This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/TheKoalaStoves on 2024-09-12 01:03:27+00:00.

I must have been eight when the nightmares began.

They started out as flashes—brief, terrifying images that would jolt me awake in the dead of night. At first, they were the typical childhood frights: shadowy figures lurking in the corners of my room, an orchestra of unseen monsters heard slithering to hide from moonlight bleeding through the curtains, and eerie whispers that echoed in my ears always waiting until I begin drifting off to sleep. Months had gone by, they grew darker, more vivid. In my dreams, I found myself trapped in mazes of shifting walls, chased by grotesque creatures with twisted limbs and empty, hollow eyes. They moved faster each time, their breath hot on the back of my neck as I would try desperately to escape.

No matter how tightly i latched my eyes or how fervently I prayed them away, the nightmares kept coming, gnawing away at my sense of reality and making sleep a thing that petrified me.

My parents were at a loss. They’d tried everything—night lights, soothing music, trips to therapists who promised that the nightmares were just a phase I would grow out of. Nothing worked. My nights remained haunted, and my days began to blur into a tapestry of exhaustion, my eyes ringed with dark circles. My friends would tell me that my once-vibrant energy appeared drained.

Every couple of years my grandmother would come to visit us from our home country. She was a small, weathered woman with kind eyes and a soft voice. I remember feeling like she arrived because of hearing about my nightly torment, she reached into her bag and pulled out a gift. It was a dreamcatcher, handmade, its web intricately woven with thin strands of twine, small feathers, and beads that glinted in the light. The hoop was aged, the leather wrapping cracked in places, but it felt powerful, almost alive.

“This was passed down through our family,” my grandmother whispered, wrapping my fingers around the dreamcatcher. “It’s an old tradition. It catches bad dreams, only the good ones may pass through it. This protected me when I was your age. I am praying it will now protect you, too.”

I wasn’t sure what to think, but I gave her a hug and ran upstairs to hang it above my bed before dinner. I remember that night, because for the first time in months, I slept soundly. The nightmares vanished, as if sucked into the dreamcatcher’s web and trapped there, unable to torment me.

Years passed. I grew, and the dreamcatcher remained above my bed, always watching, always guarding. I never had another nightmare. Even in conversations when my friends complained about terrifying dreams or restless nights, I would smile to himself, safe in the knowledge that my grandmothers tattered dreamcatcher was doing its job.

By the time I was an adult, and had almost forgotten what it felt like to be afraid of the dark. I moved into my own apartment, of course I brought the dreamcatcher with me—more out of sentiment than necessity. I was successful, content, and never gave the nightmares of my childhood much thought. The dreamcatcher was just another piece of decoration now, its purpose felt long fulfilled.

Until the nightmares came back.

It started slowly, just a sense of unease at first. A feeling that something was watching me, even in the safety of his well-lit apartment. I brushed it off as stress—work had been piling up, and i figured it was just my mind playing tricks on me. But then one night reality fractured into shards of my childhood nightmares returning.

They were different this time. More visceral. More… real. I dreamt of things crawling up from the shadows, their spindly fingers stretching toward him as I lay paralyzed in my bed. I dreamt of faces—twisted, grotesque, and familiar. People that I knew, my grandmother, my mom, dad… but distorted by something malevolent. And every time I woke up, the air in the apartment felt thick, charged with an oppressive energy, as if something was lingering just beyond the edges of my vision.

My mind begins to reel thinking about the dreamcatcher, I wondered if it had stopped working. It still hung above my bed, its web intact, the feathers and beads swaying gently in the breeze from the open window. But something about it seemed… wrong. The once bright strands of the web were dull now, and the air around it felt cold, as if it was drawing in the darkness rather than keeping it out.

One night, I woke up in a cold sweat, heart racing from a particularly vivid nightmare. I blinked, trying to shake off the lingering fear, but then i noticed something strange. In the corner of his room, where the shadows were thickest, there was movement.

At first, I thought it was just his eyes playing tricks on me, the remnants of my horrific dream warping my delicate perception. But then I saw it again—something shifting, crawling along the wall. My breath caught in my throat as the shape emerged from the darkness. It was one of the creatures from my nightmares, its eyes glowing faintly, its limbs twisted in unnatural angles.

I scrambled out of bed, backing away as the thing crept closer, its claws scraping against the floor. In my panic I grabbed a lamp, ready to defend myself, but when the light hit the creature, it vanished, as if it had never been there at all.

I lay there crumpled and frozen, my mind racing. Was I losing all grip on reality? Or was something far worse happening?

In the days that followed, the line between my dreams and the waking world began to blur. The nightmares seeped into my everyday life, small at first—flickers of movement in my peripheral vision at work, strange sounds echoing through my apartment. But then they grew bolder. I started seeing the creatures in broad daylight, glimpsing their twisted forms reflected in mirrors, hearing their whispers in the quiet moments before sleep.

It wasn’t until I found the first claw marks on my bedroom wall that I could accept the truth. The dreamcatcher hadn’t stopped working—it had been trapping my nightmares for years, holding them at bay. But it was old, worn out. The web had begun to fray, and now it was leaking. The nightmares, once contained, were slipping through, spilling out into the real world.

Desperate, I tried everything to fix it. I visited spiritual shops, consulted with experts in folklore, even reached out to my grandmother. But she was far older now, her memory fading, and in her more lucid moments when she could remember who I was, she only ever uttered one sentence “The dreamcatcher kept them away, but it can’t last forever.”

One night, as the nightmares swarmed like locusts blocking the moon, I realized there was only one option left. I couldn’t fix the dreamcatcher, could never stop the nightmares from breaking free. But maybe I could stop himself from dreaming.

I stayed awake for as long as I could, swallowing caffeine pills and guzzling energy drinks, but exhaustion would inevitably overtake me. When I finally collapsed into bed, the nightmares came for me with a fury. They crawled out of the walls, their hollow eyes fixed on him, their twisted mouths grinning in malicious glee.

And this time, they didn’t disappear when the lights came on.

As I lay frozen, paralyzed with fear, the creatures crept closer. I realized, too late, that the dreamcatcher hadn’t just been protecting me from the nightmares. It had been protecting the world from them. I began to cry as I realized something that could not possibly be a coincidence. The nightmares coming back and my grandmothers decline happened at the same time.

Now, with the barrier broken, they were free.

And they were hungry.

I stare at the shredded remains of the dreamcatcher, its web torn to pieces.

What is real when your brain slowly starts working against you, and what is lurking just beyond the edge of sleep?