Around September of last year I started taking a new medication to help me sleep. I’ve pretty much always known I was narcoleptic. Narcolepsy is known for making you fall asleep at random times during the day. But narcolepsy doesn’t just affect the day. I take one medication during the day to keep me awake, but I take a different one at night to help me stay asleep. And it’s since starting this new nighttime medication that the dream started.
This dream started in different locations, like most dreams do. Sometimes I was at the mall or sometimes I was in Mr. White’s freshman English classroom with the thematic elements of Lord if the Flies painted out on the walls. It honestly didn’t matter where the dream started, cause the scene always changed to my rental house on Hemlock Street.
I rented a small two bedroom house on the edge of town. I had a little privacy, seeing as the house doesn’t directly sit on the road behind a row of trees.
In my dream, when it changed to my house, it never felt off at first. Whoever was in the previous scene would come with me, but slowly the mood changed. One moment my college roommate and a soap star are sitting in class with me and the next, we are in my house, looking for something. I’ve never figured out what it was. It always started pretty calm. At first we are lifting couch cushions and sifting through my junk drawer but everytime a new location is searched it only becomes more frantic. Books were pulled from my bookshelves and torn apart page by page. Someone always takes a knife to the couch, ripping, shredding the upholstery, then pulling out fistfuls of stuffing. In the last diary entry we made it to punching holes in the plaster walls before I turn and look out the window. I always turn and look out the window and it’s always dusk and I always can just make out a face peering in. Watching.
Then I wake up.
After the second or third time having this dream, I started the journal. I thought I could show it to my doctor. Since I started writing the journal, I noticed it was the only dream I was having. Of course missed some entries, but there were definitely enough of them to notice the pattern.
But two months ago, something different happened. The dream was the same: we started in a bowling alley, using balled up t-shirts to knock over sets of Russian nesting dolls, when the location flipped and we were suddenly back in my house. The searching began. This time as I was throwing my set of bowls across the room I looked over to the window and the man was there. I made out the eyeless smile on his face and even in the half light I knew he saw me looking at him—then I woke up. But I wasn’t in bed. This time I was standing in my kitchen, broken shards of my little blue teapot scattered around my feet.
During the night I had gotten up and walked into my kitchen and dropped my teapot on the floor as if even my body was helping my dream-self search the house.
I didn’t mess around. Instead of going back to sleep I pulled out my laptop and express shipped a small self-install security camera set to my house. My idea at the time was to be able to show my doctor, it was a bata meditation and heavily monitored. I had my boyfriend come over in the following couple of days to help me install the cameras.
Then I started recording. I didn’t wake up with a dream that first night, but I watched the recording anyway.
The house was quiet. I didn’t move a lot in my sleep. It was all pretty normal and I thought maybe I had overreacted, but then at three AM the bathroom window slowly slid open from the outside, and a man stepped in. He wandered about my house. Looking through the fridge, fluffing the pillows on the couch but then he walked to my room, to watch me sleep. He stood there for twenty minutes, just watching me. Then he turned, looking directly into the camera.
I know it’s too hard to believe, but I know I have seen that man before.
The one in my dreams. The one who stares at me from the window. He had the same eye-less smile.
I slammed the laptop shut and called my boyfriend. I slept at his place the next night and had a normal dreamless sleep. My first one in weeks.
I brought the footage to the police the next day and they sent someone out to watch my house. Suggested new locks on my windows, or perhaps moving all together since I am only renting.
I wasn’t sure what to do. The man never showed up in my cameras again and my lease was up in a couple months. So I decided to wait.
Last month, the dream came back and I found shoe prints outside of my bedroom window. I unofficially moved out after that. Staying at my boyfriend’s place while still paying rent. But as luck would have it, a water pipe burst in one for the walls, and the Landlord ended my contract early.
I thought that would be the last I would hear of my little rental house on Hemlock Street. But my boyfriend sent me a news clip this morning. I’ve watched it three times now.
In my old house after the water damage, the floors had to be pulled up, and beneath the floors in a tight crawl space, the contractor found the bodies of three women, and the shards of a blue teapot laid out next to the third.
I am writing an email to my doctor now to change medications, but I don’t know if that will be enough. What if the smiling man finds me again?