He entered my room, and I couldn’t move my body.

This happened two weeks ago. And even today, I’m still running it through my mind, trying to figure out what happened.

Background.

The Town and Village of Green Island suffered a major power outage, which lasted all the way into night time. And rather than stay in my apartment in the dark, I called the Red Roof on Wolf Road and rented a single room for the night. Trust me, I had no idea how long the power outage would last, and I needed a warm bed.

It took a while to fall asleep. This happens when you’re in an unfamiliar bed. I tossed, I turned, I flipped, I flopped, I puffed the too-thin pillows up to give my head some sort of comfortable alignment.

Finally … maybe at about 12:30 or so … I felt the calming caress of slumber. Night night. Zzzzz…

Then, all of a sudden, I heard noises. Someone was in my room. I felt pounding on my bed. It was a man, his shadow somehow cascading from the window glare toward me. 

I tried to move. I couldn’t. I tried to speak. All that came out was jumbled moans. 

The man stayed there. I could feel my heartbeat racing. 

And then …

I woke up. Nobody in the room except me and these crappy pillows. 

That was one intense nightmare. But it felt so real. So scary and realistic and disorienting. 

I climbed out of bed and checked the door locks. They were tight and bolted. No sign of forced entry. 

But my nerves were still on high alert. Trust me. This is frightening. 

The crazy thing about dreams is that while you’re fully engulfed in whatever brain-crafted storyline in your sleep, it all disappears the second you wake up. Maybe you remember a fragment, a word, an image … but that’s it. 

But this nightmare felt so real. I remember enough of it to frighten me awake, and I remembered it enough to worry about falling asleep again. 

I eventually fell asleep, and whatever demons plagued me in the previous sleep were not there the next time. Or any time after that.

Even the fact that I’m still remembering this moment, two weeks later, still troubles me. Yeah, there’s theories about how dreams are your brain processing memories in new iterations; there’s another theory that dreams are a predictor of the future; and another theory that dreams are just your brain pfutzing around with stray thoughts, like some AI image generator.

Still … I hope the next time I have a nightmare like that … I wake up instantly to chase it away. I’m still not happy that I felt like I couldn’t move or couldn’t speak, and all I could sense was some sort of abject terror. 

Yeah. Stuff like that.