Piercing wind whispers lowly,

Too scared to make a sound.

Tip-toeing feet move slowly,

Silence growing too loud.

The wooden door creaks open,

Bunch of bodies gather ’round.

Making out murmurs spoken,

“Missing Person: Found”

Weaving through the masses,

To approach the fallen chair.

On the floor rests a lasses,

Same eyes, same nose, same hair.

Rope dangles from the ceiling,

Someone had to put it there.

Such an event to be revealing,

Of all who truly care.

There seems to only be a minute left,

Before it comes time to depart.

Plentiful faces all bereft,

Longing for a restart.

Perhaps if I’d known before,

I’d have a change of heart.

But now I lie on the floor,

Forever torn apart.

If only the clocks would reset,

This could be a dream.

Having saw my loved ones wept,

My actions appear extreme.

“Give me one more chance”

But it’s too late

For them

To hear

my screams

Blades of grass tower over me. So tall. Too tall. They wave in unfelt winds, encroaching from all sides.

But it is not what causes the rustling.

I walk through corridors of vegetation. Overhead light flickers from crying street lamps, leaking, dripping, unseen tears. The hair on my neck stands up. Goosebumps make me shiver.

But not because of the lamps.

I see them in a field ahead. Their noses pressed to the cold, hard dirt, they shuffle on all fours, endlessly tracing paths in a field of arid, yellowed hay, faces shrouded by black cowls. They snuffle as they search in circles, foraging like mad boars, for treasures unknown. I want to get away from them, but therein lies the problem.

I am forced to pass them.

They pay me no heed, it seems. Their sniffs and rustling are loud, and I am small, so small.

Suddenly they all stop. An icy shiver runs down my spine in the absence of sound. The are still, only turning their heads, back and forth, back and forth, as if deciding on where the intruder is. I move through the grass, and they continue their perpetual crawls. I realise at that point, the futility of running.

There is no key. No key to escaping.

I stoop low and start searching, hands parting grass, face close to the ground. Perhaps it is here? Or... there?

Based on a recurring childhood dream.

My eyes slowly open. The pressure in the room feels increased and thick. Strange yet familiar.

Am I asleep or am I awake?

My eyes feel heavy, and my vision is blurry. I go to lift my head from the pillow beneath it and I am paralyzed in place. Unable to overcome the gravity that holds me down.

I can feel my respirations start to pick up pace and my heart rate increases.

Am I alone in my own bedroom?

Why does it feel darker than usual?

It is so dark I can't see the corner of the room out of the corner of my watering eyes. I try to move them to look around since my head is unwilling. Is that a shadow lurking or the figure of something dark and sinister lingering?

Maybe I should scream for help.

My mouth opens and I push air from my lungs through my vocal cords to formulate a sound, but nothing comes out. Are my ears unhearing or is my voice gone?

Completely detached from the control centers of my brain I feel helpless. My arms and legs are like appendages without bones and muscles to provide movement. Becoming nothing more than sacks of flesh hanging lifelessly at my sides.

I manage to grunt and pull myself up against the weight of the presence that now seems closer than it was before.

Something is behind me.

I feel a warm burst of breath hit my neck and all the little hairs on my body are now standing at attention. My pupils dilate. The sympathetic nervous system responsible for flooding my system with epinephrine to elicit the response to flee fails to free me from this frozen state. I am motionless and silent as my mind screams and my heart races.

I am trapped in this fleshy prison of my own body while a demonic presence moves freely around the room. Taunting my every thought.

I again attempt to yell, and a small groan escapes my lips, but not enough to amount to a cry for help. Every muscle contracted, every nerve twisted with tension. I am exhausted from fighting the force that lies upon me and now without a fight left in me I am the perfect victim.

The prey of a predator I couldn't even see.

My friend comes to pick me up for school, it's not summer and it's Montana so it's dark outside. She has a friend with her, I sit in the back. We go to the gas station by my house and when we leave we're going in the opposite direction of school. We're driving down a hill by my parents house, brickyard hill to be exact, and the headlights go out. My eyes try to focus on the darkness past the windshield. The headlights come back on. Standing, right in front of the car, is a baby and it's head is cocked to the side. The car swerves violently and we start rolling over the side of the hill. We're going to die, I know we're going to die and all I can think is that baby is too young to stand on its own.

"What do you think of the property?"

We stood atop a hill just shy of the Blue Ridge. If I used my imagination, I could see the outline of mountains that held parts of the Appalachian Trail. In the winter, I probably wouldn't have to imagine it.

The realtor squatted down, facing back the way we'd come. He fiddled with a twig, his mind on joining his friends for the back nine.

I idly wiped sweat from my forehead. It wasn't particularly hot, and the hardwoods provided good shade, but it had been a long walk up the old gravel road that wound up and around the hillside. The road had been cut over a century before, and was fairly maintained ever since, but no great care had been taken to keep it completely free from deadfall or underbrush. So, we hiked.

The only people in recent memory who had regularly been on this hilltop were seasonal hunters from the extended family of the original owners.

The land had been granted to a German family who fought in 1812. It made no nevermind to the government that the space had already been claimed by a tribe of natives centuries before Oglethorpe arrived in the colonies.

For the first time in history, the land was being sold instead of given or stolen.

I glanced over at the old homesite. Only a few signs of foundation remained, but where the house once stood was clear.

Also clear to me, and unseen by the impatient salesman, was the figure of a woman standing near what was once the hearth of the original structure. In the late evening sun, she was dappled in shadow and dark promise.

The sweat on my forehead suddenly felt cold on my fingertips, and my hands were clammy.

I stared at her, and she stared through me.

My voice, when I found it, was a hundred miles away to my ears. My throat felt tight, like I was speaking for the first time after several days of tonsillitis. My steps, when I finally took them, were light, even airy.

"Let's talk about it in the car," I managed to say, and the sound of my ragged breathing and pounding heartbeat filled my ears. I reached the agent's new Land Rover a full twenty seconds before he caught up, and I was tugging on the locked handle before he could let us inside.

"You ok, man?" He asked, with a grin, as he started the car. "It is a pretty great spot, right? A beautiful place with a ton of acreage for the price."

He was right. The land was selling for about half market value, and the lot was twice the size of anything else I'd even considered.

"It is an amazing deal," I took a deep breath, turning the air-conditioning vents away from me. I'd gone from August to February in those few seconds I'd matched gazes with someone not quite here and not quite gone. "But I'm afraid the homesite is too crowded for me."

In my peripheral vision, I saw the realtor cut his eyes over at me and really examine my condition for the first time. He nodded, sighed, and I heard him whisper a quiet fuck.

I looked over at him, raising an eyebrow.

"It's not you, man. I've taken a dozen buyers up there, and not one of them has put in an offer. What did you see?"

"What I saw isn't as important as what I'm worried saw me."

We didn't speak any more after that, but I noticed his name came off the listing that still sits on Zillow.

Blood on my hands,

rivulets of red stain my soul.

Found and bound

to the nowhere prison.

Pinned to my bed,

barely breathing,

almost dead,

in the nowhere prison.

Blood on my hands,

rivulets of blood stain my soul.

Found and buried

in the nowhere prison.

I love the idea of writing down dreams, I have a ton of these scary ones so if you’d ever like to hear more, message me and I’ll get them written to you. To date, the scariest dream I‘ve ever had came the night after going skiing for a school field trip. The trip itself was awesome, it was my first time going, we got a good lesson in before hitting the slopes, the resort had a fun little cafe nestled by the base, and that night we went to Golden Corral for dinner. Epic stuff. Had no idea whatsoever that I was about to endure the worst nightmare I’ve ever had in my life.

What’s so scary about this, first and foremost, is how layered it is. The dream itself consisted of two days, one night and then a full day, and in the dream I’m, of course, about to go skiing. It was the night before this big trip our school put on, and instead of the real life happenings, our school had completely rented out a mansion that overlooked the resort we were going to with each of us getting our own rooms. The mansion was basically set up like a hotel but considered to be a mansion. I’d say it was about 7-8 stories tall.

So as the dream’s underway, I’m packing. It’s the night before the trip and I’m packing up a suitcase since we’ll be staying the following night in the mansion, and I’m watching a video on my phone while I’m doing it. Then I suddenly get a notification. Some girl I don’t know just added me on Snapchat out of nowhere, and since it’s disrupted my video and feels slightly weird that a random person’s added me, I go onto Snapchat and I add them back, asking if I knew them.

Our conversation went on for a little bit, I remember I basically introduced myself to her along with my hobbies, likes, and I even decided to tell her about the trip. I had asked her for some information about her, but all I really remember was her telling me her name. Alice. After that she asked for a picture of me and I sent one with my suitcase and then she sent me back one. She was a girl my age but I didn’t recognize her. She had dark hair, probably dyed black, pale skin, a couple freckles. Pretty normal.

I finished up packing and I was getting tired fast. I told her that I was going to be heading off to bed soon and she spent back a snap of her eye saying she’d stop bothering me. So I go to lay down and she texts one more time, and the text reads:

Trust me, I’m nice xD

So I sleep, again this is within the dream, and I wake up the next day immediately on the bus over to the ski resort. A good friend of mine on the way gets car sick, poor thing, and I give them some medicine I had with me since I’m usually the one to get car sick. I guess the medicine didn’t work in time, and so instead of going out and skiing, they just got situated in their room on the second floor and laid in bed for the day.

While they’re in bed, the rest of us get going on skiing, and we ski all day long. I go out and get hot chocolate from the cafe place for a bit, but most of the entire day I spend out skiing and have fun with the rest of my friends that didn’t get sick, the entire time feeling slightly guilty that my best friend got sick and I didn’t. And when the sun started sunning, I was plum tuckered out. Completely sore, tired, exhausted, and after getting all the equipment put up at the lodge, I stumbled my way into the mansion’s lobby, sitting down on the floor because I was so tired and people were taking up the furniture. As we were coming back in, two of our teachers had gone out to pick up a large order of pizzas they had ordered for all of us, I remember there being 40 pizzas that they were heading out to get.

So we’re all sat there when I get a whiff of something really foul. I don’t know where it’s coming from, don’t know what it is, but it’s disgusting and so, tired as hell, I get up and try to find it. It gets stronger as I get closer to the stairs, and then I remember my friend. I remember I should check on them, see how they’re doing. So I go up the stairs and as I do, I notice that the smell’s only getting worse and worse as I get closer to their room. To the point where when I’m just outside their door (which has their name written on a post-it note on it) it reeks of something absolutely awful, and I can’t process what’s going on. I knock on their door and I don’t get an answer. I try the knob and it moves. I open up.

It’s the worst scene I’ve ever seen in my life. There’s blood and entrails over all the walls in a splatted pattern, the bed’s all wet and near crusty, and right in the middle is my friend, or whatever’s left, sat up facing me with a face only half remaining. Somehow, the skin on their face had been almost ripped off, so all of it was gushing red with blood. And their eyes were open but they were obviously so incredibly dead. The most haunting thing I’ve ever witnessed. I start coughing because it’s all so much and I run out of the room where I end up throwing up just by the stairs. The commotions heard from downstairs and when the chaperones come to me and they see what I had just seen, they get the cops on the phone and have a load of them head over immediately. There’s people in a panic, some of them freaking out, some of then wanting to see, some morbid curiosity. But everyone can smell the smell now that I had picked up on and it’s enough. While some do want to see, everyone knows it‘s bad. They don’t have to look for themselves.

The cops came then soon and had all of us step outside. They wanted the mansion clear of us all so we wouldn’t tamper with anything and get in the way. So I get by a cop car and kind of lean against it, and I look up at the mansion and I’m in such distress. I look down at my feet and I’m so full of guilt. So full of anguish. And I’m so cold being out there with not enough layers on since I left my coat in the lobby.

So I get to be freezing and I look up at the mansion again, crying by then. And then I see her. Second floor, a few windows down, had to be my friend’s room. But it wasn’t my friend at the window. It was Alice. It was that sweet girl I had talked to the night before, and all she was doing was looking at me and smiling, smiling the most disgusting, terrifying smile I’ve ever seen. She looked clean, but this time crazy. I had to look away, and a couple seconds later, when I got to collecting myself, I looked back and she was gone. Like she was never even there.

I woke up immediately after that crying. I remember that I sat up in bed and had to go through my phone to make sure I had never actually texted anyone named Alice and that none of that was real. And it was so hard doing that because I had just gone skiing in real life just hours before. I hadn’t stayed in a mansion or anything, but all the slopes looked the same and so did the cafe. Absolutely neutralizing.

I couldn’t go back to sleep that night. I stayed up on my phone, I couldn’t tell anyone about the dream but I needed to think about other things, and when the sun got to coming up, I paced around the house for probably 3 hours just thinking to myself before everyone else got up. It was absolute torture, and it didn’t take me writing it down to remember it, even these 5 years later.

The dark crashes down on me, suffocating me, I tumble uncontrollably. I'm dragged down by the tide, holding onto my breath with everything I've got. I can't see, my lungs are collapsing. There's nothing restricting me from breathing, but I can't open my mouth and I fail to draw any breaths. I feel as if I'm drowning, but it's not water keeping me down, it's the weight of the darkness pressing down on my chest. There's a glimmer in the dark, a glimmer of hope. It shines brightly, indescribable warmth surrounding it. My limbs tremble, too weak to support my body. I force myself to move, for my body to rip through the darkness. I reach out towards the light. I draw closer, my hand inches away from safety. Suddenly, a roaring laughter fills the room, breathy laughs come from above. The light vanishes just as fast as it came.

I look up, seeing nothing but darkness. Only then it occurs to me that my eyes aren't open. I claw at my eyes, trying to open them, my nails draw blood. Suddenly there's an explosion of light. A guttural cry erupts from my chest. I look up to see my own face, blood pouring out of the eye sockets. I realize - my eyeballs are in my hands. I watch tears and blood drip to the floor. My face a blur. The darkness swirls around me. The laughter turns into a child's giggle one I could recognize but I couldn't put my finger on. All of a sudden the air gets heavy, every breath doesn't fill my lungs. I'm suffocating. My fingers blindly reach up to my face. Scratching out every distinguishable feature, I'm nothing. I feel someone's breath on me. A slimy hand reaches across my shoulders, laughing as it watches me struggle. I try to turn around, to look at them, but I can't. Then a child's voice speaks to me.

"I can see you." All of a sudden, it starts crying. I want to comfort it, but I can't. It screams out, it finally comes into view. Marks start appearing on the child's skin, ripping across it and drawing blood. Matching my own. "Help me! Help me!" It howls in pain but I'm frozen. Blood splatters on me, I start crying when the child starts smiling. "You'll never escape." The darkness crashes down on me once again and I'm left in the darkness, a weight in my arms. I look down and see the child, bleeding out in my arms. I try to scream but the darkness silences it. Then... everything fades away all at once.

For a moment, everything looks familiar. I’m sitting in the back seat of the van my parents had when I was a kid. My dad is sitting in the driver’s seat, and we’re driving over the bridge that crosses the river that borders my hometown. I know this road like the back of my hand. Growing up, we crossed this bridge both ways at least twice a week.

When I turn around, I should see the town behind me. So, I turn, and I do. But it’s not as I know it should be.

It’s on fire.

I can barely make out the buildings in the flames. The wall of fire seems impossibly high, and it’s getting closer.

“DAD!” I scream.

He looks in the rearview mirror at me and then back at the road. We are at a standstill. The cars in front of us aren’t moving, and both lanes of traffic are blocked. There is nowhere to go.

The flames roar behind us, engulfing everything in their path. In almost no time at all, the fire is right behind us.

And I wake up.

A sudden fling and I'm lost in vibration. As my somewhat pleasant meadow pasture has absolved from all fields of vision. Twinge to the third eye, and a darkening hue. This is when my projection had turned nightmarish, I wish not to pursue.

A maze of rod iron steel, cages of unbeknownst creatures. An unrecognizable self, forced to crawl, as my presence becomes known to an overseer. Suddenly, I'm forced to hurry, chased as I cry. My body pained with disease as I evoke an insinuation I may die.

I'm aware of my soul, not attached to this body. But still forced in struggles as I ascend lengths upwards and downwards across this prison so foggy. An evil lurking, manifestations of potent energy. I fear for this vessel as I creep with lethargy.

After what feels like must have been hours. Land and wide open space, perhaps now help I could discover. Still I must run, now able to stand, the maze dissolving. Bullets now surround me through shots revolving.

I wish to leave, I wish not to pursue. With usual ability to escape nightmares, how could this horror feel so real, so true? A heavy breath, one not like my own. My body suffering, but I must mask, and silence each groan.

Hours drag on, running in fear. I wonder now what would happen, if I just surrendered, dropping down here. And so I wept, and I bled, I remember the pain. But after this experience, never would I have to perceive again.

In nightmares, I wish not to pursue, I find purpose when I am rooted till the situation runs through. A journey, one that's dimensional, through realities untouched, do nightmares as these leave me to feel like a speck of useless dust.