In all my life, I don't remember a single night where I got a decent amount of sleep.
I go to bed around ten and wake up again around three in the morning.
Always.
I get up and make myself breakfast, contemplating on what I dreamt or rather what kind of nightmare I experienced.
My parents said it was common for our family, the doctors called it a rare variety of insomnia but I knew better.
Sure, they were scary to some extended but they were just nightmares, right?
That's what I thought until I was some thirteen years. I remember it like yesterday. The night before I had a really bad one, excruciatingly vivid, worse than ever. In the nightmare, I was running down this long hallway full of lockers, pitch black, gasping for air as I sprinted down the next corridor. I felt something chasing me, breathing down my neck but every time I looked back nothing was there but I knew better.
I woke up screaming with my mother rushing into my room, she was always on alert, at some point I convinced myself that she wasn't sleeping at all because of me. Anyways, the following day I was pulled aside by my teacher for a good twenty minutes after class, talking about my decline of engagement, not paying attention to class, low grades and such.
After his long speech of "try to do better", I left the classroom and was meet by a rather dark hallway, it struck me as odd but I assumed the janitor was done cleaning up school, you know, child-like excuses to explain situations we aren't able to understand.
I peered through the window to the classroom I just left and it was pitch black. I was starting to freak out, which is understandable.
Then the solidifying moment of my childhood traumas appeared, a grotesque hand bashing the window, making me jump back in fright with a scream, I turned around to run away only to find this flying entity behind me.
A monster shrouded in darkness is the best way to describe it, same grotesque hands with a face only made up of gray, needle-sharp teeth and pitch black eyes with shadows and dark mist engulfing it, caressing its dead, malnourished body.
I ran, as far and fast as I could, down the hallway of lockers.
I don't remember much after that, somehow I made it outside with my mother waiting for me by her car, yelling at me for being late and making her worry, she was quite over-protective but I loved it, it made me feel safe but not this time.
I never talked about what happened, I just pretended like nothing. From there on out nothing actually happened, I never saw it at school, it never occurred again, it was like another nightmare but I knew better.
I investigated in my free time, everywhere I could I looked for information, on the creature and everything else I dreamt of, the mutilated bodies, the cloak wearing cultists, the monsters and ghosts, the haunted houses and apartments, everything.
Piece by piece it all came together, it was all so plausible and all of a sudden I wasn't scared of it anymore.
Throughout my whole teenage period I was obsessed with it, I studied so much on the paranormal phenomena and concepts of everything I dreamed of, even what nightmares actually were, finding out so much my little brain couldn't comprehend.
But the major kicker was that the dreams I experienced were rendered tiresome.
They didn't scare me anymore, they still don't, they are just boring replays of something but they do intrigue me, wanting to solve the mystery the put in front of me. Anyway, I was ready to drop out of high school just to start investigating real, mysterious events that seemed interesting, just to get started, but I worked through it.
Why?
Well, I found out that a certain local college were dealing with a rather interesting haunting, so natural I had to enlist.
That's a whole other case that I won't cover but it basically set me on the path of ending up where I am today.
I figured out so much, how my nightmares are linked to some kind of curse and most of them actually foreshadow some real occurrence, past, present or future.
I also discovered a paranormal side to it all, took a lot of hard work and cases to figure things out, help from other people and mysteries but it all worked out.
Now, I am sitting here, it's 4:37 A.M. and I am drinking coffee, writing this in a word-document.
Why?
I finally found it.
The monster that set me on this path.
So much lore surrounding it alongside strong pointers that it has something to do with my curse but I don't know if I'll live through it, to be frank. The urban legends and lore doesn't speak highly of it, quite grotesque, making me praise the fact that I survived my first encounter with it.
So, I am about to pack things and head on out, it's early but I need to get a good head start because I am heading home.
Can't wait to figure it this out.