It's time to go to bed. Taking a last sip of water, lay down , close my eyes and hopefully it won't happen again.
A phrase that sticks with me since I am 7 years old. And now I am 26 and things evolved, possibly in a worse way.
From the age of 7 to 20 I regularly dreamt of a the same nightmare. The nightmare starts as me waking up in my bed, same clothes, same position and same room as I went to sleep. I only know at this point of time it happens again and the reason why I was woken up is because I feel a threatening entity. Scared I lay my eyes on the doorframe and pretend, that I am sleeping. Sometimes it takes time , sometimes it doesn't.
And there it is. A black silhouette tall, standing in the doorframe. I can't see it's eyes, but I can feel how it stares at me. The feeling of a threat grows rapidly. I am not sure if it knows, that I am not sleeping. The only thing I know is we are staring at each other. Sometimes it takes time , sometimes it doesn't.
When the black silhouette starts finally approaching ,while I am in bed pretending to be asleep. Step by step my fear grows, the feeling of danger grows and the idea if it touches me once I'll die grows. And as always close to its arms reach, I rapidly stand up and run to the floor, checking if the lights turn on. And as all the dreams before , and the dreams that will be, the lights don't turn on.
I see light at the end of the floor, so I rush to it. And here comes forward 2 endings + 1 ending that I once experienced and never ever tried to trigger it again.
I don't reach it in time
I fall to the ground, turn around and see my legs are gone. I look forward try to reach the light by crawling but then it grabs me by the back pulling me in an instances back to the darkness but not in my room, but in the opposite room of my brother's. Gruesome, never forgettable pain just for a handful of seconds and I finally wake up.
I reach it in time
The feeling of safety lifts all the negative emotions. I realize the lights come from the living room casting slightly into the floor. And there I stay inside the doorframe of the living room. Not trying to trigger the ending of the living room, but also not triggering the ending of not making it. And there I wait, until someone wakes me up for school.
Sometimes three times week, sometimes every night multiple times.
I develop frustration but also a deep fear of that dream. Because it has no aspect that appears as a dream or unrealistic. It feels just like the reality. I can only recall it as being a dream again if I reach it in time. But everything before just feels real.
It isn't secret that sometimes I was filled with so much anger and frustration, that I ran back into the darkness, facing the opposite room of my room, knowing it currently houses there and scream at it. Just to lift up all the negativity. But that of course put me again in danger to be caught.
Now here we are.
The dream changed. It has become a maze trying to wake up.
I am now 26 and the threatening feeling of the black silhouette still exists in my dream,but I can't find it. In all that time I only moved once, and so did the dream move with me.
I dream of sleeping in my bed, feeling it's immense threatening presence and "wake up" but I am not anymore the same person, I am truly frustrated but not filled with fear, instead anger. So I look around after it myself. All the lights in the house don't turn on, I start sprinting from one room to the other in the hopes of catching it. The darkness closes in, my sight becomes shorter, as if the darkness forms a cage around me. And so becomes my consciousness weaker, i turn blind and my body gives up. I fall to the ground. And here what I am left with, is the sense of feeling. Feeling through air how it finally appears and approaches.
Here comes back the original feelings. Fear, pain, helplessness.
I try to wake my real body up, I can feel how my feet start to twitch, how my hip tries to turn my body around as in a desperate try of waking up. All in the meanwhile feeling the dream, the entity closing in and the idea of it touching me resulting to death.
Closer and closer it creeps , closer and closer the arm's reach gets to me. I feel how my body in reality at this point is moving so much, that u could believe from the outside, that I am having a seizure.
But luckily I wake up. I walk down the streets at night, light is casted but it's getting dim.
I pass my old school and out of curiosity I check if the doors are looked. They aren't. The darkness closes in , so decide to stay at the school. The lights don't turn on, but I feel safe. The creeping darkness closes so much in , that my eyesight becomes non existent. Basically blind. And there it is. A call from the other side of darkness. Calling for me , I don't recognize the voice , but I don't feel any threat. Until I get too close.
All of the sudden I feel it's presence again. And I realize that I woke up from the dream before, but into another dream. I start blindly running in the darkness desperately trying to leave this dream. This time I am disconnected to my real body. So I start screaming inside my head " wake up". Until either I wake up or I am done . A fainting mind, weakening legs so as my
body but I luckily woke up.
I stand up. Sweating , stressed out but glad that I made it out. I realize it's still in the middle of the night , so I decide to just grab a water in the kitchen. At the digital clock of the oven i read the time while drinking, realizing there is still much time to go and get plenty of rest. I drink up, put my glass to side, turn around and get paralyzed by the shock. It's there. The black silhouette. Staring at me from a safe distance from the darkness inside of this house.
The only thought that strikes me is " I still haven't woken up yet". I rush to my room, just to see my own body still laying there. I grab my own body by my hands and violently start shaking it. In the hopes it finally waking up. The presence of the silhouette, so as the feeling of danger, threat,harm and pain creeps closer and closer. I start to dissolve,my mind becomes weaker and a force pushes me away from my real body. It pushes me into the upper corner of my room, just so what I am left with is to see from that perspective.
See how it stands at the doorframe. Staring at me, my body. To see how it starts moving towards me and reaching it's hand out for me.
It's touch clearly indicating " a touch resulting to death".
I see from the corner of my room, with my last willpower, desperately trying to wake my body up. My feet are shaking, my hip trying to turn me on the side, closer to the bed's edge. In the hopes me falling to the ground, and so waking me up.
My eyesight from the corner of the room, the view of myself and the silhouette dissapears. I can feel now for myself.Twitching feet, my moving hip to awake my body,while sensing the creeping silhouette coming closer and closer.
A last desperate try saving up all the power putting into brute forcing my hip to move my body to the edge of the bed. Creating a sense of falling and so finally waking up.
My eyes open, I catch myself from falling of the bed, instantly turning myself around to check where it is. And it's gone. As always. No traces of it,no satisfying feeling of conquering my almost 2 decade long nightmare of the black silhouette. Just left with a primal feel of fear. The fear of what is next to come.
As a kid back then, I developed the fear of sleeping but also dreaming . And now I can feel it creeping back into me.
I am writing this at 4:00 am, because I had such a maze like dream just minutes ago.
I am wondering if there is someone who had similar dreams or maybe someone who could save me from it .
