October 20, 2023
A few years ago, my family moved to a quiet town in the Sacramento Valley. Our house was a nice one, situated in a pleasant neighborhood, overlooking a town at the bottom of the valley. Soon enough though, things started to get weird.
Dreams are supposed to be a magical place, a place where we can escape from our everyday lives, where our imagination can run free.
Once I dreamed I was in a world of gray, it wasn't necessarily dark, just lifeless. Dead. There were gray houses, gray streets, the gray ground bare of vegetation.
Looking around I saw almost nothing of note, until I spotted a person sitting on a bench, a person I did not recognize.
From what I've read, the brain does not simply invent faces, we can only dream of what we've seen.
So, perhaps this person was someone I had walked by in a crowd once, or seen in the background of a TV show, someone I had seen just long enough to conjure their face in my dream.
The stranger stood there completely still, like they were simply a prop to this world. Then, after a long stare down, the person began to raise their right arm. They began to point at something, the direction they were pointing was close to them, but not directly at me.
As I began to turn to look at what they were pointing at, I was ripped from my dream, I found myself lying in my bed on my side, my heart was beating incredibly fast, yet I had no clue why.
When I was in elementary school, I can't specifically remember when, I somehow developed nightmares. I dreamt often that I was abducted by aliens and that was often enough to terrify me.
Now that I'm fifteen years old, I realize there were two very strange patterns around this that I overlooked as a child.
The first was frightening to realize and always perplexed me, dealing with the fact that I had never known about aliens before I started having the nightmares. I hadn't even seen E.T yet, which was obviously a bit strange for my age but it was the truth, we didn't even own the movie at the time.
The thing that worries me even now, is how could I have nightmares about an idea I shouldn't have known existed?
Anyways, this is when the story begins. Friday, October 20th 2023
On this night I had a dream that my parent's beds lay empty.
I felt my blood run cold, my fingers went stiff with fear. I couldn't believe my eyes ... my parents wouldn't leave me in the middle of the night... right?
I stared at the tidy and orderly room. It looked so eerie and unnatural. The bed was made, the desk was clean, and the curtains were open, letting the cold moonlight enter.
"Mom? Dad? You said I could stay up late," I called out hesitantly. No reply, as expected.
"Wow, this is what I get for watching horror movies," I told myself. I went back to bed, pulled the covers over my head, and squeezed my eyes shut. I could hear a soft rustling sound of the trees outside my window in the wind.
Attempting to fall asleep didn't work, so I went into my parent's room again. Maybe I should call my friends. What's the point of that anyway, you should call the police, my brain signaled me. I didn't do either of those.
That was when I noticed the blood.
"You weren't here before..." I breathed. "And definitely aren't welcome."
It was just a drop, right in front of my foot. It's just a dream, some part of my mind reminded myself in an attempt to calm me down. It didn't work. I bent down to look at it and another drop appeared out of nowhere, a few steps away from the first.
