CreepyPasta Collections #1

The Scissor Man

My dreams had always been vivid and intense, for better or for worse. Some people have told me they “never dream” or “they have dreams, but never remember what they are about.” Me? My dreams were like movies, complete with complex characters and dynamic plots. I created entire worlds with my dreams. I lived entire lives. Sometimes it’s a lot of fun. When I was about six, I had a dream that I was the sixth member of the Power Rangers, and with the help of Wolverine we were able to defeat the evil King Bowser and his robotic Foot Soldiers. On the other hand, there were times that I had such petrifying nightmares that I thought I would never feel safe in my own room again. I recall waking up to find that my mother’s head had transformed into that of an alligator, and she chased me around the house until she cornered me in my room, screaming that she wanted to eat my insides. It sounds puerile now, but I remember waking up in a cold sweat, and it was a week before I would let my mother hug me again.

Most of the time, though, I loved dreaming. I’m a writer, so I loved to draw upon my dreams as inspiration. I felt like my imagination was unleashed while I was asleep. My subconscious could take my imagination to destinations that were otherwise unreachable. My waking imagination was a horse-drawn carriage, and my dreaming imagination was a starship. I used to wish I could live my life in that half-awake state between consciousness and reality.

That was before.

When it all began, my father had died a year earlier in a car accident. I was there when it happened. I was riding in the passenger seat of a car with him, and we were listening to Aerosmith and talking and laughing like we did a thousand times. There was the road ahead, and then there was a semi-truck, and then we were upside down.

I spent one night in the hospital. So did my father. I woke up the next morning. My father didn’t.

Suffice to say, it was tough, but a year later, I felt more or less okay. There were good days and bad days, but I really surprised myself at how well I handled the loss. All throughout my formative years, losing a close family member was one of my worst fears. I went in to see my doctor for a routine checkup, and he offered to refer me to a mental health professional if I ever felt like I needed to talk anything out. I appreciated the offer, and I intimated the possibility, but I really felt like I’d been doing okay. I’m not one of those nonverbal males who push down all of their emotional baggage until they die of a bleeding ulcer. I have some close friends and family with whom I’m comfortable enough to share whenever I’m feeling down.

The truth is, other than my father’s passing, that year went extraordinarily well for me. I got a promotion at my job that came with a decent raise. I wrote a short story that got published in a local literary magazine and I was awarded five hundred dollars. Best of all, I got a girlfriend named Brooke who I could only describe as a “perfect ten.” Seriously. Brooke was like, model hot, and I’m far from it. She knew it too. She frequently liked to tease me that she was way hotter than I was, which sounds mean, but she knew how to give just the right amount of teasing and could take it just as well as she could dish it out. I never thought I’d snag a girl like her. I was fine, except for the dreams.

You see, I dreamt pretty frequently of my father. Probably that’s normal…the loss was never far from my mind, and being the vivid dreamer that I am, it was only natural that he should make an appearance. I wish that these dreams were of happier times, but to be honest the dreams were unsettling.

The problem was, in my dreams I knew my father was dead, and yet I saw him and spoke to him. It’s not like I knew I was dreaming, and I don’t remember thinking he was a ghost either. It’s hard to explain. Every time, I knew my father was dead, and I also knew that he was right there, but in my dreamlike state, the logical part of my brain never penetrated the contradiction. He was both dead and alive, and it never occurred to me that this was impossible. Both were correct. This was profoundly frustrating. I can remember a dream where we were at a family reunion, and my father was just sitting at a table by himself while the rest of my family was sitting together and laughing, and I kept trying to get them to come over and sit with him because he was dead and they needed to spend some time with him before he remembered.