Congratulations Night Terror Sufferer!

You’ll awake, as you always do, with your heart pounding, your lungs screaming. You’ll want to shout but you’ll be unable to make a noise, struggling out of your sheets to see the ceiling of your apartment suspended above you, off white turned gray in the darkness.

You’ll look around, the vaguely oppressive horror of whatever force awoke you pushing in around you. It’ll be miserable, a feeling that the world is going to end without knowing how or why. The sense of inevitability will be unbearable.

You’ll roll over to check your cell phone. It’ll read three AM. You’ll open the contact list and flip through the names you think you’d want to call, to talk to, but after a moment’s consideration you’ll close it. They’ll all be asleep, you’ll think to yourself. I should be asleep.

But you won’t be able to rest. You’ll feel uneasy, deeply uneasy. When you think about why your mind will shy away from the facts of the matter, drifting to lovers you’ve lost, people you’ve stopped speaking to. You’ll want to cry, but tears won’t come. It will be a unique sort of misery.

You’ll lay there, knowing you should get up, but you won’t be able to. And when you finally move to you’ll notice a dark shape hovering over your bed. It’ll be massive in scale, its skin barbed and black as night. The only light which will cast from its form will be a pair of glowing red slits, the definition of evil eyes.

“You’re not alone,” the creature will grumble, its voice emerging from somewhere far, far below its chest.

Panicking, you’ll switch the light on, your pulse racing. You’ll know that this could be your last moment, the last night you ever awake panicking in the middle of the night, and you’ll want to see the face of whatever kills you.

The light will cast shadows about the room, making the creature look ten feet tall. And the creature will do its part, standing there with grim purpose, its face unreadable in the low light, its form almost incomprehensible to the human mind.

“Craig?” you’ll mumble.

The creature will nod. It’ll be Craig, the monster that used to hide in your closet when you were young. He’ll be standing there at the end of the bed with the horrifying expression he always used to wear when he was the ill defined existential horror that you feared in the night.

“What’s wrong, buddy?” he’ll grumble, sitting down on the side of your bed.

You’ll spill out your feelings to him then. You’ll tell him of the sense of helplessness that has been occupying your thoughts the last few months. You’ll tell him of your fears of dying alone, how you’ve been losing sleep over the pointlessness of your work. You’ll tell him of the feeling that you’ve accomplished nothing in your life, the knowledge that your death will be just as silly and anticlimactic as your life inevitably.

He’ll sit there and hold your hand, listening to you, which is really all you needed. Someone to make you feel like you really existed. Like you counted in the world, the way Craig did, ever night for a decade and a half, making you feel that the universe itself was attempting to destroy you.

He’ll make you feel free.

Congratulations Night Terror Sufferer!