Creepypasta Stories

Empty and Endless

It was approximately 4:00am. I had been driving for a very long time. The long stretch of road cutting through the desert landscape was seemingly endless, and completely void of any signs of life. There weren't even any cacti on the side of the road where I expected them to be. Then again, it wasn't exactly bright enough for me to see very far. Without any differentiation on an almost perfectly straight route, I found myself dozing off periodically. The monotony was beginning to get to me. The only thing keeping me from falling asleep was an overwhelming sense of terror. I was being chased – chased by something. I didn't know what it was, but I knew it was gaining on me and I had to get away. My fear and sleep deprivation levels were now equal. I could feel myself losing the fight. The fight that is, to survive.

It was at this point that I woke up, drenched in a fear induced sweat. My anxious and soaked state was caused by a nightmare. This was the same nightmare I had been experiencing for weeks now. None of it made any sense. I had never even been to a desert, let alone driven through one. I lived near the beach for crying out loud. I spoke to my physician about my state of affairs, but he just blamed it on an overabundance of stress. He told me to relax and take a few sick days off from work. Work, however, was the only thing keeping me awake. I found myself nodding off at odd times during the day, sometimes even while driving to and from my workplace. It didn't make a whole lot of sense seeing as I was not an insomniac; not even in the slightest. Despite my troubling dreams, I still managed to get at least eight hours of sleep each and every night. My doctor didn't really shed any light on this either – simply telling me to take some caffeine pills during the day to keep from falling asleep at the wheel. The situation at hand was my burden and mine alone to bear, seeing as nobody could offer me any form of valid insight.

After another long day of work, I ventured home to inevitably get some rest. Before finishing my commute, I unsurprisingly found my eyelids growing heavier. I tried to keep my eyes on the road, but I could feel my mind yearning for sleep, just begging me to close my eyes and drift off. Seeing as this was not exactly a good time to catch some shut-eye, I figured that I should pull over before endangering other people's lives, not to mention my own. I would have done this, had my insatiable desire for sleep not taken over in a matter of mere seconds. These were anything but ideal circumstances.

In a seamless fashion, I went from driving home from work, to driving through that long stretch of road located only in my nightmare. It was dark out, as was to be expected. What wasn't expected was a pair of lights off in the distance. I could barely see them, but they were definitely there. I still had an unnerving sense of being chased, but something didn't feel right. I kept driving nonetheless. After what felt like maybe ten minutes of driving, I could make out what the lights were. They were headlights! They belonged to a truck driving in my direction on the opposite side of the road. This was astonishing to me because my recurring dream never contained anything within it, other than myself and the landscape. As the truck grew closer, it started honking it's horn. The sound grew louder and louder until finally, I awoke from my untimely slumber.

Without even a proper moment's notice to react, I swerved to the right, avoiding the oncoming traffic. My car had wandered onto the wrong side of the road while I was asleep. The honking I had heard in my dream was actually that of on oncoming car. I looked back to make sure I hadn't been the cause of some sort of pile-up in the middle of the highway. To my relief, I was not. Even so, I was lucky to be alive.

After adjusting myself onto the proper side of the road, I realized where I was located. I was in almost the exact same spot that I had been before drifting off. My dream may have felt like it had lasted ten minutes, but in actuality it only lasted an instant. Thank goodness for that, otherwise I could have very well died. With my newfound understanding, I drove the rest of the way home, successfully avoiding sleep's unyielding grasp.