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The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/YogurtclosetTrick649 on 2025-05-22 09:11:13+00:00.

This happened a few days ago, and I haven’t slept since. I don’t know if this is the right place to post, but I need to tell someone before I lose my grip completely.

I was on a red-eye flight from Tokyo to Los Angeles. About nine hours in, I couldn’t sleep, so I started flipping through the in-flight entertainment system. You know how some planes have exterior cameras? This one had three: Nose Cam, Tail Cam, and Belly Cam. I figured it would be cool to watch the clouds from above.

I started with the Nose Cam—nothing weird. Just a serene view of stars and cloud cover, the edge of the Earth barely visible under a navy blue sky. Peaceful, almost hypnotic.

Then I switched to the Tail Cam.

That’s when things started to feel… off.

It showed the rear of the plane, the wings stretching into the emptiness behind us. But there was this faint distortion just behind the aircraft—almost like a smudge, or a shimmer, like heat rising from asphalt. It kept flickering in and out. I thought maybe it was turbulence or a glitch in the camera feed.

But then the shimmer twitched. Not in a way that looked natural—more like a single frame of something vastly larger, trying to force itself into visibility. Like it didn’t belong in three dimensions.

I stared for a long time. The shimmer didn’t go away. It moved, just slightly, and then I swear to God the stars behind it blinked out. Not like clouds passed over them—like they were eaten.

I backed out and tried the Belly Cam.

It showed the Earth far below, speckled with clouds and the faint glimmer of ocean. But now there was something else.

A shape.

Dark, massive, coiled like a nest of serpents made of shadow. At first, I thought it was just a weird cloud formation. But clouds don’t move like that. They don’t twist and pulse and bend space around them. The edges of the shape weren’t even solid—more like teeth gnashing behind a curtain.

Then the screen glitched. For a fraction of a second, it showed something else entirely.

Not the Earth.

Not the sky.

But an eye.

Wide and deep and old. Not metaphorically old. Before-earth-was-earth kind of old. The kind of eye that has seen stars born and devoured, and still hungers. And it was looking directly at me.

I tore off my headphones and slammed the screen dark. My heart was pounding. I looked around the cabin. Everyone else seemed normal—some asleep, some watching movies, some reading. No one was panicking.

But I felt it.

Like the pressure in the cabin had shifted, ever so slightly. Like the laws that held this world together had loosened by a millimeter.

I got up and went to the lavatory, splashed cold water on my face. I told myself it was a hallucination. Sleep deprivation. High altitude.

But when I came out, the lighting in the cabin had changed.

It was subtle. A little too green, like fluorescent lighting in a hospital. And the flight attendants—I swear they weren’t the same. Their faces looked… stretched. Off. Like their smiles didn’t reach their eyes, which now gleamed just a little too bright.

I sat back down. Tried to breathe. Tried not to look at the screen again.

But I couldn’t help it.

I tapped the Tail Cam one more time.

The sky was wrong. Too dark. The stars were… moving. Orbiting something unseen.

The shimmer was back. Bigger now.

And then—God help me—the camera feed zoomed in on its own.

It pushed through static, through corrupted frames, and showed the shape again, but closer. Clearer. I saw limbs. Not arms or legs—just endless appendages, bending in spirals, folding into themselves. It wasn’t outside the plane.

It was wrapped around it.

And smiling.

Not with a mouth, but with its presence. I could feel it pressing against the edge of my thoughts like oil seeping through a crack in my skull.

The feed cut out.

The lights flickered.

The captain came on the speaker… but the voice wasn’t his. I can’t explain how I knew that. It just wasn’t him. The voice said something in a language I can’t reproduce—half static, half whisper. Then silence.

We landed eventually. Or at least, they said we did.

But something’s wrong. I’m back home, but things don’t feel right. My reflection lags for a second when I move. The moon doesn’t look the same—it’s too close, or maybe just watching back. I haven’t slept. I don’t think I can anymore.

And sometimes, I hear something crawling above the ceiling. Not in it—above it. Somewhere outside of everything.

If you fly soon, don’t look at the cameras.

Please.

If you see it, it sees you too.