I’m laying in bed, wide awake. For some reason I can’t sleep. I can’t close my eyes. I squeeze them shut and roll over onto my side. It’s dark out. The moon is in its usual place to shine down on my bed brightly. I pull the covers up closer, snuggling under them and staring at the ceiling.

That’s when I first hear it.

The twinkling of an ice cream truck. It starts off far away, then draws closer through the small neighborhood. I sit up in bed as it passes, not stopping until our drive it sits idle at our long driveway for awhile before slowly continuing down the road. I settle back down and close my eyes, finally, sleep finds me.

                               ✵✵✵

The moon is flickering through the slitted window blinds. Flickering? Flickering. I sigh, dust drifts through the air, settling. My breathing slows and my eyes start the close. 𝘧𝘪𝘯𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘺, I exhale.

That’s when I hear it the second time.

It starts closer, the same ice cream truck. The twinkling cranking sound is slower, as if the truck has slowed. It stops briefly at the drive, then continues on.

                               ✵✵✵

It’s deadly quiet. All I hear is my breathing. The moon is extinct amongst the dancing stars. My breath sounds too loud, I almost hear an echo. Is someone in the room with me?

That’s when I hear it for the third time.

It starts right outside my window, louder. It gets closer, stopping at our driveway. It stays, idly, the music plays. Slowly, creepily it runs into my ears. Music of the clown, right out of a horror movie.

Something passes by my window, backlit by white moonlight. I gasp, flying straight up in bed.

                               ✵✵✵

Sweat is puddled on my skin as if I fell into a pool while sleeping. I stand on shaking too-pale white legs and pull a oversized black T-shirt on, that falls to my mid-thighs. I run a hand through my curled, messy hair, and close my eyes.

“What the hell?” I murmur, puffing out my cheeks and releasing the air slowly. I bend with my hands on the messy grey bed and try to steady my breathing. “God, that was freaky. Oh my gosh. Wooo…” I shake my hands and rub my face until the feeling of being watched goes away.

… Yeah, so… I had this dream a few times. The first ones are the dream… it like… progressed as it went. It wasn’t back-to-back dreams. It was like 2 one week And the last one was a week later. I haven’t had another. Was scary since I kept having them with small differences. The last section is my reaction to the dream when I woke up one morning. 😂👍🏼

A black endless void The feeling of falling Seeing clockwork pieces Gogs turning gears rotating The sound of a chime Echos

A feeling of falling through the Clockwork

Then I wake up

haunted by a recurrin dream.. idk ig ill put a random kid in it and make him a dream ik its gonna be shitty lol

bobby cuz bobby is a funny asf name he 50 n got no hair in a circle in the back of his head cuz that’s where you sling the rubberbands lmao frl though

alr now the story.. i swear its like grabbing materials from a shelf ion know what im doin so like.. talkin to myself in a box ? lol

alr again uhk

bobby who was literally scared of anything had a dream one night bro woke up sweatin and shit dude was like super hyped and shit dream had happen several times and he was freaked cos this time he felt the dream not juss saw

.. and yeah so thats what happened any questions ? No lol Im messin wit you dont kill me

I jolt awake, breathing quickly. Groaning, I flop over onto my other side, covering my eyes and flinching away from the meager light coming through the window. Stupid streetlights.

I was dreaming about it again tonight. That makes… five days in a row. A new record. Tonight’s dream was different, though. Somehow it seemed urgent, more insistent. There was a greater sense of panic, of terror, even.

Rubbing the crusts from my eyes, I sit up, reaching for the journal beside my bed. My therapist thought that it would help if I wrote about it. Which it didn’t. Now the dreams are just bolder, more defined and more detailed than before. Even though it didn’t help with making them go away, I still have a way to track them. I figure they must mean something.

I just wish they would stop.

They always begin the same way, with me lying in my bed beside someone else, someone I don’t know. In my dream, the person always looks at me and smiles, clasping my hand, but they don’t have a face. It’s not that it isn’t there, I just am never able to pin down features, not even enough to tell if it’s a man or a woman. Despite the terror that it maybe should have inspired in me, at this part, I am never afraid. That comes next. When I am dragged roughly from the bed, the person reaching for me, calling my name. Somehow, there is always terror on the features that I cannot see. I scream, every time. Thrash and kick, trying to escape, but I never do.

And it all goes black. But it’s never the end. Because then I wake up, or it seems like it, and I’m in a cave. A towering cavern. Dimly lit, I can barely see what surrounds me. But there’s enough light for me to see the others. The other bodies that are all around the cave, some still alive. Some crying out, some dead and rotting, some barely breathing, but most that are just bones. So many that are bones. But the scariest thing, the thing that is more terrifying than my shackled legs, than the darkness, than the stench and the feeling of helplessness, is that all of them look the same. Every single person in the cave, even the dead ones, all share the same face. Despite the differing clothing, all of them have the same ruddy gold hair, the same light green eyes, even the same crinkle between their brows.

They all look like me.

But it still is not the end of the dream, for then it goes black again. Slowly, the darkness recedes. Standing on the edge of a monumental cliff, I can hear the cries and screams from the cave behind me. This is the part of the dream where I wake up. When I gaze beyond the cliff, I see something that can never quite translate to my waking mind, and the sheer enormity of what I see wakes me up. From the scraps that I recall, it is a hole. A hole that seemed to be ripped into the air on the side of the cliff. Hundreds of them, even thousands, crowding and filling every bit of space below the cliff. It’s dizzying, and I know that there might be millions more. I know there are many more that cannot translate into my waking world, or perhaps I would go mad.

Perhaps I already have.

[23 hours, 57 minutes, and 16 seconds later]

I slowly wake, peacefully for the first time since the dreams began. Shifting slightly, I catch sight of the person beside me, and my breath catches. In sleep, the curly brown hair, long lashes, and full lips are enhanced, beautified to the point of perfection. Lashes fluttering and eyes opening, I am greeted by a soft, sweet smile, and a hand reaching out to clasp my own gently. We both lay like that for a moment, surrounded by a peaceful silence. Then our eyes meet, before I glance down, seeing a smile form across those lips. I chase them, drawing us into a gentle kiss. We pull away, and those gorgeous eyes sparkle at me before catching on something over my shoulder. A look of terror overcomes the beautiful features, and I am suddenly caught and dragged out of my bed. A hand desperately reaches for me, a voice calls my name, and I descend yet again into darkness.

She doesn’t look like me. She doesn’t sound like me. Why is she touching him? Why is she kissing him? Why is he kissing her? Oh my god. I know who it is, it’s her, it can’t be, please god no don’t let it be. She’s telling him she’s always loved him, he tells her the same. They embrace, they reminisce, they look deeply at each other…

I feel like I’ve woken up from an electric shock. My heart is pounding through my chest and through my throat. Sweat is soaking my body, but I feel as dry as a desert. I always felt like something was off about her. Her gaze lingers at him for too long. Her hands hold onto him for too long. I don’t trust her, and he shouldn’t either. A lot of women struggle with their partners having female friends. Platonic as they may be, a woman’s intuition is never one to doubted in any circumstance.

I’ve been having these nightmares every night. I feel like I’m in a horror movie. Her presence is haunting, everything is haunting me. My partner is so unaware and I’m being consumed by constant worry and fear. My body is itching to tell him. But how would that make me look? Crazy, insecure, jealous. Crazy girlfriend alert. I can’t bear him viewing me as that, I’m better than that.

She’s coming to his dance class tonight. The ladies swoon over him as he twirls and leaps in the air. I feel like drowning in a cave, i feel heat running all through body, anger coursing through me. I can’t take this anymore. Time to found out who she really is. Time to prove a woman’s intuition is never wrong.

So my neighbor had gone missing a week ago, and he wasn't found yet. I never really socialized with him, and I didn't even know his name. It was 1 am, and I could hear the neighbors crying and talking to the cops. His case wasn't closed yet. I must have been really tired though, as I fell asleep almost instantly in spite of all the noise.

I had a weird dream that night. In my dream, I saw a man running through a dark forest and panting. It was like someone, or something, was chasing him. I couldn't see anything but him and the path ahead of him. Then, he climbed a tree, and managed to hide. That's when I saw the person chasing him, it was a man holding a sharp knife and shovel. He was dressed in black clothes, and was wearing gloves. And then, I woke up. I shrugged it off, and got dressed to go to work. I work as a news reporter, and currently, I was reporting every little detail on my neighbor's disappearance.

I got the same dream for the next few days, and I had had enough. So, the next morning, I decided to take a day off from work. I decided to go to the ONLY forest in town, the one I had been seeing in my dreams, hoping to put an end to my dreams.

I took my best friend, Emma, with me to the forest. There, I kept looking for the man. I don't know why, but I was hoping to see him. I searched, but didn't find him. Or the person chasing him.

Later that night, I had the dream again. So I decided to head out to the forest again, with the cops. I didn't know the man hiding, but I thought and hoped it was my neighbor. Just then a cop said, "We found him." I turned to look at my neighbor, who was standing there, shivering. The cops thanked me, but they still didn't find the other man who was holding a knife and a shovel in my dream. I went back home and finally fell asleep, peacefully. Or so I thought....

I had another dream. The man holding a knife and shovel was standing, and he said: "You took away my victim from me. I am coming for you. You're next."

Should I do a part 2??

THIS IS A CONTINUATION OF ESCAPIST

I was in the alley again. It was were I started every night. The whistle began, it’s taunting tune ringing through the air, the volume progressively increasing. Do, re, mi, do. As badly as I wanted to, I knew running would be useless. I could never truly outrun him. Every time I hid, I was only biding time. I really should be terrified. After all, I died here night after night. But I guess you could say I’ve become desensitized to it. He came from the shadows, the same place he always did. He never bothered to hide his face, he knew I knew it was him. I think he also wanted me to see how unapologetic he was. How little remorse he felt. It made him hauntingly beautiful. I paid him back by ignoring him. Why pay any attention to him when the dagger he used far outshined him? Knowing it was mine hurt, the stupid thief, but at least he made good use of it. Tonight, though, I watched his eyes. I used to think the stars were in those eyes. The very hands that set out to kill me now used to cup my face before those lips that were currently in a terrifying smirk pressed themselves to mine. The dream ended there. It always ended as he killed me.

I awoke, daylight pouring through the window. It was strange how no matter how short the dream seemed, it always lasted all night. It took me a second, just like it did every morning, to remember where I was. The walls surrounding me were not the walls of my bedroom, but of the safe house room where I now stayed. I knew as well as he did though that he would find me. He wouldn’t stop until I was truly dead. The older version of me was in the kitchen, I could here her singing along to Taylor Swift though I couldn’t quite tell which song. She’d promised to tell me everything. So far, all she’d told me was what I already knew. “He’s hunting y-us.” “I’m only alive now because I managed to come back to now.” “He won’t stop.” Nothing I couldn’t have figured out myself. I slipped out of bed, still dressed from the day before. I could tell her about the dream, but if she was me, she would already know about it. There was no doubt on what it meant. He was going to kill me. I was starting to think it was pointless, delaying the inevitable. Nothing would stop him and I couldn’t run forever. Eventually I’d have to either turn and fight or hand myself over. He’d be expecting a fight-hoping for it. He’d be so disappointed if I just showed up and said “go ahead.” It was a shame I still cared. I showered, trying to wash the thoughts, the memories, the burns his touch left away. It never did work. The older me was proof I lasted, even if it was only for a couple more years. I wondered if she was getting deja vu, being here. If she was trying to remember what she’d been told so she could tell me the same things. If she didn’t know what she could tell me. If when she said ‘everything’ she meant ‘what I can’ and not actually everything. Lastly, I wondered if I was ever going to throw off my stalker.

From a good distance away she watched the building burn and collapse into further despair, sinking in on itself. The heat singed her skin.

Asphalt pooled beneath her feet. Leland burned on the ground floor, his charred blood painting the wall in which he was thrown against. In all her medical experience she didn’t understand what she saw before her: his legs fractured into thousands of splinters, bone jutting outwards from his skin. He wasn’t awake this time.

She dragged him out again, breathless from the physical exertion.

It was always the same injury. She knew his lungs were weak from inhaling the embers, she knew the blast vibrated his bones until they shattered. Burns all the way down to the nerves across his body.

Sometimes Leland was awake and screaming. Other times all she ever heard was agonal breathing. For once, he’d passed out from the pain; she was thankful for that, because she couldn’t handle hearing it again for another night.

Then her eyes fluttered open.

——

It had been precisely 128 days since the Beirut Hilton crashed and burned, along with her career.

She lit a cigarette between her slim fingers, watching the embers drift from the end of the stick. The city was a backdrop behind the fence she leaned against, blurring out of vision. The dying lights that broke off from the cigarette - from the Hilton - lived in her mind endlessly in a traumaloop of her own making. A notion she wished she could cast aside like she did her old job.

For weeks, the same haunting images invaded her dreams: the building, Leland, the flames. It was a memory within a memory, a distortion of her fear. Ever since the fourth night, she’d taken to ceaselessly scouring for him again— her old command didn’t know, nor did her former friends from the unit. Nothing on the internet.

It wasn’t until she’d carefully coerced a networking associate of hers, some jaded RN from the trauma center Leland had been admitted to a couple months prior that she’d find out where he was now.

——

Flowers in hand, she nervously pushed open the doors of the Medical ICU, looking for the room she knew he’d be in. Visiting hours were going to end soon, and she cursed herself for not building up her courage quicker. In truth, it’d taken all day for that.

Leland had physical therapy to attend almost every day for his shattered legs, and since he had no home or family to take him in, the hospital was the only place he could remain.

She looked at his figure. He was staring out the window, overlooking the city with unexplained content.

“Leland?”

He turned. A moment of silence enveloped them.

“Oh, shit—“

“Relax. Don’t- Don’t move too much.”

“Why are you here?” He carefully shifted in his bed so as to not move his legs too much, wincing occasionally. “I mean, I’m really happy! But… holy shit… When’s the last time I saw you? Since these engines got blown out?” He pointed at his legs, grinning.

She chuckled and placed the flowers on his bedside table. “I think so. I’ve looked everywhere for you, you know.”

“I’m glad. You didn’t forget about me.”

“I could never.”

A fire, glaring off his eyes, breaths around him.

A house. On fire.

He looks at his hands covered in a dark green ooze. Shiny specks, glimmering like glitter, populate the goop like a sky full of millions of stars.

Panning his gaze to the window, he sees the world on fire, an orange cacophony of shrills, yells, and pained screams. He begins to cry. There is so much pain: In his lungs from the smoke, on his finger by the whim of the fire, by his ears experiencing the torture of human fears, and through his dry eyes where he is forced to see the hellish punishment.

No weeps can extinguish this fire, but the light begins to dull anyways.

Amon awakes in sweat, still bound by the tiredness in his body. Removing his covers, he shivers out of bed. A tentacle, texture like melted plastic, hangs onto his hand.

“Not you,” he says as he tugs.

The creature stirs under his bed, a gibbering moan originating from an orifices. It’s limb pulls slightly on Amon’s hand, a spectral light zips between their grasps.

Amon berates as he pulls harder, “Stop giving me those dreams. They scare me!”

It clicks back at him, the black ooze.

“Get off of me, you demon! I don’t know what you are!”

Holding a metal water bottle above his head, he threatens the thing under his bed. It begins to hiss back, a monstrous, wet hiss.

“Go away, get out of my house,” he trembles knowing the creature has yet to leave and probably will not. It had been under his bed all night.

It backs into the corner, offering it’s limb out.

Amon succumbs to his fear, and he tugs the unwilling ooze from out of the corner. It struggles. It bites him. He bleeds.

Using the weight of metal, with swings pushed to the limit from hot adrenaline, he beats the creature, until his hands are covered with it’s black juices and the metallic smells leave his hands.

He stands there breathing heavily, shaking. Exhausted from fear.

He slouches against the wall observing the limp corpse with teary eyes. A few nips dot his legs.

After a few moments of delusional contemplation, a light from across the street fills his room. Wobbling to his feat, while his hands drip the sparkly goop, he sees the searing orange outside: A building doused in fire that moves like the sea, a petroleum truck crumpled at the front window. And, in the wake of the fire, screams are muted just beyond his glass window.

The view is all too familiar.

“So Marcy tell me about this recurring dream that is stressing you out?” Casey asked as he leaned back in his black leather office chair, with his fingers interlocked behind his head. Casey and Marcy’s had built a close knit therapist/client relationship over the past five months. Marcy felt as if she could confide in Casey about any and everything… and she did

“Unfortunately Casey it’s not just ONE recurring dream. No…In all actuality it’s TWO. And the dreams don’t occur on the same night. For some odd reason the nightmares seem to alternate, it’s either one or the other.” Marcy held up two fingers as she cross her legs at her ankles and reclined comfortably on the cognac brown leather chaise lounger.

“Two different recurring dreams, that seem to
alternate? Casey repeated Marcy’s statement to make sure that he heard her correctly. “Well I can truly understand how that would be both alarming and frustrating all at the same time.” Casey tapped the end of his ink pen on his chin, as he looked intently at Marcy with his sky blue eyes. “Now I believe last month when we last met, you vaguely mentioned that in one of the dreams you had the sensation of continuously falling? Am I correct?”

Marcy shook her head up and down in agreement, “Yes …that’s correct. I had a friend of mine who told me that in a dream like that …you don’t want to hit the ground because that could be a really bad thing?”

Casey smiled, as he ran his fingers through his medium length blonde hair. “Well …I haven’t heard that one.” He chuckled. “ So Marcy if you would like, we can discuss the meaning of this particular dream… Or if you would like, you could tell me about your alternating second reoccurring dream, and then we could discuss the meaning of both of them together? It’s totally up to you.”

Marcy stood, smoothed her lavender maxi skirt down and walked over to gaze out the large picture window. “I would much rather discuss them one at a time. If you don’t mind? Because each of the dreams are just so disturbing. Usually when the dreams occur, they wake me up and I can’t go back to sleep. I can only imagine what they both dreams translations are.”

“As we have previously discussed, recurring dreams may be a way to work through, unmet needs or process trauma. This type of dreaming activity is usually associated with mental or physical stress, which I believe you have been experiencing.”

Marcy turned away from the window, tilted her head to side, as she nodded and peered at Casey. Holding her hands up, “Soooooo as you know I have been under a great deal of stress, not only at work, but as you know, Larry and I are going through a rough patch. So anxiety and stress have been my middle names for quite some time now.” Marcy gave a long sigh. “So Casey please explain what the continual falling represents?”

Casey glanced down at his Apple Watch, and swiveled back and forth slowly in his black leather office chair. “Marcy the meaning of the falling sensation is usually associated with an individual feeling vulnerable, helpless or overwhelmed, just as you are feeling. The falling could also be a symbol of fear, and may indicate uncertainties about some areas of your life. Possibly areas in your life that you totally have no control over …such as the state of your finances, the future of your relationship, a possible, up-and-coming job search, etc..” The act of falling is an indication of defenseless and being unprotected. It’s as if you’re a sitting duck for something that may or may not happen.”

“ Okay… thank you for the explanation Casey that really helps to shine a light on a lot of things… which are occurring in my life right now. I know our time is almost up, so can we continue where we left off next month and also delve into the meaning of my other reoccurring dream that I’m also experiencing?” Marcy inquired.

“ Absolutely Marcy… now, remind me again, what did you say is your second reoccurring dream?” Casey asked inquisitively

“ YIKES!…Well ….in my second reoccurring dream Casey I am ….being surrounded …by hundreds maybe thousands of insects and bugs.” Marcy answered hesitantly.

Casey rubbed his forehead and gave Marcy a reassuring look as he walked over and gave her a fist bump “Yes… No worries…Marcy we will continue our conversation as well as delve into the meaning of your second particular reoccurring dream at our next office visit in a few weeks…”