Beautiful Dreamer

Chapter 1

Chapter One

The nightmares began in July.

They sprung from nowhere, twisted horrors spawned from the darkest depths of my imagination to plague me as I slept. They were naught but airy figments, none concrete but each more terrible than the last. They woke me, screaming and sweating, at night's unholiest hours.

They made me fear the darkness.

Because that is what they were: darkness. They all took me to a world of thick, meaty black that was all-powerful and all-consuming, that gouged out my eyes with its completeness. There were no monsters, demons, or any kind of demented creature. What was terrifying, really, was the nothingness. The total lack of shape or matter, the uncertainty of whether or not I existed. And I dealt with these fears night after night without fail, until they had become somewhat of a routine.

For two months, they were the same.

In November, they changed.

I don't know how it happened, exactly. As I remember it, my dream began in the dark place; the horrible, suffocating, aphotic fearscape that claimed my mind when I closed my eyes. I was running, sitting, hiding, screaming—I was everywhere at once, but so was the darkness, and it was choking me. Its tendrils were in my nose, down my throat, clawing into my brain like it was trying to devour me from the inside out. I was dying. It was killing me.

And then I woke up.

Except that I didn't.

I opened my eyes, and it was dark. For a sliver of a heartbeat, I wondered if I was still in my dream—then I saw the outline of my dresser on the wall across from my bed, and knew I was in my room. I thought I was awake.

But I wasn't.

The best way I can describe it is that my brain was conscious, but my body was still trapped in dreamland. I couldn't move. Everything, from my head all the way down to my toes, was pinned to my bed, paralyzing me. I tried to move, to shift, to combat the terror growing in my chest, but my body would not respond.

That's when I realized that the tightening in my lungs was not fear.

And I was struck with the absolute certainty that there was something sitting on top of me. As soon that knowledge registered, the pain instantly doubled. Something dug painfully into the soft spot just below my rib cage—knees, knees, they had to be knees—pressing my lungs into my spine and cutting off my air completely. I could not breathe.

I mostly remember the fear. This fear, it was different from any kind of sensation I had ever felt before. It wasn't like the nightmares, where I knew that the terror would dissipate when I woke. Here I was awake. I was conscious and alert, but I could not move, I could not breathe, and I was seeing strange shadows seething in the air before me. It felt nearly identical to being swallowed by the darkness.

Except that this was real.

How long did it last? One minute, maybe two. But it felt eternal. Panic coursed through my body, not quick and frenzied but slow and thick like molasses, thorough, so that it managed to fill every crack and crevice. I couldn't call for help, because my lips were glued shut, and I didn't have the air to make a sound. It was like drowning and drowning and drowning, but never being able to give in to the blackness.

And in those awful moments, I truly believed that I was going to die.

When the paralysis released me, it was sudden. One moment, I was frozen, crushed beneath the humanoid weight on my chest. The next, I was flying up off my bed, into a sitting position, propelled by all the pent-up energy that had been building in my limbs.