Night Terrors Deletion Appeal

Now, before I actually start writing this. I will remain anonymous and will use fake names for the sake of other's identities.
I’m a senior in high school now. When this all first began, I was just an 8th grader going through a hard time in life. My parents got divorced and my grandmother died. I was definitely not in a good place by any means. I was falling deep into a depression and found my only source of comfort was studying dreams and creating art. I was so captivated by artistic ability both in the physical world and those manifested in my dreams, that it was the only thing that kept me happy before therapy began. I would go to therapy, sit down on a cold, hard couch and pour my heart out to a complete stranger. This didn't comfort my emotions or pain in any way. It was interesting recording my dreams down in a notebook, then going back to figure out what they meant. If I didn’t write down my dreams, I’d forget them in an instance, but wouldn’t forget the feelings they gave me.

When I first began to sink into depression, I didn’t really dream. It was just a blur between stressful day after stressful day. After about a month or so, I began to dream and take notes of dreams. They didn’t seem to have really any important meanings behind them besides stress, which I knew I was in. I recorded my dreams for about three weeks before noticing a connection between them all. In each of my dreams, there seemed to be the same man appearing throughout them. He was about 6’ 1”, and had shaggy light hair. He wore dark, black shades. It was hard to exactly recall his purpose was, but he would always appear in these dreams. I named him “Edward”, because he never told me his name and it would be annoying to just call this person "it" over and over. I did truly believe Edward was a guardian in these dreams, since nothing bad ever seemed to happen to me.

During the time I started recording dreams, my eyesight had started to deteriorate from staying up all night to watch Netflix or researching facts about dreams, etc. I don’t know . . . if I was just seeing this or not, but I found some pages marked with an ‘E’ on the corner in my notebook. My sight isn’t a reliable source for proof whether or not something is real because of my nightly routine activities. I’m kind of a messy note taker, so it wouldn’t surprise me to see notes written everywhere when I was half awake, but just a single letter in fancy cursive on the bottom of the page made me uneasy. I knew I couldn’t have done it, because I could never write in cursive. I wondered to myself if it was just my younger brother, John, messing around with me, but figured he wouldn’t dare go through my stuff without asking. I tried lucid dreaming for a while, but I could never tell when I was dreaming or when I was awake. My dreams always felt so real, because they’d never be about flying pigs or magic wishes. My dreams would seem like day to day things, but had secret meanings behind everything.

After a couple weeks, Edward started to talk to me throughout scenarios in my dreams. He had a deep voice, which sounded scary, but had a warm smile that seemed to ease my unnerved mind. He would always seem to solve some sort of conflict and assist me in anyway I could. He reminded me of a couple friends I used to have. He’d listen to my problems or anxieties and help me get through them. If I had bad day at school, he’d console me and tell me to just work on making friends, so my classes wouldn’t be as lonely. My depression started to ease up and my therapist said that I no longer needed to come see him anymore. Things started to go downhill from there. Edward started acting a little different. It started off with his appearance. He no longer wore a nice white shirt and dress pants. He started wearing darker clothing, with just a black shirt and black pants. Then his hair seemed more disheveled as the dreams progressed. His sunglasses had cracks in them. For the time being, this was the only thing that changed. He still helped me through my problems and let me vent on about them.

Then he began acting colder. He would not respond back to me when I talked to him. He would only stand and stare at me in response. I’d scream at him for some sort of reaction of movement, but he’d just stare at me behind his sunglasses. I figured maybe I was becoming stressed again, and soon he would be back to his normal self. I noticed now that the ‘E’s that were being written on the page, seemed sloppier and bigger. They weren’t just neatly on the corners now, but also in the middle of the page, even in the middle of a paragraph sometimes. I was getting concerned about my mental state of being and about Edward. According to my studying, he was part of my mind. Which I didn’t believe until one night in December. I remember it vaguely without writing it down. I was getting in my bed, when I saw shadows lurking around in the dining room. The silhouette of a person crouching by the chairs just staring at me. I had a hard time going to sleep, and couldn’t tell if this was real or a dream. It had to have been a dream, since I heard nobody walk downstairs and nobody had broken in. The silhouette just sat there and stared at me as I tried to go to sleep.

I started becoming afraid as the nights went on. I kept seeing the same figure sitting there. It kept moving closer and closer every night. Edward was no longer in my dreams to comfort me. It would just be me in a world of darkness until I woke up. The figure, the night, and I were the only things that seemed to exist anymore. After a couple weeks of this nocturnal torture, I casually asked about starting therapy again and figured at least thinking about starting again would help. There was one specific night, where I couldn’t take it anymore and knew I needed to start again right away. It was the middle of the night, 4 A.M. to be precise when it happened. I sat up to find the same figure across the room, standing just above the basement stairs. This time it was a full body. Light illuminated the room from outside to show me a full view of them this time. I was fucking horrified. Dark clothes were torn up, showing pallid, almost transparent skin. Sunglasses were just barely hanging off their face, when I caught a full glimpse of it.

They had no eyes . . . as if someone had gouged out their eyes and left a bloody mess inside the socket. And a small, knowing smile was stretched across their face. Entrails seemed to be pouring out of his stomach, wiggling their way out of him, and dumping themselves on the floor with the a wet smack. I screamed and screamed until my mother came down, and begged her to start therapy again right away.

I have been in therapy since that night, trying to make sense of these things that I was seeing. My therapist said it was just stress or I might’ve been watching too many horror movies, but I truly believe there was something there. There was a monster, standing at the foot of my bed in the dead of night. Haunting and plaguing my dreams to become nightmares. I know I was not seeing things. This was real and I shouldn’t have to feel terrified like this every night before I go to bed. People have told me that dreams were connected to our souls. And by engaging with this . . . monster disguised as a man, I let him out. Edward was more real than I could've dreamt him up to be. If you see anything that looks like this or experience anything like this, tell someone right away. It might be too late before you realize this isn’t just a dream.