Monday November 13th 2028 - 11:27
The nightmare would strike me from time to time. It left. Left for years. That night was the first time it ever came back.
When I was younger I would get struck by night terrors, the kind of thing that seems ridiculous once you wake up but during the experience it can cause fear on levels impossible to quite explain with mere words. It's as if you can feel a lack of control at all times, as if secret invisible strings are pulling back at you, keeping you within whatever hellhole you found yourself within.
I would awaken screaming, as is the night terror experience. The dreams themself wouldn’t be the strangest part, often they would be normal, but would come with a side effect of extreme fear. I remember the smells, I remember the colour palette, I even remember the way my muscles tensed over the duration of some of the most vivid things I’ve ever seen. Things that can’t necessarily be written down. The smell would be that of rotten fruit and perspiration, like the smell of crushed peppers forced into nostrils after exercising too hard, your muscles tense at the vein, enough to pass out from a paper cut, shaking hard. It was as if you had tasted a drug, one that caused every sense to be amplified, with the side effect of white noise ringing across everything. And orange. I remember vibrant bright orange, the brightest, warmest colours possible spilling across the view.
But the strangest dreams were the ones that repeated. Sometimes the exact same. Sometimes with changes.
I remember running down a school hallway, from some childish fear, goblins, ghouls or others of the sort. The lights would flicker and the rooms would stretch out. To get to the end of one hallway was a Sisyphean gamble, for all you knew the next would be twice as long, but you could be sure of one thing: the hallways never ended. Sometimes there would be others with me, parents, or friends. But we would split, somehow. Always getting split up. Normally by accident, I would fall or they would run off in fear not realising I was left. But a few times it would be intentional, a malicious act that would occur in the hopes of holding me back, stopping whatever horror was chasing us so that they would get a head start.
But the ending.
The ending was what changed in the strangest way.
Every time I awoke, it was in a strange void, brightest in the center where I was stuck, a sort of vignette everywhere else. The light defied the rules of physics. Nothing was shining on the floor, there was no spotlight, just a surrounding light coming from nowhere. I was on the floor in the middle, with the vision of some sort of omnipotent being. I was nowhere and everywhere all at once. I was on the floor, but only really in spirit. There was no form I took on. In spite of that, there was also a strange paralysis. As if I couldn’t move anywhere, could barely turn my non-existent head.
At some point I would awake from the void.
But one day, in came the pile.
There was a doll on the floor of the void, a strange porcelain doll, the kind of thing you’d come across clearing out an old house, and throw away out of fear. Their strange uncanny eyes were always too far apart, not to mention the unnaturality of such a small human made object taking on the human form in such an abstract way. The doll was naked, and didn’t appear to have hair. It may have had genitalia implying a gender but I never noticed. At that age I don’t think I’d have thought to do such a thing.
But the next time it happened, there were two. I thought nothing of it.
But it continued.
The next time, it was more. I don’t quite remember how many, five perhaps. And then as time went on it increased.
Only a few dreams later there were too many to count, the dolls overcrowding the void until they flooded the entire illuminated area. You had to pick between the darkness and the porcelain throne that had been laid out for you.
Such a thing continued for months. Despite the dreams probably only lasting a matter of minutes in the real world, they managed to feel as if they lasted years. It was as if I had been stuck inside a hell of my own brain’s making. And then I would have to awake and realise that one night I would have to go through it again. My parents had to feed me melatonin from my fear of sleep. But it would always return. But one night it did so for the last time. And that is what I think of whenever the pile comes to mind.
I woke in the void, and for the first time this was the entire dream. The pile always acted as an ending to another nightmare, like some kind of running joke my brain was playing on me, but not now, it started back where I had left off. And the dolls were gone. For the first time in what must have been a few months, it was simply a void again, except for one thing, a chair in the middle of the room. Part of me was compelled to sit within it, but I was paralysed as ever. I sat for what felt like an eternity, but of course I later woke up, screaming as always. But from then on it stopped. It was as if the chair had stolen the dolls, stolen the pile.
...
After Ma told me of what happened to Billy, I didn’t speak for the rest of the afternoon. I simply escaped upstairs, to discover my room was the same as when I had left. I suppose that was a display of my parents' respect… or wealth. I stayed in bed, going through some DVDs and CDs on my old shelf from my teenage years. A ton of movies, personal videos of me and friends shoddily transferred onto 240p home media, band albums, most pirated onto blank jewel cases, and of course the custom albums from our unnamed band. We had no name so we just called ourselves “The Unnamed”. For some reason I thought that was smart.
Eventually, whilst trying to get a CD-ROM of Myst to launch on my laptop, clearly too new for it, I simply closed the lid and went to sleep.
I don’t particularly recall any dreams that night other than the return of the pile. I at first assumed its return was simply a manifestation of stress restarting an old, forgotten dream. I had continued to get nightmares, but never terrors. I find people mix up the two, but I can’t stress the difference. A nightmare is a dream that leaves you unsettled and upset. A terror is a panic, a state of abject horror in which you cannot be comfortable or calmed no matter what. And they hadn’t touched me in over a decade. But there I was, back in the void, albeit not quite on the pile. Even in its absence, I knew I was there. Part of me simply knew that this was the same place, but the chair was gone. A strange musty smell appeared in the air, as if out of a fog machine, slowly seeping its way into my nostrils against my own control. I tried to move, tried to thrash around and get some kind of movement, but I couldn’t move. I couldn’t even scream, I had to sit, the colour slowly seeped in, filling the room with shades of sickening orange and green, not dark, but bright, vibrant, almost neon to the point of giving you a headache. And then the control came back. For the first time in my 19 years I was in the void, in full control. Able to move, get up, and take it in. I was naked, and the floor was dirty, almost oily. The musty smell seeped in further, and I fell to the floor outside of my own knowledge, as if my mind was on a delay, only taking in my position after the fact, convulsing on the floor, freezing cold.
But then I was awake.
I’m sure you understand me when I say that we know when we are awake, but don’t always know when we are dreaming. When you are awake there is a certainty, a grasp on your surroundings, vision, state of mind and senses that applies the logic that the world you possess is true, that you can trust your senses in addition to your brain, rather than beyond it.
I was awake.
There was no doubt of that.
My vision knew it and so did the rest of the senses.
Which is what made the room so strange. Because it was my room, only the chair was in here. The chair from the void, sitting directly in front of my bed, possessed by somebody. The room was dark but I thought that I could make it out.
“...Billy?”