text: Reader, I imagine you might be about to read this while lying down in your bed. I imagine night has long since fallen and that like many others here, you are seeking out stories of the strange, the curious and the unimaginable to entertain yourself to sleep. If I’m right and this is you, I hope the experiences I am going to share with you don’t somehow impact you in any way. I hope that after reading this, you wake up tomorrow as normal, go about your life, and question nothing. I hope by sharing this with you I don’t somehow pass on whatever is happening to me. See, I am still holding out for that to happen. Waking up, I mean. After all, this horror that is now my life, all began with simply falling asleep. I’ll attempt to explain but at this point, the nightmare has been going on so long that I am not even able to pinpoint a timeframe or a starting point of exactly when it all started. Not confidently anyway. I suppose the earliest I can remember is going to bed one night after staying up late indulging in my habit of watching old school B-movies on the TV. My wife, as usual, had gone to bed long before me and as per what has become our weeknight ritual, I entertained myself with a glass of whiskey in the lounge until I was tired enough to join her. It felt like a Wednesday, but I really can’t be certain. The result is always the same these weeknights anyway. I eventually slide in next to my wife and due to the combination of the alcohol and the exhaustion, I promptly fall asleep. This scenario had played out many, many nights before since we had settled into our middle-aged suburban lifestyle. My wife never had any trouble falling asleep, but I always valued the extra few hours to myself before repeating the 9 to 5 work cycle the next day. So I drifted off that night and my mind wastes no time putting me through a bizarre dream. That’s been the way since I was a kid. I guess I have a vivid imagination or something, but my dreams have always been so nonsensical and strange that I’d long gotten used to it. The dreams usually start off normally enough, in fact recently I’d noticed that the first part of my dreams had become increasingly mundane and realistic that it could easily be mistaken for real life (perhaps this happens with age?). For example, on this occasion the dream began with me at the post office getting ready to mail some forms off to some obscure boring company. Whatever I was supposed to be doing wasn’t really apparent, but it seemed to make sense to me at the time. I’m sure you know what that’s like when your dream self seems to already know what’s going on when thrust into a random dream scenario. Whatever it was, it was typical, routine and not exciting in anyway. As per usual however it didn’t take long for my mind to reveal itself to be dreaming when the post office teller’s jaw dropped off of his face leaving a bloody mess on the counter and an elongated tongue hanging out of the massive hole in his face. Dream me frantically looked around the post office only to see the same thing happen to all the other customers and staff members. Not one of them seemed to react to what was going on but went about their business. At this point of course, I realize I’m dreaming. One of the benefits of having strange dreams so often was that my dream-self had gotten quite good at becoming self-aware when something wasn’t right and when things got uncomfortable or frightening, I generally manage to simply wake up. So it was in this occasion. While my adrenaline had definitely spiked due to the grotesque and bizarre scenes taking place, I quickly was able to recognize I was having yet another weird dream and almost instantly woke up. After blinking in the quiet darkness of my bedroom for a moment, my heart rate slowed back to normal and I rolled over and went back to sleep without so much as a second thought. The next day, I go about business as usual. Wake up, get ready for work, have a quick breakfast, say bye to the wife and start making my way into the office. Once there, I am sitting at my computer, I routinely open up email to check the daily staff bulletin...only for hordes of maggots to suddenly start pouring out of the screen and into my lap while everyone on the entire office floor start spontaneously screaming at the top of their lungs. And just like that I realize that when I had gone back to bed I must have ended up in another dream that started normal, but then turned once again into a nightmare. And, just like the last one and many before, I wake myself up. After catching my breath a second time now, I rub my sleeping wife’s shoulder (more for my own comfort) and roll back over. "Man, two in a row...tough night", I think to myself with a feeling of tired annoyance before drifting off again. The next morning, I wake up to the rotting bloated corpse of my wife hovering over me and laughing. Again, I wake up. If you don't already see where this is going, this has been the pattern now. This has been my life for as long as I can remember. Sometimes, I will wake up, my day will go about as normal and life will seem to go on for days, months, even occasionally years before something bizarre happens, like the sky opening up and a thick liquid blackness pouring through and smothering the earth. Other times, I’ve barely gotten out of bed before the freakish nightmare reveals itself, such as discovering I have misshapen human teeth rapidly growing out of my hands and face while my own teeth melt out of my mouth. This has been going on so long now at this point that while I use that Wednesday night I described earlier as my reference point to when this first started, maybe that wasn't even the truth of it either. Time moves differently when you’re dreaming. Maybe I’m still lying there in bed and am currently going through a seemingly endless sequence of nightmares waiting to finally wake up after the longest night of my life. Maybe that night was just one of thousands and the cycle started long ago. Maybe that night never happened but was yet just another dream, in which case I really don’t know when and where this began. You start to question everything when in this situation. What’s real, what’s not. Am I even real? Am I just consciousness existing in a vacuum, creating my own imaginary world? Was I ever truly awake? Or am I in a coma or something? Will I wake up properly one day to discover I’d been in an accident and this whole thing is what people who are in comas go through, but they forget somehow. Or am I dead even and this is what death is? Or am I simply insane? Experiencing a mental illness such as oneirophrenia or even a severe form of narcolepsy? I really don’t know anymore. The constant exposure to strange and bizarre happenings means I rarely even get scared by it anymore. I expect it. The worst of it is when you manage to go several years before anything has happened and you begin to think that the last time you woke up was finally for real. But then inevitably one day something nightmarish happens like a black demonic figure suddenly replacing your reflection in the mirror one morning or all the stars in the sky start exploding during a family barbecue one night, and you snap awake again back in bed, realizing all those years you spent getting on with your life were a lie and just yet another dream. All I know is that nothing crazy has happened yet in this current state of being “awake”, however it has only been a couple days. I figured I’d hop on here and share this with anyone who’d care to read. I could walk away from my computer after this only to discover suddenly no one has a face anymore or that there are hands coming out of all my walls. Then I’ll wake up again and none of this will matter. But if this does somehow get read, by someone like you, dear reader, who is lying at night preparing to sleep. I just hope when you eventually drift into dream world, that you well and truly do actually wake up tomorrow.