No Bed

I want to share this because...I want to share this so that I'll feel better about it...maybe less lonely, less crazy maybe and hopefully I can get some help.

I don't sleep in beds anymore. I dream a lot so maybe when I wake up...Maybe I'm not completely awake and that's why this started happening to me.

Before you assume that I have typical nightmares, I don't. My dreams, I don't think they fall into the nightmare category so easily. I'm a horribly sick girl, my subconscious knows I'm a horribly sick girl so my dreams aren't just random occurences after watching a horror movie. I learned at a young age that what I dream about isn't normal. I learned that I shouldn't talk about it because normal people, sane people, don't dream that way. There were several adults in my life consistenly telling me that something wasn't right, so I learned to ignore it and keep it to myself.

The themes in my dreams are pretty standard nightmare material, perhaps it's the way it plays out that changes it from "oh you just had a bad dream; it will be ok" to "Don't tell anyone that you had a dream like this. Don't talk about this to anyone ok?" My dreams used to be gritty but straight forward, usually with themes of paranormal, unique murder, sexual torture, mental disabilities, and self-cannibalism. I've had these kind of dreams since I was a child, now that I'm older I understand why I was told to keep quiet, these aren't the normal themes found in children's dreams. Moreover, my childhood wasn't traumatic and many of the things I dreamed about for example sexual torture I didn't know of until I was a teenager. I was sheltered from those kind of things like most children but I still dreamed of them.

So I had fucked up dreams as a child that continued on as I became an adult but that's not the problem, the problem is the girls.

By the time I was twelve the severity of my dreams had dulled down and I was sleeping dreamless most nights. Then she showed up, the first girl. At first it was just a dream about a some imaginary girl, she was being cut up with wire and decorated with flowers, in a shallow pool of water. I didn't see her attacker because everything was focused on the girl. She was young, she looked highschool age, and I woke up from the dream when she asked for more. It was pretty normal actually and I was used to it. What I wasn't used to was what happened when I woke up. On my closet door there was a long hanging mirror, and when I wake up it's usually the first thing I see. Normally I wake up and see my bedhead, my morning face and think, "gross, shower." That day however I thought I saw her face under the bed. For a long moment I was still, my mind was racing and I thought that I was still dreaming. Then my door opened and my brother asked about breakfast. The face was gone but I was terrified. It was happening after all these years of coping I was finally going crazy.

And I must be because that girl kept showing up in my dreams and under my bed, and I almost got accustomed to her until the day she was gone and another girl was in her place. She was much younger and blonde, thin with freckles. The first dream I had of her she was just sitting at a table with an untouched bowl of cereal slicing into her thighs through the fabric of her night gown. She didn't show up under my bed she usually appeared on the end of my bed lying there curled up like a pet, staring at me for long moments, and then gone the next. Brigette (I named her myself) didn't just show up only in the morning like the first girl. I'd come home from school to find myself frozen in my doorway as Brigette lied on my bed staring.

This cycle began and everything was fine. I figured I was hallucinating and that if I didn't tell anybody, if the girls only showed up by my bed it was ok, and no one had to know I was crazy. I gave them names so they wouldn't seem so frightening, I was coping well. Then I was invited to a sleep over and I was worried that I would hallucinate. It was a rare opportunity for me because I didn't have many friends and I really wanted to go. I just told myself that I would be so exhausted from hanging out with my friends and staying up late that I would pass out and not dream at all. I was wrong. I did dream, it was a creepy dream that focused on a man hiding a baby in a slaughtered pig and I woke up with a scream that scared the hell out of my friends, and made my best friend's mom flip out. But none of the girls appeared in the dream or when I woke.

I think I noticed when Tae-Ji (an asian woman who always wore denim shorts and a constant neck bruise, she was usually choked or drowned in the dreams but she smiled and was very pretty) was coming to bed, but I only had those dreams when I was in that bed. Naturally, I assumed that something about the bed was making me sleep poorly and that's why I was hallucinating whenever I slept in that bed. It was great timing because my family was moving soon, so I begged my parents for an upgrade from a full size bed to a queen for my new room. Lucky me they wanted to upgrade to a king so their old queen bed became my new queen bed.

But my theory was quickly proved wrong, after my first night in my new bed I was visited by the first girl. In the dream she was carefully slicing into her belly, taking the cut pieces and frying them in a pan. In my new room there wasn't a mirror that showed under my bed, but I knew she was there so I curled up under my blanket and waited. First (who I never named, I should've named her something common because she had the common highschool girl look and braces, Ashley would've been good) began appearing in the gap between my bed and nightstand. I guess without the mirror just like I couldn't see her, she couldn't see me.

It wasn't until I graduated highschool that I finally learned the trick. It was just beds. All beds, if I was in a bed, the girls would find me, but in college I slept on my cousin's couch to avoid sleeping in my dorm (mainly because my roommate expressed several times that she wasn't comfortable sleeping in the same room as me and eventually moved out because of it. Of course I felt like a complete asshole for making her uncomfortable and thus sleeping on my cousin's couch.). I did this for three weeks before really noticing that the girls were gone. It all made sense the sleep overs I went to in highschool, I had always slept in my sleeping bag or on the couch, which is why they never showed up there but did show up after I'd slept in my dorm bed.

Now I don't sleep in beds. I still have dreams, but the girls aren't in any of them. I think about getting a bed but I can't bring myself to do it. I'm not sure what's wrong with me but I don't want to have those girls in my life again. They weren't necessarily scary. I was more frightened thinking that I was losing my mind but seeing them watch me after I had dreamed about them, it was chilling. It was a mix the feeling you get when you overhear or see someone else in a very private act and the feeling you get when you think someone's watching you. It's uneasy.

If you think you can offer me any help please do. If something like this has happened to you please let me know. If you have answers that would be amazing. Really I'd like to sleep in a bed again.