Night Terrors
When Reddit user casuallynoted was four, he experienced night terrors at the children’s hospital he was in. And although each encounter was slightly different, there was always one creepy looking figure stalking him in all of them and he was convinced he was going to die every time.
“When I was four, I had an infection that caused my lymph nodes in my neck to swell up badly, and I wasn’t able to get it checked out until it was really bad. I ended up being sent to the hospital, where I stayed for around a month. I don’t remember a whole lot of it but I’ve seen pictures of me hooked up to an IV, it was a children’s hospital so it wasn’t bad at all, I remember playing TMNT the arcade game, it was fun.
After I got back though, I began having these insane night terrors, just about every night with only a few exceptions. They would always follow the same pattern, with minor variations (location, small details, etc.), and the same being was present in all of them: I would be somewhere with people that I knew (Friend’s birthday party, kitchen with my family, at school), and for one reason or another, everyone would leave the room.
Once I’m alone, I look around and realize that every room that’s connected to the one I’m in is pitch black. After I had had quite a few of these, I became used to them and realized that it had to do with the creature in these dreams. He hated light, any source of it would hurt him in some way, and so he had the power to absorb or cut off the light, even rays of moonlight that would pour into the room from the windows. From this point, I would do one of two things: If I walked out into dark hallway/room/etc., he would travel in the darkness, be right behind me, and spend his time giving me a slow, detailed, and agonizing death.
Now, these started when I was four. He would do everything under the sun, things I hadn’t heard of yet. I didn’t watch horror movies. There was one where he stabbed me all over my body and held me down, whispering in my ear as I died from blood loss, another where he murdered me, others where he would tie me up and suffocate me until I begged for him to kill me. Every single time that he killed me, I felt a strange almost tingling feeling in my back that quickly spread across my spine and erupted into pain. I can’t describe it in any other way except that it’s extremely painful.
Alternatively, if I stayed in the lit room, I would watch, my heart pounding, as the lights flickered off, and eventually he would be there. Maybe not right away but he would always be there. Sometimes he would kill me, I would wake up from bed, and he would be right there again. I never actually woke up.
Around maybe age 6, I decided to begin using a night light. Not because I was afraid of the dark, I was fine sleeping without one before, but I realized that if I woke up out of bed and that night light was off, I needed to shock myself out of the dream as quickly as I possibly could. I kept using this method for a while, and if I had a particularly bad terror the night before, would just decide not to sleep. I had nights where I would stay in the computer room with the lights on all night because I was afraid of falling asleep.
My mom did try to help with these, she saw me waking up crying and sweaty and obviously disturbed, but how does a young kid explain the things I saw when they don’t know the words for them themselves? It took a long time before she was able to fully understand what was going on. So at exactly age 10, I had one of the best days of my life. I remember waking up at 4AM that day, which was definitely strangely early. I know because I checked the alarm clock to see what shows were on (it was a Saturday morning). I got up and turned on the TV, figuring that I probably couldn’t go back to sleep (I was never the best at actually getting back to bed once I woke up early like that), so I might as well stay up and catch some of the early Saturday morning cartoons.
Suddenly my vision started to mess up a bit, and I felt myself losing control of my body right on the couch. I began dreaming, but I could still see the living room if I focused on it, my eyes were definitely open in real life. I had the first part of a dream in which I met a girl dressed in white, and suddenly snapped out of it back to the living room. I got up, completely freaked out (I still haven’t heard of anything like this being possible, and I’ve been looking for years. The closest thing I could find was sleep paralysis), and I got up to go to my parents room because I had no idea what else to do. As I was walking there, I froze once again and the dream continued, same weird half and half dream/reality vision, this happened about four more times until I laid down in my parents bed and had the last part of the dream.
The girl in the dream promised me that I wouldn’t have one of those night terrors ever again, and that we would see each other again when I turned 15. Fast forward so many years, I’m 19 now. I never heard back from her at 15, but the dreams stopped for the longest time. I almost thought they were gone. But about a month ago, I began to have them again out of the blue. No indication as to why I’m having them again. Same creature, except he’s younger now. He used to be around 30-ish, now he’s maybe 17. I’ve learned lucid dream control techniques in the years that I have had regular dreams, and attempted to use them twice to try to kill him instead, and both times, I felt almost like a shocking feeling in my brain and heard a static sound, and then it was a false awakening where he was there again, over my bed.
The first time that happened, I remember trying to do a reality check, and he put a hand over my mouth and whispered in my ear “If you try that again, I swear you’re going to regret it.” I’d once posted on Dreamviews about all of this to try to get an opinion but I didn’t get too much back on it, so this is my creepy life story. There are a few other strange experiences with dreaming that may have something to do with all of this, but my post is way too long as is, so I’m just going to leave it like this. If anyone has any clue as to how I might be able to stop these dreams, just let me know. They’ve become progressively more violent now that they’ve started again, and he is usually with people who I have had intense negative experiences with in the past now (like my dad).”