, but we wanted to provide a nice stable factual resource as best we could using what we had at the time for those who wanted it.

As you can see based on what we have of Henry in the stories, the appearance of “Mike’s dad” is absolutely spot on, as is the man we see working on the endoskeleton in the parts and services area of Freddy’s.

I definitely think we might well have been looking at Henry the whole time and that the fact that William stumbled over Mike’s surname might be because that was Henry’s true surname in this continuity. Hearing his old partner’s name might have been like someone walking over his grave, especially if Henry did not so much die as vanish in search of William.

It would certainly explain the nervous fear we see in William’s expression and the fact he struggles to call Mike by his surname at any point before the finale, where he frames it in an almost accusatory and mocking way.

I think Henry is here. I think we were looking so hard for him, we just couldn’t see him.

Just like always.

End communication.

Conclusion

On starting to discuss Mike’s dreams I realise that I’ve had to branch out into many different associated areas, this part’s been a bit all over the place as a result, but I thought it was important as there are so many dream sequences and they involve and touch upon so many characters, I wanted to pull the pieces together in one place.