I keep seeing the figure that is giving me nightmares. Strange, weird dreams that don’t feel like my own. It’s hard to explain, but some of my dreams… they feel alien. Full of awful stuff. Friends dying. Dismemberment. Hell. A lot of them I don’t remember, but a few stuck with me. I remember waking from a particularly disturbing one, one in which I witnessed the murder of disabled children, and didn’t immediately open my eyes. I was upset by my nightmare and just needed a moment. I don’t know why, but I peeked my eyes open slowly. And I saw it. A silhouetted figure standing right by my bed. I sat up quickly to find myself alone, but I was sure it was there. It got me thinking about the other strange occurrences. Waking from nightmares with long scratches along my arm, or seeing floating balls of light briefly in the dark.
I don’t think I would have been a believer in the supernatural if I hadn’t seen so much of it. Things moving without being touched; presences that sat beside me. Thumping. Scratching. But I saw this one. And I just saw it again, in the corner of my eye. This time, it isn’t nightmares it’s bringing, but insomnia. Something I suffered from for years. I thought I had finally gotten over it. I moved cities, began sleeping through the night. Rarely dreamt. But it’s changing now. I’m beginning to suspect it has been the same thing following me, and it’s found me again. I heard a strange sound a moment ago. Like an old man with a smokers cough, hacking through a tin can. I’m trying to sleep, but dawn is almost here. I’d forgotten how long the hours in the dark dragged on. Hopefully I can get a little bit of rest before I need to get up for work.
Well. I managed a few minutes of “sleep.” And holy shit. I experienced the worst sleep paralysis of my life. I had moved to the couch, and from my bedroom, where I saw the shifting and heard the cough, an inky black figure emerged. But… it didn’t move like a person, and it didn’t keep a consistent shape. It flicked all around the room, like some sort of shadowy goo or something, changing size and taking on very odd and disturbing forms. It changed its bodily proportions in unnerving ways. Elongated arms on a too skinny torso. Bent up legs with too many joints. It felt like it was taunting me. It got right up to my face. I kept trying to call out, but I couldn’t move. It was one of the strangest instances of sleep paralysis I’ve had in my life, because I kept “waking up.” I would awaken and imagine I was charging into my bedroom and getting under the covers with my wife, explaining to her what I saw over and over, only to “wake up” on the couch again. It happened at least a dozen times, but it was so vivid, I had an incredibly difficult time discerning what was real. I would touch things, hum things, and look at things trying to make sure I had finally woken up, and it always seemed like I had. Until I was back on the couch. Such an awful loop. I think whatever has been haunting me got mad that I wrote down my experience. Even as I’m writing now, in the bathroom, I hear banging. Nobody in my apartment is awake yet. Maybe it’s the neighbors, but it sounds like it’s coming from inside the apartment. It always does.