I don’t know if this story even deserves to be on this sub, I didn’t encounter any kind of supernatural being or monster, and I don’t THINK I’m in an alternate dimension. But this has been eating me up inside ever since and I’m going to go insane if I can’t tell SOMEONE what happened, to help make sense of it all or even just to vent.
Earlier this week, Monday, I was in my lecture theater, we were presenting our assignments and I had gone second out of a class of thirty. My work usually only starts at 1am so I’m quite a late sleeper. The 9-12 Monday class always messes with my sleep schedule, getting me up earlier than I’m meant to. It’s safe to say I’m not a morning person.
Regardless, watching 28 people present after me three hours before I usually even wake up really took the life out of me, around 9:30, I felt myself falling asleep at my desk.
I put my head down
Felt myself drifting off
I really should have just gone to sleep.
But I shook myself awake.
-
As soon as I looked up the silence was deafening, several students looked in my direction, staring at me with shallow, silently judgemental eyes. The student presenting his work had stopped talking aswell, he was stood at the front of the class standing silently, looking directly at me with dead eyes in dead silence.
Needless to say, I was violently comfortable. I realize falling asleep during someone’s presentation was rude asf, but that was NOT the reaction I was expecting. But if I wasn’t uncomfortable before, what my lecturer said to me next sent shivers down my spine.
“You aren’t supposed to be awake right now…”
The hell is that supposed to mean? I had no idea what to make of it so I brushed it off as a joke, like I suppose it makes sense? You see someone falling asleep so you make a joke about them being awake? I don’t know. It’s weird. I don’t care. I needed to cut the silence so I mustered up a soft, “sorry.”
The student went back to presenting, his work was fine, idk it seemed normal. The next student got called up from the list, they presented the same, all be it with worse work, I thought it was all going back to normal.
The next student got up, staring directly at me with judgemental piercing eyes. She stood in front of the class and her presentation played behind her. Poorly thought out white slides with Arial text and no images. She didn’t say a word… no one did. She stared directly at me the entire time… standing stiff like a mannequin, eyes locked onto mine while her ‘presentation’ played behind her… she received no feedback, her friends did not whisper to her as she sat down.
Finally, the lecturer stood, walked up to the front of class. “That’s all we have time for today, class is dismissed.” It wasn’t even 10… we had over 2 hours of class to go, and over half the class still had to present. I can’t have disrupted the class THAT much by dozing off right?
A few people got up and left the room, a few stayed seated. I left as quickly as possible.
I saw maybe three people on my way out, the silence was following me through the halls. The usually bustling university halls were no longer full of young people laughing, or even working. Just a handful of silently seated individual students, staring blankly at a laptop or an empty notebook.
I wanted to leave. I figured just getting to work a couple of hours early would be better than lurking amongst these desolate halls, so I went to the bus stop. I stood there, at an empty bus stop, the busses usually come to this stop every 15 minutes, they did not.
Even the street felt uncomfortable, a car passed me maybe every few minutes as I waited… this city is supposed to have a million people. Yet every time I had the “luxury” of seeing life I was greeted with a slow walking pedestrian walking on the other side of the road, or worse, a glaring face, eyeing me down from a dark window. I had never felt so alone, so confused. I couldn’t shake the feeling I was being watched, even when there was no one in sight, which had become more often than not at this point.
I waited there for two hours, two hours that felt like they stretched on for days, empty soulless eyes watching me from dark corners, looming people stood like soldiers in distant windows.
-
At exactly 12:00, bang on midday, this all changed. The bell went off from the university behind me, a loud and annoying reminder that screams to all the doe-eyed students that class has ended. I heard laughter again, a businessman almost bumped into me entranced by his phone, a car screeched over a puddle and threw water on a passerby. A mother with a screeching baby pushed a pram up the hill.
Five minutes later my bus drove around the corner, on time as usual, even if the last eight had seemingly missed their cue. At this point I was paranoid, more than that I was visibly shaking, I had no idea what was going on but I knew it wasn’t right, and I’d read enough horror story’s to know NOT to trust this bus.
Against my better judgment, I boarded it. To my surprise it was fine, the bus quickly filled with racing students in a rush to get home. Everyone thanked the bus driver on the way out, outside the window I saw life again, we even got stuck in a traffic jam.
I called in sick to work and went home to sleep, but I couldn’t bring myself to.
It’s been several days, nothing like that has happened since, I don’t catch people staring at me, the streets feel as alive as ever. But that doesn’t change the fact that it happened. It doesn’t change the fact that for two hours of my life I was faced with a city that finally slept and demanded I rested alongside it.
It doesn’t change the fact that for two hours of my life, I wasn’t supposed to be awake.