My mom had many outlandish beliefs about the world, but the one that stuck with me the most was her belief that our dreams took place in alternate universes. She thought that we were transported into different universes to live out our dreams, and returned to our physical bodies upon waking up. On its own, this sounds like a cool (or maybe even a silly) idea, but coupled with the fact that my mom eventually became afraid of dreaming, it becomes ominous.
When we were children, my mother would tell us to “be careful next time” whenever we told her the events of our dreams. I remember my sister Anna once telling her about a dream she had where she was piloting a spaceship through a glow-in-the-dark galaxy, to which my mom replied “If you have that dream again, you must never get out of that ship.” She then made Anna pinky swear that she would never exit the spaceship in her dreams.
Back then, this was just a silly promise that I laughed at and that Anna agreed to while she looked excited to be doing a pinky swear with our mom. As we got older and were less likely to be scared by her theories though, she began to fill us in on more rules that we had to follow while dreaming.
She would tell us to never speak to people in our dreams if we could not see their faces. She said that no matter who they looked like, what we felt, or what they told us, it was imperative that we never ever speak to them or answer their questions.
When she told us this, Anna and I looked at each other, raising our eyebrows to signal that we both thought she was being dramatic, but we promised her that we would never speak to faceless people in our dreams. She then corrected us and said that it was not just faceless people, but anyone whose face we could not see, and we corrected our promise and she seemed content.
A few months after that talk, I had a dream. I don’t remember much of the details of the dream (my mom would say that this is our brain’s way of protecting us), but I do remember seeing a tall man wearing a hat that cast a dark shadow over his face, completely hiding it from me. I clearly remember seeing him first in the background of a crowd in my dream, and I remember becoming more and more aware of the fact that I was dreaming.
I remember him getting closer and closer to me until he was finally a few feet away. He had caught me at a moment in my dream in which I was alone, and that was when he spoke to me.
He simply said, “I know where you’re from.”
I remember looking at him, and while I did feel uneasy, I also felt like I knew him somehow. I was about to ask him for clarification when I remembered my mom’s warnings, and so I walked away from him. He didn’t try to stop me, and he didn’t say anything else.
I didn’t tell my mom about this, because she would freak out, and I didn’t want to sit through a twenty-minute speech about all of the rules that I had to keep in mind while I was dreaming.
I saw the man a few other times. Sometimes he appeared in odd dreams and sometimes he appeared in nightmares. He often spoke to me and I always ignored it. I think that while I’d like to sit here and say that my mom was crazy, deep down I truly believe everything she said.
My mom died about two months ago, but she kept her beliefs about dreams her whole life. On her death bed, she made me and Anna recite all of her dreaming rules and promise her one last time that we would follow them. Of course, we did, both because she was literally about to die and because I think that we do believe her.
In the few weeks before she died, she was freaking out, saying that they were becoming “more aware”. She had said this before over the years, as she had this constant belief that the people in the other realities that we were visiting in our dreams were becoming aware of the fact that we were just “travelers” there and that we were vulnerable since our physical bodies were elsewhere.
I never really pressed her on the details of her beliefs, but from what I gathered, the people in these other realities were not aware of the fact that we only appeared in their realities in our dreams. And, if they suddenly became aware of this, it could be dangerous for us, although again, I never really asked her to explain the types of danger that we could potentially face.
After she died, Anna and I spent a few days clearing out her house. She had left it to us, but neither of us wanted to live in it as we had careers in other nearby cities, so we had decided to rent it out to another family member.
While cleaning up my mom’s study, I found a shelf full of journals that she was using to write down her dreams. Each entry was dated and it seemed like she hadn’t missed a single day in the last ten years. Some of the entries contained multiple paragraphs detailing everything that happened in her dreams, while others simply stated “No dream tonight” or “ Dog birthday party, pool filled with pink fairy liquid”.
I decided I was going to keep them all because I felt guilty throwing them away. As I was packing them up in a box, I decided to grab the most recent journal and flip through to the last few days of her life.
In these entries, her handwriting was messier. Her words were pressed together with no spaces between some of them. She had misspelled random words or used weird abbreviations as if she were in a hurry to jot things down. But they all had something in common.
Every single entry for the last three weeks of her life ended with the same words: They are becoming aware. They’ve been staring.
In each of her entries, she described noticing people in her dreams who were just staring at her. She claimed this was proof that “they” were becoming aware. In one of her entries, she remarked that she had accidentally drawn attention to an old woman who was staring at her in the dream and had spent a while running from her. According to her, when she woke up that day it was well past noon and she had managed to sleep through three alarms. She wrote that she was afraid of dreaming again, and she wanted to find a way to stop the dreams.
She never wrote down any of the ways she attempted to stop the dreams, but they clearly did not work as the next entry was more of the same. She claimed there were more people who were noticing her, and that every time she dreamed, even more of them would be staring at her. She said she feared for her life, and claimed that she knew she would die soon, that she couldn’t hide from them anymore. She said there were too many of them, and it was too late to stop it.
The doctors said my mom died of natural causes. She was just old, they claimed. They said she was in a constant state of stress and that it all just became too much at her age and she died.
But I’m not just telling you this to talk about my mom, I’m writing this because I believe that she was right. I believe that these other people, wherever they are, got to her.
I say this because I’m noticing it now, and so is my sister. The last few nights, every time I dream, I notice more and more people in my dreams, but they aren’t partaking in them. They aren’t background characters or people in a crowd. They’re people that I’ve never seen before, that I don’t recognize, and I can feel their stares on me. I fear my mom was onto something, and I don’t think it’s something that was just affecting her. I think it’s spreading, and I think that I’m in danger.
You don’t have to believe me, but I do want to suggest that you be vigilant. Next time you dream, try to pay attention. Think back to the latest dream you had. Have you noticed the stares?