When I was younger, I found a fetish porn site called dontwakethem.com. This was around 2010/2011ish, when I was 13. You might be wondering why a 13 year old was on a site like that. Well, I had unrestricted Internet access and I was a weird kid. Sue me.
The site was very Web 1.0, with a black background and the site’s title at the top of the page. Everything was written in Comic Sans. The site had pictures of people, usually women, sleeping, with the sleeper’s name under each image. Now, I assume this was a fetish site because a lot of the people shown were wearing clothes. Some were naked, sure, but it wasn’t in an outright sexual way. It was more like they were just sleeping in the nude. I think the thing people were supposed to get off to was the sleeping.
The pictures, from what I remember, were taken in the sleeper’s bedroom. The room was dark, but you could still see the sleeper because the photographer used a flash. Not sure if that woke that person up since the only pictures posted are those where the subject is sleeping.
I remember checking out the site a couple of times, mainly to skip to the pictures of naked women. Listen, when you’re 13 and horny, tits are tits, ok? However, I didn’t visit too often since the general vibe of it creeped me out. It felt voyeuristic in a way that made my skin crawl.
I ended up finding new places to get my jollies, and forgot about the site for years. I eventually weaned myself off of my prepubescent porn addiction (though not before getting a monster of a virus on the family computer) and instead focused on trying to get a girlfriend and – possibly – laid. You know, normal teenage boy shit.
Anyway, let’s fast forward to a couple of days ago. I was listening to a podcast advertise Casper mattresses, which somehow reminded me of dontwakethem.com. A bunch of old memories popped into my head, and I decided to look it up. The site doesn’t exist anymore, instead taking you to a page listing similarly named sites. On a lark, I decided to put the URL into the Wayback Machine, and go back to 2011.
The familiar black background and Comic Sans text popped up, along with a ton of images of sleeping people. It was just as weird as I remembered. However, I noticed something this time that I hadn’t over a decade ago: all the bedrooms looked different.
Now, that may not sound like much, but for a site that appeared to specialize in very low budget fetish porn, that means a lot. These productions tend to just reuse the same sets (which are usually just someone’s apartment). Here, though, every bedroom looked different. The walls were painted a different color depending on the image, some bedrooms had windows while some didn’t, and none of the bedrooms had their furniture arranged in the same way.
Maybe it was a bunch of people doing this independently in the same style? They’d take their picture, and send it here. That seemed like the most logical – and least creepy – explanation.
Morbidly fascinated by the site, I kept scrolling through it. There were dozens upon dozens of images of people sleeping, all taken in that weirdly voyeuristic way. I also noticed that there seemed to be images of teens and children sleeping too. They were clothed, but it still felt squicky as hell.
As I was scrolling, I came across a picture of a kid who had the same Spider-Man bedsheets I did as a kid. Actually, that kid had the same posters in his room that I did, and the same Bionicle figure on his nightstand that I did. With growing dread, I looked at the name under the image.
It was mine.
Ok, what the actual fuck? How did this site have this picture of me? It didn’t look like a picture my family took. It was in the same style as every other image on this site, with that same camera flash.
I looked for some sort of email or contact on the site, but found nothing. I went ahead a bit on the Wayback Machine, hoping that maybe the site would list it later on. The site only lasted until 2014, where it kept updating with new images (its last image was of a woman named Riley Ashcroft) but there was no contact info. Going back before 2011 didn’t turn up anything either.
I tried Googling the site to see if anyone had ever talked about it, and found basically nothing. It’s like no one else knew about this site. I wasn’t sure what else to do or where to even discuss something like this. I decided to try putting this weird site out of my head and hoped it’d make more sense in the morning.
The next morning, after a pretty light sleep, I checked the site on the Wayback Machine again. However, the site was no longer archived there. According to the Wayback Machine, someone had requested the site be removed.
What the hell? Was the site taken down because I looked at it? How would someone even know that?
Unless…maybe I didn’t see the site. Maybe I imagined it or mixed it up with a dream? Not sure how I’d do that, but at that moment it seemed like the best explanation. I mean, it’s not like there was any proof that any of this existed outside of my head, right?
I went about my day, trying and failing to put this entire thing out of my head. I put on some headphones and listened to a podcast to help myself sleep. I had nightmares of camera flashes.
That brings me to this morning. I saw that I got an email from someone going by “sleepyhead.” Just that name made my stomach drop. Taking a deep breath, I opened the email.
The only thing the email contained was a picture of me, taken while I slept, with that same signature camera flash. What really freaked me out was that, in the picture, I was wearing those same headphones I wore last night.