Short Scary Stories

Lapse

Have you ever had a lapsing dream? It's a very real thing, but I don't talk to many people and I pay little attention to the media, so it is difficult to know what is unique to my mind and body. I turned the concept into a creepypasta because it scares me, or it frustrates and upsets me at the very least. A lapsing dream is entirely separate from more widely discussed occurrences in sleep like lucid dreams or paralysis incidents. It is not as immediately scary as sleep paralysis, but as someone who has suffered from both types of dream, I believe lapses to be the more insidious of the two. A lapsing dream lies somewhere between the illogical realm of fragmented dreams, which don't seem to be very different from normal dreams except for their poorly defined and difficult to remember chronologies, and the timeless void of dreamless sleep. Lapsing dreams only seem to happen, or at least I remember them to only happen, at either edge of a period of restful sleep or throughout the course of poor, non-restful sleep. During a lapsing dream, random shards of thought or information spontaneously dart through the dwindling stream of consciousness, popping in and out in extremely quick succession as if hopping crossways over the mental flow. Sometimes, a lapse is composed of succinct, discrete bits of meaningless information that are too small in volume to hold any meaning. Other times, a lapse is composed of an amorphous mesh of many little thoughts ran together. All thoughts experienced in a lapsing dream do not appear in any tangible format such as text, imagery, or sound. They are all raw and unprocessed, and how they are able to be perceived, let alone remembered, is unexplainable. Any perception of self and existence is lost during a lapsing dream, but the experience is still present and able to be remembered. When someone has a lapsing dream, they do not see black or any other color, which separates this type of dream even further from all other kinds.

So why are lapses more scary than nightmares or sleep paralysis? Well, I think that lapses have the ability to slightly alter a person's perception of reality. Lapses have a strange place within the continuum of the mind and sleep. Having a lapsing dream is probably as close as one can get to "experiencing" a deep, dreamless sleep, yet they occur at the times when the mind is most active and the consciousness is strongest during rest. That said, they seem to draw together areas of the mind that are usually kept separated, and the residual effects of lapsing dreams extend into the waking world in strange ways. After any given lapse, I woke up with memories that were entirely real to me until I noticed the absence of a particular object, location, or person, or someone belied the truths that had just manifested in my head. I know from reading various forums that it is not a very rare occurrence for dreams to cause false memories, nor is it a phenomenon exclusive to lapses, but this is somewhat different. Memories created by a lapse are very strong regardless of how implausible or glaringly false they are. After a lapse, somebody who had lost a loved one after a major tragedy might believe that the person lost was still very much alive, or that a tragedy had never taken place at all. And when that person's memory is nullified by the truth, they might suffer the same grief that they went through when they were first exposed to news of the death. I know this to be true because I have been affected by lapsed memories multiple times. There have been many times throughout my life where I remembered owning items, usually things that I greatly desired, that I did not actually possess, or where my knowledge of the layout of a building or environment was overridden until I visited the altered locations. The most notable and exceptional cases concern a long-dead family pet and a grandparent who had died long before I was born. When I woke up one morning, I went into the living area of my house confident in the knowledge that I'd be greeted by my parents' fluffy white dog Princess, who had been around since before my conception. I soon found out that Princess had died years ago, but I felt like I just lost my pet. I do not want to talk about my grandparent's death in detail, but it is important to point out that I felt someone who I had never met was with me.

The incident with my dog presents another strange anomaly caused by lapsing dreams: distortion of the perception of time. After waking up that morning, I was missing a huge chunk of my memory. Of course, this occurred during the earlier portion of my childhood, and the hippocampus tends to be rather unreliable during that period. But what I experienced was far different than the gradual fading of memories. Additionally, I have the gift of being able to remember many scenes from my early life with extreme detail, including some from before the lost period. My recognitive ability does not, however, negate the fact that I am missing multiple years' worth of memories, including the time when my dog died. I still do not remember witnessing or even hearing about my dog's death even though I remember almost every detail about her looks and some details (although they may be confabulations) about my interactions with her. That is the power of a lapse, and they have not stopped since my childhood. The extent of their effects does not end with the alteration of experiences committed to memory, either. Lapses can also alter a person's moment-to-moment perception of the passage of time.