10/01/23
Have you ever been so tired that you dare not sit still for too long for fear that you might fall asleep? You know the scenarios I’m talking about here, like when you are at work in a meeting and you are fighting your eyes not to betray you and leave you with a pissed off manager. Or the time you come home from a long day and the health of your relationship with your girl would be shattered if you made the catastrophic mistake of dozing off whilst she was talking to you in the living room. Well, I’m that tired. Honestly that even sounds well rested from where I am now. I’ve been struggling with my sleep for a little over four weeks. At first, I didn’t think much of it, everyone has issues with their sleep at points. Everyone I spoke to echoed as such. Turn off your phone screens and computer an hour before bed, the advice from Google looked suspiciously like it was implanted directly from my mother. I half expected the results to tell me I would get square eyes too if I kept watching computer screens all day. Nonetheless, I implemented the advice. I implemented plenty of other strategies too. I’ve put up black out curtains to prevent all natural light from entering my bedroom. I’ve bought little foam earplugs to silence any noises that might disturb me. None of this has made much of a difference. I went to the Doctors about it last week, and at first, they didn’t really take me seriously. They mostly brushed it off and it was only when I practically begged them for help that they referred me to an online therapy resource. Doctors can’t just give out pills anymore it seems. No, my problem would have to have gone on a lot longer before they would even consider it. I’m keeping up with their therapy app. Normally I would consider meditation stuff kinda useless, but I’ll try most anything right now.
The waitress passes me and asks if I want anything else to order. I’m sat writing this too you in a café. It is winter, and so it is dark outside despite it not being particularly late. Stuff’s more expensive here, but I feel bad using the space for multiple hours doing my work without having the courtesy of ordering something every once in a while. I ask her for a glass of Fanta. Normally I would enjoy a cup of tea, or a coke if I wanted a fizzy drink. But I stopped drinking those weeks ago. Too much caffeine. The café is small and independent. This suits me greatly, as it is both mostly empty and in the less walked street of town. There is a desk area that looks out of the wide glass window onto the street and periodically I look up at someone passing, taking a shortcut. The path doesn’t permit cars which adds to the peace. I thank the waitress for the drink and allow the bubble to scratch down my throat. In my mind the drink perks me up and gives me enough alertness to keep writing in a placebo sense. I suppose you want to know what my story actually is. The reason my sleep is so disturbed. The truth is, I’m not sure. But my investigations into my tiredness lead me to discover something terrifying. I watched the video over this morning, and I haven’t been back to apartment since. I’m so deprived I still wonder if it was just some kind of delusion. A sleepless hallucination meant to taunt me into further sleeplessness in its cruelty.
I first started by recording my snoring using an app. It purported to be able to tell if you had certain sleep conditions by your recordings. After a few days of this I was cleared of any potential sleep apnoea, although at points my breathing was deep, ragged, and just weird. Not enough of an explanation since I was still sleeping well without waking from what it sounded like. I was at a loss at this point. The weird part of it all is that I was able to get to sleep with no issues. I fall asleep so easily I’m sure many people would even be jealous. Yet no matter how much time I allocate to sleeping I always wake up drowsy and unrefreshed. The quality of my sleep must be rock bottom. Short of buying sleeping pills online, I was left with only one other option.
Yesterday evening I set up my webcam. I fixed it to the top of my computer monitor and aimed it towards my bed. My desk was on the other side of the room, meaning that I should have had a decent view of me sleeping. I plugged in a small nightlight next to my bed so there was just enough light to see me. I don’t know what I expected to see. Excessive tossing and turning, sleepwalking maybe. Just trying something else and ticking that off the list would do.
A light misty drizzle begins outside the café now. I see a man lightly jogging down the path, trying to cover his head with his jacket. Heading in the direction of the bus stop. The same bus stop I got off of first thing this morning. I virtually sprinted out of my apartment getting to the stop well before the first bus. I’m glad it didn’t rain whilst I waited this morning. I look around me in the café and there are only a couple other people here this late. An old man sits drinking coffee dressed in a knitted jumper, still wearing his overcoat. A much younger woman sits across from him, laughing and smiling. Their relationship and tone seem to indicate that this must be his daughter. Granddaughter possibly. There is young guy behind the counter browsing his phone. He has some unfortunate teenage acne gracing his lower cheeks and wears glasses that seem to embrace the stereotypical nerdy look. My eyes catch the waitress and I forget its socially inappropriate to stare at people too long. She offers me a polite smile as if to ask
“Are you okay?”
She is certainly used to ‘writers’ sitting in the café hours at a time on their laptops, but I’ve pushed this definition far. Having been in here since they opened, I try and avoid checking the time. It’s anxiously close to their closing hours.
I woke this morning a little earlier than usual with anticipation to check the footage I had recorded from the previous night. I would say that I felt drowsy, and I did, but this was no more than I had experienced each day previous. I yawned, approached the webcam and paused it. The runtime was a little over seven hours. I didn’t watch it straight away. Instead, I went about my usual morning routine. Brushing my teeth, taking a shit, showering, styling my hair, and getting dressed. I remember each of these in key detail since every moment I’ve been sitting in this café I wished I skipped them all and rushed out in some joggers and a shirt.
The recording starts innocuously enough. Me getting into bed and trying to sleep. It seems to take me about twenty minutes to do so. I guess you could call it performance anxiety. I skip ahead to the thirty-minute mark, and there I am. Sleeping soundly on my back. The audio on the camera isn’t the best, its just a shitty webcam after all, but from what I can hear my breathing is pretty normal at this point. I press fast forward on the video. I see my chest rise and fall rapidly and my body move through the natural motions of sleep in that comical fast forward of movement. I skip ahead to the hour thirty mark. I’ve turned over once or twice now, and coughed at least once. Not exactly sleep diagnosis territory yet. Once I get to the two hour mark I pause the video again and begin making some decaf tea alongside a bowl of porridge. I have plugged the camera into my laptop at this point and have moved to watching the footage in the kitchen. The anticipation of the video has mostly faded. I get to three hours realising that I’m just sleeping normally. I half expected to see myself in a half-awake state, explaining my terrible sleep.
That’s when it all goes dark.
The entire screen is sent into a fuzzy blackness you get when the camera cannot pick up enough light. This began at the three-hours forty-eight-minute mark. I anxiously waited for the screen to come back on. At the three hours fifty-one-minute mark the darkness faded., allowing an image to manifest once again. I could no longer see the whole of the bed. Blocking my view was the back of something standing not far Infront of the camera. I could not tell who or what it was. It was tall and the nightlight was mostly blocked meaning the figure was obscured. But the humanoid shape was undeniable. And it was looking at me. Staring at me. It continued to stay there, unmoving for hours. Just watching me sleep. Chills run through me as I type this to you. When I say I ran out of that apartment, I mean I’m pretty sure it was the fastest I have ever moved in my life. I don’t know if there was anything in there, I hadn’t heard or seen anything and I had been in every room of the apartment. I had to unlock the door as I panicked my way out of it. Once I was at the bus stop, I started the video again. It continued to stay there unmoving. It was present for many hours, body slightly swaying and moving but rooted to the spot. I skimmed along until the screen went dark yet again at six-hours fifty-seven minutes. It came back five minutes later and there I was. Sleeping soundly. Alone. Shortly after I woke up and moved to the camera, oblivious the intruder that was there only part of an hour before.
I’m looking at the time at the bottom of the laptop right now. The café closes soon and the waitress has given me a heads up. I’ve struggled not to burst into tears. I have some sort of explanation for why my sleep has been so terrible, but it just makes me never want to sleep again. Hopefully typing this out will allow me to gather my thoughts. I have decided that I will go to the police in person first thing tomorrow. For tonight my best friend has said that I can crash at his place. I can’t imagine I’ll get much sleep but things should be safe at his place. I’ll make sure to update everyone tomorrow with what the police say. I just hope they don’t send me to a doctor thinking I’ve gone mad from lack of sleep.
11/01/23
It is so much worse than I could have imagined. I’m currently sat in a side room at the police station with my friend, with uneaten breakfast sat on the desk in front of me. We are both sat in shocked silence after watching the second video. So last night, I decided to set up my camera again just in case. But this time, I put it next to me on the bed so that it was facing away from me. If there was some dark entity watching me at night and I wasn’t crazy, I figure I could capture it. I believed that there could be nothing there in my friend’s house but it gave a little more piece of mind. It took me well into the early hours to fall asleep. I was so scared to do so, even at my friend’s house. But in the end the tiredness took me forcibly. Watching the footage was a similar story to the night before. All was normal as expected. Until the darkness came. The minutes passed and then the light reanimated the picture. I felt as though I was going to choke on nothing as I registered a figure standing looking at the camera. It wasn’t a dark entity as I had been thinking.
It was me.
I was standing at the edge of the bed looking towards the camera. I had no memory of this. It must be some kind of sleepwalk. The worst of it was my face. It was contorted into an innate terror, the muscles of my face seemingly twisting as they had never before. As I type, I’m sure my face currently has a similar expression. Police are investigating both mine and my friend’s home. The video continued until the darkness came, and then I was back in bed.
The camera was close enough to pick up sound this time.
While I was stood petrified in an non-lucid state, the camera picked up sound from the space in my bed next to where I would have been sleeping.
DEEP, RAGGED, INHUMAN BREATHING.