My Bad Dreams

‘We all have bad dreams sometimes.’ That was something my mother would tell me as a child. On many nights I would wake from my bed, sweaty and anxious, call out for my parents, only for one of them to rush into my room and calm me down. ‘They’re just dreams,’ they would say. ‘Dreams cannot harm you.’ But, you see, I was never able to truly believe their words. The evidence against them is just too great. I say this because, throughout my entire life, every single dream I’ve ever had has come true.

I don’t mean this in wishful sense. I don’t own a magic lamp,→ I don’t have a pair of fairy god parents, and I’ve never used a monkey’s paw. I mean this in a more clairvoyant sense. Every time I dream, what I see in that dream happens in real life. It could happen that day or the next, or the following week, or month, or even years later. But it will happen. It won’t always happen the way it does in the dream, sometimes the actual event is less dramatic than the dream... though sometimes it's more.

If you have not already assumed that I’m nuts, or that I’m making it up, then you might be thinking that this is an amazing gift that I have. I could have a dream about finding the love of my life, and a year later I’d bump into that same person, get married and live the happiest life I could ever have. I could dream about winning the lottery. I could dream about becoming chairman of a large company. Well let me ask you this? Do you have control over what you dream? I have heard that some people have lucid dreams – dreams where they are aware they are in a dream and can exert some level of control over it – yet I am not one of those people. This is where the problem with my gift comes in.

Every single dream that I’ve ever had has been a nightmare.

For as long as I can remember, I have been plagued by night terrors. Now please, think back upon the worst nightmare that you have ever had? What exactly happened to you in that nightmare? Was it based on something real or something that, hopefully, is not real? Now imagine that you knew that someday, somewhere, that nightmare would come true. That is the horrifying realisation that I face every time I wake.

I don’t always dream, but that doesn’t stop me from being afraid to do so. There are days where I don’t sleep at all. I’m terrified of sleeping, in case I dream of something truly horrible. I don’t know if I’m dreaming of something that was already going to happen or if I make the dreams happen somehow. I go through periods of trying to keep myself awake, which can last for days. I drink coffee, play exciting videogames, fill my stomach with food till it aches, anything to stop me from sleeping. Yet eventually I am forced to sleep. I cannot run from my dreams.

You may still be sceptical of my fear, so I’ll do the best I can to detail some of the dreams that I can say have definitely come true, the dreams that have rattled me to my core and affected my life in undeniable ways.

When I started primary school I made friends with a kid named Sam. The both of us were power rangers’ fans, and through conversations about the show we became close friends. I was about five years old at the time, so our conversations weren’t especially intellectual. We stayed friends all the way through primary school, with only a few petty arguments that did not last long, then we both moved to the same secondary school. For three years we were both studying there, still friendly with each other, even though our interests had begun to change and our friendship group had grown larger.

Then I had a dream. In that dream, I saw Sam die in a car crash, along with his father and his sister. I had already experienced bad dreams coming true by that point, but even so I was not completely convinced that it would happen. I was fourteen, and my parents and friends had insisted that they were only dreams and nothing more. I even told Sam about the dream, and while he knew a little about my previous experiences with this matter, he shrugged it off as what it was: a dream.

A month later, during the winter holidays, Sam and his family were returning from their holiday in France. Sam’s father took a shortcut through a lane to avoid traffic. They drove down an icy path, the wheels lost their grip on the road and the car spun off, into a nearby tree. Sam, his father, and his younger sister Lily were killed immediately. Only his mother survived.

I cried for weeks after learning about what had happened. Everyone in our friend group was grieving, but I was inconsolably so. The same things kept rushing through my young, grief-stricken brain. I had tried to warn him about the crash, but I had inevitable done the same thing as him and shrugged it off, assuming that it would not happen. I never made that same mistake. This was the point where I realised how real these dreams truly were. I couldn’t let my guard down. I had to make sure that this never happened again, not to me or anyone I loved. But, no matter how hard I try, I am doomed to fail at this.

When I was three years old I dreamt that I would stand beside my father as he lay on a hospital bed, blood on his chest, his hand in mine as he took his last breath. This was the first dream that came to my mind after Sam’s death, the other dream that revolved around a loved one of mine. My father was not perfect by any means. He had a decent job working as a garage mechanic, which he’d done for twenty-five years of his life, and while he didn’t make a huge amount of money, he made enough for him, my mum and me to get by. After Sam’s death I started to properly document every dream I’d had and could remember, to make sure that I could keep every distressing vision I suffered from. One of those dreams was the one of my dad, one of the oldest dreams I could remember having. I could remember no indications as to how he was injured or how old he was, so from that point on I spent every waking hour with him cautious and protective. He would often ask why I was behaving so weirdly, and I always responded with ‘I just have a bad feeling’. My parents never truly believed my gift was real. They wouldn’t have heeded the warning if I’d told them. Eventually he got used to me acting this way, although sometimes he would ask if I could stop with the protective attitude for a minute. But as we both got older, I started to relax my attention to the matter. The dream had not yet come to pass. Hopefully it never would. I know now that I was stupid to believe this.

Last year I received the news that, while walking home from work, my father had been mugged by some junky delinquent, and when he’d resisted he’d been stabbed through the chest, piercing his heart. A passing witness had quickly called for an ambulance, but by the time they got him to the hospital he was in critical condition. I rushed there with my mother, but when we got there we learned the bad news. He had fallen into a coma from which they did not expect him to wake. They were doing what they could to keep him alive, but they did not expect him to last till morning. I sat with him all that time, his hand in mine, tears welling up in my eyes. I hoped with all my heart that this would not end the same way as my dream. I pleaded to god that he spare my father, that he miraculously open his eyes and slowly recover from his wound. But as the night passed on, I grew more and more hopeless, and by the time dawn had arrived my father was dead.

Some could call this coincidence, but I don’t think I’ve ever believed in coincidences. When you constantly dream of bad events that always come true, words like that lose their meaning. Thankfully not all of my dreams are quite as drastic or painful as these two life-shattering events. Some come down to simply feeling anxious about getting an exam question wrong, or realising that a bird has just done its business on your shoulder. These things did indeed happen, but they don’t trouble me quite as much.

Another note is that usually my dreams usually focus upon events that are definitely possible, although there have been a few that stepped that boundary and entered the realm of being just plain weird. For example, one dream I had involved a giant, one-horned rhino charging towards me and goring me with its horn. I really do hope that one doesn’t come true, although I doubt I’ll ever come across a massive one-horned rhino. I think I watched James and the Giant Peach before sleeping that night. Maybe that was the one dream I’ve had that won’t come true. We’ll just have to see.

Though other more unusual dreams have been less charming in their horror and more… well, abstract. I remember vividly having a dream where half of the human population had vanished with no trace. In this dream, I was left on my own, my mother gone, most of my friends gone, my boss and half my work friends gone, half the people in my neighbourhood gone, and everyone else left behind, abandoned and grieving, and no matter how hard they searched they would never find the missing people. I’ve always been afraid of being left alone. I’m not very good with social situations, mostly because of the dreams. After Sam’s death I found it much harder to communicate with others. I’ve never really held any proper relationships. I had a romantic relationship for a while in college, but that didn’t last long. So maybe this dream was just an expression of my fear of being alone. Maybe, though I very much doubt it.

But all of these dreams I have mentioned so far do not compare to the dread that this last dream fills me with. This dream was what inspired me to finally talk about this, to post this to whatever page I can find where people might believe me, where maybe I could find people who would believe me, or maybe even have the same gift as me.

Last night I awoke, crying out in the dark. I should note that, no matter how bad the dreams have been, I have never actually screamed after waking from one before. It was 2am. Sweat dripped down my brow, my hair ruffled, my eyes wide, panting heavily as I sat in my bed. I was only half awake, though the dream I had just had was swimming vividly at the back of my mind like a school of sharks.

The dream was of a massive shadow passing across the whole world. No, not just that, but the entire solar system itself. It swallowed the sun in its massive maw and froze the earth with its chilling breath. In that moment the planet fell to pieces, leaving nothing but icy chunks of rock to float off into the black emptiness. If I was a normal person then this would be just a stupid dream. I truly wish that I was a normal person. It’s tough for me to explain the horror that these dreams give me to anyone else, certainly those who do not dream like I do. I don’t know when, or how or why this will happen, or if the human race will even still be around by then, but I have a horrid dread that it may not be far off. Most of my dreams make it clear that they will come to pass in my lifetime. I have never had a dream where I was old.

The most I can say to you is get the word out. It doesn’t matter if you believe me or not, I understand how unlikely the very concept of clairvoyant dreams must sound to a normal person. Believe me, though, I know these dreams will come true. They always do. If anyone reading this suffers from the same gift, or knows anyone who does, then please let me know what kind of dreams you’ve had, whether they’ve already happened or are yet to come. It’s important. I have tried to stop them from happening but have never succeeded, but maybe someone else can.

I no longer want to believe that my bad dreams are doomed to come true!