CREEPYPASTA

Funnymouth

Nothing. Eight users in the channel, not a single one active.

lemonlimeskull: BORING.
lemonlimeskull: Why are you people so BORING?
funnymouth: O)_(O
lemonlimeskull: WAKE UP.
* lemonlimeskull puts everyone's hand in a bowl of warm water.

It took me a few seconds to see it. Funnymouth again, staring again. I physically slumped my shoulders with a "not this shit again" sigh.

Then I noticed he wasn't in the channel.

lemonlimeskull: ?
lemonlimeskull: ...
lemonlimeskull: Anyone else see him?
lemonlimeskull: Of course not, because you're idle.

Obviously, it was a glitch with either my client or the server. The message was kicked up from earlier in the night, at random. These things happen.

Still, it creeped the hell out of me.

After a few minutes of sitting there with a really cold, creepy feeling in my stomach... that "I shouldn't have done something" feeling... I decided to stop trying to brave it out and just closed out the entire chat program.

Sure, I COULD have just hung out like everything was fine, but why bother try to prove I wasn't spooked? Hell, nobody was even around to see me slink away.

After a few more hours screwing around on the web, I went to bed around 2:40 AM.

One thing I've always prided myself on is that I do NOT have nightmares. At least not regularly. Usually, if there are monsters or ghosts or nuclear wars in my dream, I get to control it and I have a great time. I'm shooting zombies in the face, outright telling ghosts they're not real while I laugh at them, and if there's some disaster, I always know how to get to the safe spot while every other MF'er fries.

I've had maybe four ACTUAL nightmares in the past ten years, and yes I'm completely serious.

The first nightmare of my adult life was in 2005. I'd just broken off a relationship with someone who had been with someone else for over a year behind my back. That night, when I finally DID get to sleep, I dreamt she was strapped down to a medical table while some sort of unseen, inexplicable creature sucked her brain out through an organic machine.

The brain screamed. Ceaselessly.

The second nightmare had me visiting a medical facility where they were experimenting with new methods of saving lives. There was a fantastic tour of this high-tech facility, lots of wonders of modern science, people in lab coats, etc. then, I was lead to a room where three car crash victims had been "saved" by their techniques. This included a slowly rocking young girl whose face had been completely distended and hung around her chest, and a woman who was nothing but a cluster of twitching severed limbs, all held together by a drawn-out, kite-like span of flesh.

The third came soon after the second. I was being accosted by two people - one who wanted to insult me to no end, and the other who kept trying to pinch and tweak me in absurdly ineffective ways. Thinking I could control this dream like others, I set the two men against each other, thinking it would be a sort of poetic justice.

Instead, the pincher became increasingly violent until he was pulling at the other's cheeks, grabbing his tongue with a fist and furiously pulling at it until it came out... Then he pulled the fellow's eyelids until they distended in some sort of grotesque prolapse.

I suppose what I'm getting at is that even when I DID have nightmares, I was never the actual target of any sort of horror. It's always been a kind of empathetic horror related to someone else getting brutalized.

This night, however, was different. As soon as I fell asleep, I started dreaming. Basically, it was a recurring dream I have where I'm in the woods, just checking out animals and birds and generally acting chill. I lie in the grass and look up at the sky. It's always a dream I welcome, because even if I've had a shit day, I'll wake up happy and ready to start over.