Friend Folio: Animate Dream
The above image is but one of the unique forms an Animate Dream may take on. It's one of those monsters that really gels with both the roleplay and attrition-based aspects of Pathfinder 1E, with an incredibly unpleasant touch attack and a challenge rating around the point where incorporeal enemies start coming into play. If you're the type to incorporate mechanics into roleplay, now's the time to break out your knives and ghost touch macguffins.
So, whose dream has animated here? In a standard adventure, this can be a great way to flesh out important NPCs and make your players feel like true heroes. If you're running the (dubious) sanity mechanic from Horror Adventures, this also slots really well into it. The 3/day nightmare and 1/day phantasmal killer almost feel superfluous at this point.
Killing an animate dream is well and good, but having to fight an overlarge chimpanzee made of ground turkey every night is getting exhausting. If the contractors looking to kill it for good want to succeed, they'll need to figure out which resident of St. Sviato's Comatorium is having these dreams, what's causing said dreams, and how they're going to put an end to them.
The Ruby of the Third Charlatan has immense historical, academic, and practical value. Anyone looking to steal it from the Fort Blueclay Museum of Art should be advised that in addition to the typical museum defenses, the curator is pretty bad at identifying the local bogeyman's prank items. Nighttime raiders can expect impressionist trompe l'oeils, statues walking off their podiums, and their own worst nightmares crawling out of an uncanny pottery set.
Demons don't need sleep, and they don't dream -- so when a nabasu earns the ire of a night hag coven (gem fraud), he's wholly unprepared for his first ever nightmare. Coulli the Graven's dreams have now animated into a bigger, stronger "nabasu", representing his fear of being upstaged before establishing himself. Like any nabasu, it grows as it feeds. If Coulli's foul nightmare isn't killed soon, it might complete its transformation into a "vrolikai"... or worse.
(Bestiary 2, pg. 29)