The nightmare toad

I happened to read the following in a treatise on witchcraft by Éliphas Lévi, describing "a bewitchment made use of by country people":

Yet another and more abominable practice. A fat toad is selected; it is baptized; the name and surname of the person to be bewitched is given it; it is made to swallow a Consecrated Host over which the formulae of execration have been pronounced. The animal is then wrapped in magnetized objects, bound with the hairs of the victim, upon which the operator has previously spat, and is buried at the threshold of the bewitched person's door, or at some point where he is obliged to pass daily. The elementary spirit of the toad will become a nightmare and vampire, haunting the dreams of the victim, unless indeed he should know how to drive it back on the operator.

This got my attention because I myself have had the experience of a buried toad haunting my dreams.

In my early teens I had a particularly vivid and memorable nightmare: I went out into the front yard of my home (this was when I was living in what is now part of Hell Hollow Wilderness Area in Ohio) and became aware that a toad, a malevolent one, was thinking about me, so intensely that it was insufferable. Following the radiating malevolence to its source, I arrived at a somewhat swampy corner of the yard, by the edge of the woods (a place we kids called "Africa" because after heavy rains a large puddle in the shape of that continent would form there). Perceiving that the toad was underground, I got a shovel and dug down until I found a heavy wooden box. Opening the lid, I found that there was indeed a large toad inside, deep brown in color and with red eyes. It was sitting completely motionless in the box but was very obviously alive and conscious and positively oozing spite, and I was aware that it was laughing at me. I tried to kill it with the shovel but found that it had no effect. Finally I decided that the only thing to do was to bury it again.

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This toad was recently recalled to my memory by the little dog in Hieronymus Bosch's painting The Conjurer (discussed here and here), which somehow carries some of the same feeling. Although Bosch's dog is not at all malevolent, and even seems likable, it is like the dream-toad in the way sits hiding in the shadows and yet becomes the focus of our attention because of the unbearably intense consciousness it exudes. An animal that manages to become that conscious comes across as "demonic" in a broad sense even if it is not actually evil.