"Sleep Walking"

I keep having these dreams. Night after night after night... It's gotten to the point where I'm afraid to sleep. I drink as much coffee as I can and I pop in a DVD and watch these movies, trying to stay awake, but soon enough I feel my eyelids fall and I feel myself slipping away.

The dreams began simply enough. I was walking around my apartment. Sometimes I'd sit down for a moment, and then I'd walk again. You know how, when you dream, you don't really think about what you do? You just do it and then later, when you wake up, you realize how strange your actions were? It was like that. I didn't think about walking or sitting or anything. I just did them.

Each night my actions in my dreams became more complex. I would jump and I would crawl around on the floor... I remember one night, I turned on the faucet on the kitchen sink, and I set to 'Hot', and I stuck my hand in the stream. Pain soon flooded through it, and I desperately wanted to jerk my hand away and set it against something cold, but I couldn't. I just couldn't. No matter how desperately I willed for my hand to move, it refused to obey me.

The dreams became more painful. Once I found myself unable to blink. I lay on my couch with my eyes wide open and soon they stung and I couldn't see through all the tears forming and I just couldn't blink. One night I stepped outside my apartment and walked down the street. I can still remember the feel of the cold pavement under my bare feet. The chill of the wind against my skin. How my body shivered under clothes too light and too thin for the weather. Suddenly I felt myself fall forward, as if forced down, and my knee scraped against the curb. I looked down at the torn flesh and I felt the stinging pain and the warmth of my blood oozing out and sliding down my skin.

When I woke up that morning, my knee was scraped.

I thought I was sleep walking. I became afraid of what I might do. That's when I started trying to avoid sleep. I did whatever I could to stay awake. Anything to avoid another dream.

The first night I tried to stay awake, well... the last thing I remembered was seeing a woman outside my window. She was wearing a red dress of some sort, and there was something off about her hair. It was too thick. And her skin was wrong, like it was covered in some kind of rash. A brown, ugly rash.

After I saw her, darkness took me, and I had another dream. This time I walked down to some woman's house. I'd never met her. An old lady. Lived alone. I just stood outside her window all night, shivering in the cold, watching her sleep.

It was like that for the next week, though I didn't see that weird woman again. I'd sleepwalk down to the old lady's house and watch her. Night after night. It began to become a routine thing for me. I started to expect it.

Last night I saw the woman with the rash a second time. Just like before, she was outside my window. Only this time I saw that face. Oh God, that face! Her eyes, so completely round, so completely white, with perfectly round, perfectly black pupils and no irises. Her smile impossibly wide with impossibly big, impossibly square teeth. Her nose jutting forth like a spear.

I fell into sleep, and I walked down to the old lady's house. I broke through her window, climbed into her bedroom. I remember bending down and picking up one of the shards of glass. I remember how cold it felt in my palm, and I remember how carefully my fingers held it to keep from being cut to pieces. I remember walking to the old lady's bed, just was beginning to stir. I remember how her eyes opened and how terrified they seemed when she looked at me. I remember driving the glass into her throat, how there was some resistance at first, and then suddenly it all vanished, and the point of the shard fell forward completely.

I woke up in my own bed, still holding a bloody piece of glass.