Piercing wind whispers lowly,

Too scared to make a sound.

Tip-toeing feet move slowly,

Silence growing too loud.

The wooden door creaks open,

Bunch of bodies gather ’round.

Making out murmurs spoken,

“Missing Person: Found”

Weaving through the masses,

To approach the fallen chair.

On the floor rests a lasses,

Same eyes, same nose, same hair.

Rope dangles from the ceiling,

Someone had to put it there.

Such an event to be revealing,

Of all who truly care.

There seems to only be a minute left,

Before it comes time to depart.

Plentiful faces all bereft,

Longing for a restart.

Perhaps if I’d known before,

I’d have a change of heart.

But now I lie on the floor,

Forever torn apart.

If only the clocks would reset,

This could be a dream.

Having saw my loved ones wept,

My actions appear extreme.

“Give me one more chance”

But it’s too late

For them

To hear

my screams

"What do you think of the property?"

We stood atop a hill just shy of the Blue Ridge. If I used my imagination, I could see the outline of mountains that held parts of the Appalachian Trail. In the winter, I probably wouldn't have to imagine it.

The realtor squatted down, facing back the way we'd come. He fiddled with a twig, his mind on joining his friends for the back nine.

I idly wiped sweat from my forehead. It wasn't particularly hot, and the hardwoods provided good shade, but it had been a long walk up the old gravel road that wound up and around the hillside. The road had been cut over a century before, and was fairly maintained ever since, but no great care had been taken to keep it completely free from deadfall or underbrush. So, we hiked.

The only people in recent memory who had regularly been on this hilltop were seasonal hunters from the extended family of the original owners.

The land had been granted to a German family who fought in 1812. It made no nevermind to the government that the space had already been claimed by a tribe of natives centuries before Oglethorpe arrived in the colonies.

For the first time in history, the land was being sold instead of given or stolen.

I glanced over at the old homesite. Only a few signs of foundation remained, but where the house once stood was clear.

Also clear to me, and unseen by the impatient salesman, was the figure of a woman standing near what was once the hearth of the original structure. In the late evening sun, she was dappled in shadow and dark promise.

The sweat on my forehead suddenly felt cold on my fingertips, and my hands were clammy.

I stared at her, and she stared through me.

My voice, when I found it, was a hundred miles away to my ears. My throat felt tight, like I was speaking for the first time after several days of tonsillitis. My steps, when I finally took them, were light, even airy.

"Let's talk about it in the car," I managed to say, and the sound of my ragged breathing and pounding heartbeat filled my ears. I reached the agent's new Land Rover a full twenty seconds before he caught up, and I was tugging on the locked handle before he could let us inside.

"You ok, man?" He asked, with a grin, as he started the car. "It is a pretty great spot, right? A beautiful place with a ton of acreage for the price."

He was right. The land was selling for about half market value, and the lot was twice the size of anything else I'd even considered.

"It is an amazing deal," I took a deep breath, turning the air-conditioning vents away from me. I'd gone from August to February in those few seconds I'd matched gazes with someone not quite here and not quite gone. "But I'm afraid the homesite is too crowded for me."

In my peripheral vision, I saw the realtor cut his eyes over at me and really examine my condition for the first time. He nodded, sighed, and I heard him whisper a quiet fuck.

I looked over at him, raising an eyebrow.

"It's not you, man. I've taken a dozen buyers up there, and not one of them has put in an offer. What did you see?"

"What I saw isn't as important as what I'm worried saw me."

We didn't speak any more after that, but I noticed his name came off the listing that still sits on Zillow.

My friend comes to pick me up for school, it's not summer and it's Montana so it's dark outside. She has a friend with her, I sit in the back. We go to the gas station by my house and when we leave we're going in the opposite direction of school. We're driving down a hill by my parents house, brickyard hill to be exact, and the headlights go out. My eyes try to focus on the darkness past the windshield. The headlights come back on. Standing, right in front of the car, is a baby and it's head is cocked to the side. The car swerves violently and we start rolling over the side of the hill. We're going to die, I know we're going to die and all I can think is that baby is too young to stand on its own.

Blood on my hands,

rivulets of red stain my soul.

Found and bound

to the nowhere prison.

Pinned to my bed,

barely breathing,

almost dead,

in the nowhere prison.

Blood on my hands,

rivulets of blood stain my soul.

Found and buried

in the nowhere prison.

I love the idea of writing down dreams, I have a ton of these scary ones so if you’d ever like to hear more, message me and I’ll get them written to you. To date, the scariest dream I‘ve ever had came the night after going skiing for a school field trip. The trip itself was awesome, it was my first time going, we got a good lesson in before hitting the slopes, the resort had a fun little cafe nestled by the base, and that night we went to Golden Corral for dinner. Epic stuff. Had no idea whatsoever that I was about to endure the worst nightmare I’ve ever had in my life.

What’s so scary about this, first and foremost, is how layered it is. The dream itself consisted of two days, one night and then a full day, and in the dream I’m, of course, about to go skiing. It was the night before this big trip our school put on, and instead of the real life happenings, our school had completely rented out a mansion that overlooked the resort we were going to with each of us getting our own rooms. The mansion was basically set up like a hotel but considered to be a mansion. I’d say it was about 7-8 stories tall.

So as the dream’s underway, I’m packing. It’s the night before the trip and I’m packing up a suitcase since we’ll be staying the following night in the mansion, and I’m watching a video on my phone while I’m doing it. Then I suddenly get a notification. Some girl I don’t know just added me on Snapchat out of nowhere, and since it’s disrupted my video and feels slightly weird that a random person’s added me, I go onto Snapchat and I add them back, asking if I knew them.

Our conversation went on for a little bit, I remember I basically introduced myself to her along with my hobbies, likes, and I even decided to tell her about the trip. I had asked her for some information about her, but all I really remember was her telling me her name. Alice. After that she asked for a picture of me and I sent one with my suitcase and then she sent me back one. She was a girl my age but I didn’t recognize her. She had dark hair, probably dyed black, pale skin, a couple freckles. Pretty normal.

I finished up packing and I was getting tired fast. I told her that I was going to be heading off to bed soon and she spent back a snap of her eye saying she’d stop bothering me. So I go to lay down and she texts one more time, and the text reads:

Trust me, I’m nice xD

So I sleep, again this is within the dream, and I wake up the next day immediately on the bus over to the ski resort. A good friend of mine on the way gets car sick, poor thing, and I give them some medicine I had with me since I’m usually the one to get car sick. I guess the medicine didn’t work in time, and so instead of going out and skiing, they just got situated in their room on the second floor and laid in bed for the day.

While they’re in bed, the rest of us get going on skiing, and we ski all day long. I go out and get hot chocolate from the cafe place for a bit, but most of the entire day I spend out skiing and have fun with the rest of my friends that didn’t get sick, the entire time feeling slightly guilty that my best friend got sick and I didn’t. And when the sun started sunning, I was plum tuckered out. Completely sore, tired, exhausted, and after getting all the equipment put up at the lodge, I stumbled my way into the mansion’s lobby, sitting down on the floor because I was so tired and people were taking up the furniture. As we were coming back in, two of our teachers had gone out to pick up a large order of pizzas they had ordered for all of us, I remember there being 40 pizzas that they were heading out to get.

So we’re all sat there when I get a whiff of something really foul. I don’t know where it’s coming from, don’t know what it is, but it’s disgusting and so, tired as hell, I get up and try to find it. It gets stronger as I get closer to the stairs, and then I remember my friend. I remember I should check on them, see how they’re doing. So I go up the stairs and as I do, I notice that the smell’s only getting worse and worse as I get closer to their room. To the point where when I’m just outside their door (which has their name written on a post-it note on it) it reeks of something absolutely awful, and I can’t process what’s going on. I knock on their door and I don’t get an answer. I try the knob and it moves. I open up.

It’s the worst scene I’ve ever seen in my life. There’s blood and entrails over all the walls in a splatted pattern, the bed’s all wet and near crusty, and right in the middle is my friend, or whatever’s left, sat up facing me with a face only half remaining. Somehow, the skin on their face had been almost ripped off, so all of it was gushing red with blood. And their eyes were open but they were obviously so incredibly dead. The most haunting thing I’ve ever witnessed. I start coughing because it’s all so much and I run out of the room where I end up throwing up just by the stairs. The commotions heard from downstairs and when the chaperones come to me and they see what I had just seen, they get the cops on the phone and have a load of them head over immediately. There’s people in a panic, some of them freaking out, some of then wanting to see, some morbid curiosity. But everyone can smell the smell now that I had picked up on and it’s enough. While some do want to see, everyone knows it‘s bad. They don’t have to look for themselves.

The cops came then soon and had all of us step outside. They wanted the mansion clear of us all so we wouldn’t tamper with anything and get in the way. So I get by a cop car and kind of lean against it, and I look up at the mansion and I’m in such distress. I look down at my feet and I’m so full of guilt. So full of anguish. And I’m so cold being out there with not enough layers on since I left my coat in the lobby.

So I get to be freezing and I look up at the mansion again, crying by then. And then I see her. Second floor, a few windows down, had to be my friend’s room. But it wasn’t my friend at the window. It was Alice. It was that sweet girl I had talked to the night before, and all she was doing was looking at me and smiling, smiling the most disgusting, terrifying smile I’ve ever seen. She looked clean, but this time crazy. I had to look away, and a couple seconds later, when I got to collecting myself, I looked back and she was gone. Like she was never even there.

I woke up immediately after that crying. I remember that I sat up in bed and had to go through my phone to make sure I had never actually texted anyone named Alice and that none of that was real. And it was so hard doing that because I had just gone skiing in real life just hours before. I hadn’t stayed in a mansion or anything, but all the slopes looked the same and so did the cafe. Absolutely neutralizing.

I couldn’t go back to sleep that night. I stayed up on my phone, I couldn’t tell anyone about the dream but I needed to think about other things, and when the sun got to coming up, I paced around the house for probably 3 hours just thinking to myself before everyone else got up. It was absolute torture, and it didn’t take me writing it down to remember it, even these 5 years later.

She stood surveying the battlefield. The sky was as red as the ground below. She knew that it had to be her, she had to be the one who would fight the other side. They had a mysterious fighter, someone who had taken the lives of many on their side. They had a dragon with them. Her cousin had volunteered, but how could she let her fight, knowing that her cousin might not survive, knowing that her cousin had a young daughter. No one else could do it, only she could. And she finally might be able to find out who this monster was.

Suddenly she heard it, the flap of dragon wings, deafening in her ear. It was time. Slowly, the figure rose from the other side of the plain and gradually approached. The dragon landed nearby, and a figure approached her slowly. She readied herself for the fight... until she saw his face.

"No," she breathed, it couldn't be! Not her brother, anyone but he! She waited but knew what she had to do. They fought. She manged to get him on the ground and tore off his helmet and his armor. Then she took her knife and stabbed him. But he didn't die. Again and again, she stabbed him, tears streaming down her face. Cut after cut was made until his flesh become spongy and deteriorated. Finally, what was left of her brother stopped moving, and she sat down in the blood and sobbed.

This was a dream I had when I was 14 or 15, and it bugged me for the entire day afterward. I love my brother and we get along great, so this one hit hard. I have had other dreams, dreams where my entire family dies, but I was never the one doing it.

DIFFERENT NIGHTMARE:

Everything was on fire, again. This dream had happened several times over. Sometimes her family made it out, sometimes they didn't, and sometimes she was trapped beneath the flames. But it was always a dream...

Until the fire alarms went off.

(Turns out the alarms were just broken, and there was no real fire, but it took us a while to figure it out.)

For a moment, everything looks familiar. I’m sitting in the back seat of the van my parents had when I was a kid. My dad is sitting in the driver’s seat, and we’re driving over the bridge that crosses the river that borders my hometown. I know this road like the back of my hand. Growing up, we crossed this bridge both ways at least twice a week.

When I turn around, I should see the town behind me. So, I turn, and I do. But it’s not as I know it should be.

It’s on fire.

I can barely make out the buildings in the flames. The wall of fire seems impossibly high, and it’s getting closer.

“DAD!” I scream.

He looks in the rearview mirror at me and then back at the road. We are at a standstill. The cars in front of us aren’t moving, and both lanes of traffic are blocked. There is nowhere to go.

The flames roar behind us, engulfing everything in their path. In almost no time at all, the fire is right behind us.

And I wake up.

My nightmare starts as all do. Total blackness that makes you feel like you're drowning. Like the air is being pulled from your lungs and your throat squeezes in on itself. I can see a single figure in front of me but it takes a minute for her face to come into focus. Her eyes are stained with tears and her shoulders shake. There's a pair of children't scissors that seem to mock me. Her arms are covered with scratch marks and bleeding cuts. She holds the pair of scissors up to her throat and plunges them in before I can stop her.

I sit there watching my best friend die in my arms because I wasn't fast enough to stop her. Because people piled pressure on top of her and did nothing to lessen the weight. Because of the bullies who don't care for anything but to tear others down and this is what happens. Death.

I suspect I had this nightmare because I actually found my friend in the bathroom at school preparing to cut herself. I don't know what I would have done if I showed up a minute later than I did. I've never been so scared in my life.

A sudden fling and I'm lost in vibration. As my somewhat pleasant meadow pasture has absolved from all fields of vision. Twinge to the third eye, and a darkening hue. This is when my projection had turned nightmarish, I wish not to pursue.

A maze of rod iron steel, cages of unbeknownst creatures. An unrecognizable self, forced to crawl, as my presence becomes known to an overseer. Suddenly, I'm forced to hurry, chased as I cry. My body pained with disease as I evoke an insinuation I may die.

I'm aware of my soul, not attached to this body. But still forced in struggles as I ascend lengths upwards and downwards across this prison so foggy. An evil lurking, manifestations of potent energy. I fear for this vessel as I creep with lethargy.

After what feels like must have been hours. Land and wide open space, perhaps now help I could discover. Still I must run, now able to stand, the maze dissolving. Bullets now surround me through shots revolving.

I wish to leave, I wish not to pursue. With usual ability to escape nightmares, how could this horror feel so real, so true? A heavy breath, one not like my own. My body suffering, but I must mask, and silence each groan.

Hours drag on, running in fear. I wonder now what would happen, if I just surrendered, dropping down here. And so I wept, and I bled, I remember the pain. But after this experience, never would I have to perceive again.

In nightmares, I wish not to pursue, I find purpose when I am rooted till the situation runs through. A journey, one that's dimensional, through realities untouched, do nightmares as these leave me to feel like a speck of useless dust.

In the darkness of night, when you are hidden and tucked under blankets. Fighting for sanity in your dreams. I come for you. A dream, the worst of all. Black and White, red and colorful. I follow you.

In the form of a snake I wriggle.

As a kid I was paranoid of the dark, like most people. I was always scared of the shadows in darkness. I would hardly ever sleep because every time I closed my eyes I thought that I saw in my nightmare. Now I have gotten over it, but it's still vivid in my head as if real.

I prefer to call this nightmare " Unnamed" or " Cursed Name" and sometimes " Unspeakable." I was really creative. So, I fell asleep and my dream grasped me before any other could.

Everything was black. A giggling girl's echo chased every corner of the room. I couldn't figure out why she was giggling, or where she was at. So I sat there, waiting for her to explain or to show herself. But she didn't she kept giggling. And sometimes she would whisper things in a breathe. I could feel her close, but I didn't know where.

Finally I called out. " Hello? Why are you giggling? What's so funny?" And I remember it, her raspy voice, the smile in it. She paused giggling. Then very quietly she said, " You're going to die! There coming for you!" And she continued giggling.

Who, I thought and as of she heard my thoughts she paused and answered, " All of them." Then I remember her, she turned toward her eyes flashing red. " All of them will come!" psychopath.

I started running, but hand grabbed my legs, tripping me. I turned around and started kicking. Then I saw it. I screamed and clawed at the stone around me until my fingers bled. But the blood wasn't red, it was black. I could feel the pain as it clawed up my legs.

I turned around and started to frantically hit it. It opened it's jaws wide. It looked like a Gill Man from Black Lagoon. And then I screamed as it shoved my face in it's mouth. And I woke up.