Creepy Stories

Truble Sleeping

Some kids can't go to sleep without their door ajar and a light on in the passageway.

This was never the case for me; I always slept in complete darkness. When I was a child, I dreamed more than anyone I've ever discussed it with, I had several dreams that I could remember a night. And in every one of my dreams, I died. I died a thousand deaths, being shot, stabbed, poisoned, I fell from cliffs, I burned in fires. Most of these nightmares I just put down to an overactive imagination.

The dreams I was shot, it was usually by some soldiers in some war. I might’ve seen too many movies. But some dreams I knew were different. They all involved places I knew, as opposed to the other nightmares, where I was killed in all sorts of locations I'd never been to. In these particular dreams, I was prey. I was being hunted by some beings that I couldn't see, couldn't feel, but I knew they were there. When they caught me, they tried to kill me. But they were non-corporeal, so they couldn’t physically injure me in these dreams.

When they got me, I couldn't breathe, and I felt them draining me.

Normally, when I knew I was dreaming, I could wake myself up very easily. But not when they had me. I could feel them keeping me in the dream, and it took all my will to drag myself away from them and wake up.

In all my other nightmares, I could wake up and say to myself, "It was only a dream," and forget about it. But these particular dreams I couldn't get out of my head. I somehow knew that they were real. And that scared the hell out of me. In the nightmares, when these beings caught me, I was trapped, and couldn't breathe. I would slowly, intentionally, claw my way back to consciousness. I am an only child, and for the first twelve years of my life, I slept alone, in a bedroom at the opposite end of the house from my parents.

Occasionally, I would have friends sleep over. And I would completely freak them out. I discovered that when I was dying in a dream, and couldn't breathe, I couldn't breathe in real life. Sometimes, it would happen for extended periods of time.

Some of the times, I'd wake up, and whoever was staying at my house would be shaking me, trying to wake me up because I was choking, unable to breathe in. As soon as I regained consciousness, I could breathe again. This didn't happen every night. Just the nights when I knew the dream was real. Sometimes I would be having a normal dream, dreaming about being a champion footballer or whatever the generally carefree young kids dream about, when I knew that the being searching for had found me in the dream, suddenly the dream became real.

Over time, I realised that not all of my real dreams involved me being hunted down. Sometimes, I would be talking to other beings. One group of beings in these real dreams tried to help me. These were not like the dark, invisible things which tried to kill me; these other beings were semi-visible, shorter than me at the time, making them quite short. They tried to teach me things in the dream world. There were three in particular.

I can’t remember the names of two, but I can remember the name of one distinctly: "Ry-ing." I'll explain why I can only remember that name later. These beings taught me, and I think they tried to help me hide from the hunters, but they couldn't protect me, or fight the hunters off. I learnt that in these real dreams, I had powers I didn’t have in the real world. I could fall great distances without injury, because I could slow how quickly I fell.

It was as if I could affect gravity's effect on me. This also meant that I could almost fly. It was more levitation, it required all my concentration in the dream, and I could never get more than a meter or two off the ground, and couldn't move very quickly. There were other creatures that inhabited my real dream world. One was a small creature that looked a little like a hedgehog. It was a misty, semi-transparent creature, which made it easy to accidentally step on.