My first problem is that I hate sleeping. It is anthema to me. It takes several hours to get to sleep at night and to ensure I sleep at all I must physically and mentally exhaust myself. I always try to fight sleep off. I usually get up when I feel starting to drift of to sleep. At these times I will often play games on the P.C. or read books. More often than not I find myself at the P.C. writting stories. I belive my hate, (fear?), of sleep started at a very young age and I mainly blame the dreams I get.

When I do sleep I always invariably dream. Most people do as far as I know. Not everyone can remember their dreams in complete detail though. At the age of about 7 or 8 I started noticing that the certain aspects of my dreams were coming true. One example of this was during a school lesson during which I lost a close friend. I was explaining to him that I had dreamt about the lesson the previous night and that I knew what the teacher was going to write on the black board. He didn’t believe me so I proceeded with telling my friend what the teacher would write on the black board word for word. He soon wished to have nothing more to do with me and said that I was a freak. As I grew older the dreams I had came true more frequently, but rather than being exact to the dream they became obscure in definition. One dream around 14 or 15 I was playing with a tennis ball in one of the school rooms during a rainy lunch break. The ball bounced out of an open window onto the ground floor roof. I went to fetch the ball and tossed it back to my friends in the classroom. No sooner had I done this than I feel through the roof and broke both of my legs. The dream did come true to a degree. I remember the dream as soon as I had picked the ball up of the roof. My friends were shouting to me, asking me to throw the ball back to them, I suddenly felt an oppresive weight all about and ran back to the window, holding onto the ball like it was my life. The feeling didn’t leave me when I entered the classroom through the window. I didn’t fall through the roof, but the bad thing that happened was that I receieved a weeks detention after school, each session being two hours long! These dreams have continued into my adult life an I have grown fearful of them. I only remember the dreams when I reach what I call the trigger point. It is always the point when something nasty could happen to me or someone with me. At this point I always pause and change what I did in the dream, in doing this I hope the dream never fully comes true, the ending changed by my decision in life.

My final problem is that I often dream of SHADOWMEN as I call them. These are shadow figures with indefinable gender and come in all heights, they are however always thin with long, gangly arms and legs and long hands and fingers. With them comes an intensive sense of evil. It is incredibly opressive and forces me down into the bed. They do nothing except standing there and watching. I usualy wake up in abject terror and hide under the covers. It becomes a force of will to get out of bed and can take up to an hour to get up to turn the light on. Several times the SHADOWMAN has still been there, watching me move around the room to the light switch. When the light comes on I feel more at ease, but the sense of terror is still prevalent. On numerous occassions I have had to wake my partner up to ask her to turn the light on. I ocassionally get this feeling of evil and terror during waking hours and it seems to follow me around the house. It is always dispelled as soon as I leave the house. I also pick the feeling up in various areas of the city I live in, including certain parks, inner city areas and friends’ houses.

My major concern is that my son is starting to have similar dreams to myself. He is only 2 and has on several occassions complained about the little man in the corner of his room. My son tells me that the man goes out the wall for walk. He also severely dislikes going to certain areas we are frequent to, including his favourite park. Strange I may sound now, but there is a section in the park that has really good climbing frames for him to climb on. Once in that area he is fine and doesn’t want to leave. However he also never wants to go there and has more than once cried about it.

Credits: DAT