I've been having pretty wild nightmares for as long as I can remember. This is a collection of short stories and flash fictions inspired by my nightmares, but with a few artistic liberties taken!
So! I sent "The First Time" (the first story in this collection) to my mom because the story involves her recurring nightmare about the man running towards her room, bursting through the door and jumping on to her chest... That was a true story. She really dreamt that! She told it to me when I was a teenager and it has stuck with me ever since. It frightens me still... the sound of footsteps far away in the house, growing faster, louder, closer to your room.
Sure, it's a dream, which might make it easier to cope with perhaps, if you weren't a child and if the dream weren't so vivid. Your parents aren't there and you can't get to them, because in the dream they're not necessarily the next room over; in the dream they can't hear your stifled screams as your attacker presses his knees into your chest and bares his teeth at you, his eyes wild, his hands unfathomably strong around your neck...
Sorry, I went on a tangent there. What I'm trying to say is that I sent "The First Time" to my mom and this (screenshot below) is what she said. I've copied and pasted it from our Messenger conversation. What chills me is that in the same house where I first dreamt of a man running down the hallway towards me, my mom had a dream that she hadn't had in decades: she dreamt of "Run and Jump on Me," only this time, he was coming for her daughter.
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To give a little more context, we lived on "Chadwick" for about a year and a half, when I was between the ages of 3 and 5. My mom didn't tell me about "Run and Jump on Me" until many years later, and I've only just now found out about her dreaming of him somewhere around the same time that I had the aforementioned nightmare...
