Waking up in a cold sweat feels like nothing to worry about. But sometimes, you remember why you worry. That dream you had felt so surreal, and for what? Why? Why are you tortured by your own mind in the middle of the night? Sometimes it may be nice, but most of the time it is always your worst fears.

I hold onto my nightmares dearly. I remember them since I was a toddler. From the giant drop of a coaster and landing me to my doom, to having to wake up and to hear something in the living room. When I get up from bed to see what it is, however, the sound slowly fades away once I reach the room, and I’m left standing in nothing but darkness.

People always tell me I can change my dreams whenever they’re bad, but it’s always impossible. My mind is in control, not me. What scares me most is sometimes, I feel like I’m dying in these dreams. I can feel the pain. The thing is, in dreams when you “die”, you automatically wake up. It’s because your body doesn’t know what to do, due to the fact it had never felt death before. And that makes everything scarier if your dream continues on after you “die”.

It only applies to you, not anyone else in the dream you have. One dream, I knew I was going to die, so I texted everyone that I knew in my family and friends, and told them that I would never see them again, and that I loved them very much. A natural response to a dream like this, or anything in real life, like a shooting. After, I see a man get mauled right in front of my own eyes by this… Thing. Not just him, but many other residents in my dream. One who died tried to escape, but all that I saw left of her was her hand running down a window, her hand covered in blood and staining the glass. The monsters in my dream could also change into humans, so you never knew if who you were standing alone with in an elevator is a real person, or a fraud.

In most of my dreams, me or other people are mostly killed off. I hid in a bathroom stall once from an attack, but I was found, and my wrists were gripped onto tightly until I lost all of my blood circulation to keep going. I cry into my pillow, I can barely breathe, I’m losing all oxygen from choking on my tears, until finally I manage to wake myself up.

I’m always having to hide, but I can never attack. For some reason I can only allow myself to have these things happen to me. But sometimes I can run away, although only barely. My blankets hold me back from escaping my dream, and it causes me to lose mobility in my legs. I can only crawl away from whatever is following me, and sometimes I’m not fast enough. It’s not fair.

Sometimes dreams happen in real life as well, and it makes things more terrifying. Déjà vu is something serious to worry about in my opinion. You never know that one day, you go up to a food stand to order something, and the person working there whispers to you, “It’s too late. He’s here.” And once you turn around, everyone around you is gone. When you turn back, the worker is gone, too.

Once, I stood in front of two mirrors. They showed me, of course, but the reflections were different. One on my left had skin covering her mouth and eyes, and her wails of help were muffled. The other on my right had eyes that were deep into the palms of her hands, and her sockets were on full display. She unhinged her mouth to show another pair of eyes in the back of her throat, staring directly at me. I was paralyzed as I saw the one on my left gouge her hands into her sockets, desperately trying to rip her skin away. Blood dripped down her face as she tried to rip her mouth open next. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t see or speak, as the one on my right cackled at her misery.

I think about the two to this day. I feel like it’s a sign, my two inner feelings trying to speak out to me. My anxiety, who can never say anything, and my pride, who can hear, see, and speak all. My worst traits.

I fear that all of my dreams are a sign. A sign of something horrible coming my way. My dreams about falling, murderers, hospitals, death, all a figment of my imagination ready to torment me physically at any moment.

The help I need and want still lingers out there somewhere, but as of right now as I want to speak, nobody is here to listen. My trauma squeezes around my body like a snake, knocking all of the air out of my lungs and the tears out of my eyes, making my blood go cold and myself go numb. Sometimes I don’t even dare to speak about my dreams, because people can’t do anything but walk away. I’m alone, you’re alone, we’re all alone with these nightmares that are constantly following us around, never leaving our brains and sometimes coming back in our lives to haunt us once more.

I can’t stop thinking about the thing I dread the most. That it’s all a sign.