#29 The Dead Visit at Night
When I was in high school, my friend Phil ended his life. I never really knew the specifics. All I know is that he ended it at one of the local parks.
Fast forward six years or so and I’m asleep in bed next to my wife. I’m having a fairly normal dream. I was at a store doing something or another, I can’t really remember the specifics of the beginning of the dream. What I do remember is running into Phil in the store. When I saw him, everything got super weird. He actually looked like Phil, not like in most dreams where people will be certain people but not look like them. Nope, he actually looked like Phil.
He looked at me, smiled, and said, “Hey man.” At that moment the dream got crystal clear. I asked him if it was really him and he said it was. He told me we were going to hang out for a bit and after that the dream got even more lucid. He showed me how to make stuff and generally we just messed around doing dream things.
Suddenly, I realized that my dream was coming to an end. I turned to him and asked him if I was about to wake up. He said “yes” and said he “had fun coming to hang out with me for a bit.” I don’t know why, but I asked, “So why did you do it man? Why did you end your life?”
The way he answered chilled me to my core. Not necessarily what he said, just how he said it. He replied, “My girlfriend cheated on me, man.” He said it like it was a question he had answered before. Like when someone asks you what your first job was, you’ve responded with the exact same sentence so many times that it just falls off of your tongue effortlessly. Except I had known his girlfriend and they were the kind of couple that everyone admired.
I said, “Sophie? Sophie cheated on you?”
His eyes lit up like he realized he was talking to someone that actually knew him in life. He said, “Yeah, man, Sophie cheated on me.” We gave each other a hug and he wished me well. I woke up and felt super strange. It was somewhere around 2 or 3 in the morning. I closed my eyes and thought, Phil, if that was really you, I need you to give me a sign. No sooner than when that thought finished, my phone started ringing. It came across as an unknown number and only rang twice. I knew I wasn’t dreaming anymore because my wife woke up and sleepily asked me who was trying to call me so late. To this day when I think about that story, I get chills.
Credit: schumi0221