I wish I could say this was purely fiction. Unfortunately, it’s really happening and I’m completely lost as to what to do about it. I’m going to explain this one situation, but this is actually the fifth time this has happened in the past year and I’m legit scared about what is going to happen next. I cry sometimes, not from sadness, just out of pure fear and stress because I can’t talk to anybody about it. Four days ago I was meeting with a client and had to excuse myself to go to the bathroom and puke my brains out because I was holding this thing in the whole time. There is something going on with me, but I can’t explain what. It’s in fragments. I feel like a completed jigsaw puzzle that someone knocked off the table onto the floor.
I guess you could call this “chapter 1” because there’s so much more to this story, but this just happened today so I gotta get it off my chest or I will definitely go insane. I appreciate anyone reading this, because this is my only form of therapy. I just don’t know how else to deal with this.
So, I started having these dreams a few months ago. They’re more than a little disturbing, they’re actually very frightening, to the point where I’m legitimately concerned about my state of mind when I wake up. People have nightmares, or upsetting dreams, that isn’t anything new or profound. But you know when you have a dream and it just felt so real? Well, these are a little too real, like they might have actually happened, even though I know they couldn’t have. I mean, I know myself. I know what I’m capable of. I couldn’t have done the things I did in these dreams, I just couldn’t. The best way I can describe them is to tell you about the one I had last night because they’re all like this.
It’s not a long story: we were eating dinner, my wife and I, with a couple of friends, and we ran out of food on the table, so I turned around and grabbed a woman sitting near us and smashed her face with a rock. I just kept smashing it until she stopped moving. Once it was clear she was dead, her shocked eyes staring at the ceiling, I scooped her brains out of the side of her face with a tablespoon and put it on a plate on the table. And then we all started eating it. Her brains were like little chopped pieces of spam. I remember really enjoying it, we all did. It was a nice meal and her demise was entertainment to everyone. We were all enjoying ourselves, it was a good dinner. This scared the shit out of me.
This is a sick dream, I know that. I feel like a bad person for even writing it. I woke up from this and was very upset. It was gross, unprecedented, and I knew it was going to stick with me all day, maybe for the rest of my life. This was not going to be a good day because of this dream, and I knew it was going to change me forever.
Then I noticed something that I can’t unsee. There was blood on my slipper next to the bed. “There’s no way,” I thought to myself, and I got up out of bed and walked around the apartment, searching for clues, anything to make it real, just to get this horrible feeling over with, but I found nothing. When I inspected my slipper again, the blood looked maybe like something else. It was dry and brown, maybe like sauce from dinner last night because we had steak and I like my A1 sauce. I laughed at myself for a second and realized I was just, yet again, being crazy because I had a bad dream and jumping to conclusions. I’m a creative guy, this is just my mind fucking with me. I wasn’t totally awake yet, this was just a dumb misunderstanding, everything is fine, I’m not a cannabalistic murderer.
That’s when it happened. It hit me that the woman in my dream that I hit with the rock was a familiar face. I couldn’t place it at first. But she was so familiar to me, someone in my life, I just couldn’t for the life of me figure out who.
I kept thinking about her face, but every time I thought about her face I also thought about smashing it to pieces. It was starting to haunt me and I kept pushing the thought away, trying to repress it and pretend it never happened, but I just couldn’t stop. I turned on some music, started making some breakfast, and i decided to go out to my mailbox and collect my mail. Now, my landlord tends to put these handwritten signs on our inner door, usually some sort of message about the water or electricity or “To all tenants: Exterminator will be by on Sunday 6/11,” that sort of thing. This time, when I went to get my mail, I saw a sign from him that was out of the ordinary. It said, “All tenants: if you have seen or heard from Sarah in Apartment 5, please call me ASAP.” It was strange because he never brings up anyone’s name in the building, out of respect for privacy. So if he was doing this, it must be important. I got chills.
I remember Sarah. She lives up on the second floor. Apartment 5 is right above mine. She is around 40 years old, white American lady, dark straight hair that is shoulder length, sort of average looking person with a sort of half smile on her mouth. She kept to herself, I never really ran into her in the hallway, maybe like once a month I would see her. But I haven’t seen her in a few weeks, maybe longer. Honestly, I hadn’t even thought about her at all until I saw my landlord’s message on the door, so this gave me pause.
There were some other things that were cropping up in my mind, too. It occurred to me that almost a year ago I remember a guy coming into our building looking for Sarah. We were coming home from dinner, it was maybe 10:30pm on a Tuesday night, and this guy was asking us to let him into the building and said he knew Sarah, but we didn’t know who he was and he looked scraggly, unkempt, not someone we knew or trusted, so we said, “Well why don’t you call her and she’ll let you in,” and he was visibly upset about that. Well, we went in and forgot about him, but the next day the front door to the building had it’s doorknob broken and we put two and two together. He must have broken in to go see Sarah. But why? What is up with this woman? Why would this type of guy be so intent on seeing this very normal lady? My wife and I tried to figure it out, it just didn’t add up to us, but then the landlord fixed the doorknob and we forgot all about it. Life goes on.
And that’s when it hit me: was that Sarah in my dream?
The more I thought about it, yes, that was her face that I smashed apart, that was Sarah. She had dark straight hair, she had that half smile planted on her mouth… I suddenly got really cold and confused and scared. Why would she be in that role in my dream? I don’t hate her, I don’t even know her. I have no reason to have any conscious or subconscious feelings of anger or hatred towards this woman. We say hi to each other in the hallway, that’s it. I don’t know anything about that guy and I don’t know anything about this woman except that she gets lots of Amazon packages, that’s literally all I know about her. So I didn’t want to believe it at first, that this woman I murdered in my dream was her, but it really was. The more I thought about the dream, it was definitely her who I killed. And now she’s missing?
I don’t want to deal with this, honestly. I have a life, I have responsibilities. But this is consuming me to the point of agony. I keep thinking about it. I keep wondering if I had anything to do with Sarah going missing. I keep wondering how I could. And it doesn’t make sense. I had dinner with my friend last night, and his girlfriend and my wife. We had a great time together, a normal night. There’s no way I could be a killer. There’s no way I could have done what I did in that dream. My mind is starting to break thinking about this. I can’t process it right. The only thing I feel I can do is write about it here in the hopes that maybe someone out there in internet land could possibly help me figure it out, but I’m also not entirely sure I want to. I’m really legitimately messed up about this. Am I a killer? Are my friends in on it? What the fuck is going on right now?
I was going to just write this and post it, but something happened just now and it’s really freaking me out. I’m sitting on my bed, typing this on my laptop, it’s early morning, and my wife rolled over, half-asleep, eyes closed, and said, “Good morning,” with a smile.
“Good morning, baby. Are you hungry?” I said.
“Yea..” she said. “Is there any more of Sarah left?”