- Name: Tim Stein
- Pronouns: He/him
- Date: April 4, 2020
- Occupation: Poet and restaurant employee
- City of residence: New York City, New York
- Date(s) of account: March 2020
- Subject of account: Strange dreams
My name is Tim Stein. I'm a poet in my free time, but otherwise I work at a restaurant, busing tables and the like.
I've recently had some troubling dreams, and although I know something as minor as that probably won't be of much use to you, I still feel like I should mention it on the off-chance this amounts to anything.
It started a month ago. I think so, anyways. Time is difficult.
In the first dream I had, my body was asleep in bed while I looked down at it as a ghost. I moved downwards and touched my body's chest, and suddenly I felt myself enter my body again.
I got out of bed and was about to get dressed when I noticed how dark it was. Checking my phone, I saw that it was still 2 AM. As I was about to climb back into my bed and go to sleep, I happened to glance outside and saw that the moon was far bigger than usual. It nearly took up the entire window, in fact. I could make out a massive crater at the center of what I could see of the moon. As I watched, it grew smaller.
The moon's pupil had shrunk.
I woke up. As soon as I did so, I got out of bed and looked out the window. The moon was back to normal, just as it always had been. It was actually 2 AM, though, so I went back to sleep, this time uninterrupted.
The dreams continued over the next few weeks. There was always that same sensation of being outside my own body until I chose to enter it. Sometimes I'd spend the whole dream just floating through my home, walking through the walls, seeing what I could see. Nothing existed outside of my home in the dreams, though, as I soon learned. Everything outside was just a featureless black landscape, barely distinct from the sky, save for the moon. One night I tried going outside after I'd entered my body, just to see what it felt like to walk on that smooth black nothing- if I even could- but I found the doors and windows somehow locked from outside, and I wasn't strong enough to break through by force.
One night, though, I felt determined to see what was outside my home in the dreams. I searched the entire house in hopes of finding something that could help me. After trying all the keys I could find to no avail, I took a kitchen knife and stabbed it into my door, prying it apart. I continued stabbing the door until enough of it was broken that I could reach into the hole and unlock it from outside.
I opened the door and stepped through into nothing.
I fell forever. I fell forever but the moon never got any smaller. Even when I could no longer see my home for being too far below the world, the moon was still there, watching me like a giant eye.
I've never thought of night or the dark as anything to be afraid of. If anything, I've always liked being the only one awake while the rest of humanity is asleep save for the few others who experience that strange and silent world, alone in their own homes just as much as I am. After that dream, though, my feelings on the matter had changed drastically.
When I finally awoke, it was 4 AM. For some reason, the dreams never let me wake up before it gets light out. They always seem to leave me to the darkness I used to love, back when I could still look at the moon without swearing it was looking back.
That was how the first two weeks passed since the dreams started. I would find myself looking down at my body, confined to that house where the moon watched from every window. But one night, when I'd resolved to try and reach the moon as a spirit before I'd fallen asleep, I found the dream changed. No longer was I in my home, hovering above my bed. Instead, my body was sleeping on a bench in the local park, though I was above it as always.
But just as I was about to enter my body and see whether anything existed outside the park, I saw it stir.
I stared at my body as it twitched in its sleep. I'd never seen anything like this before. I floated over to a nearby tree and watched my body, waiting to see what happened next.
At last, it sat up. Its face turned slowly towards me. Though I could not scream, I tried to when its eyes met my own.
Something in my body's eyes reminded me far too much of the ever-watchful moon.
I was shaking when I woke up that night- not in my own bed, but on a bench in the park.
It got worse from there. Not the dreams themselves, but what they meant for me. I've started waking up in strange places, despite placing increasingly strict measures to keep myself locked inside, and it's become harder to feel rested when I wake up, though I can never quite keep myself from falling asleep. I haven't spent so long feeling fatigued that it's become difficult to tell waking from sleeping, but…
But I'm not sure that's true. After all, as I write this, I can see the moon staring at me through my window.
Its pupil just shrunk.
Analysis
Given that a series of strange dreams is more or less impossible to corroborate, I think I should add a rule against hallucination- and dream-related accounts to my introduction post. Not much else to say here, really, except that I find it odd although Stein claims to have retained a degree of awareness in his dreams, he didn't have the level of power over them that lucid dreamers do.
Tim, if you're reading this, I'd advise you talk to a therapist about this rather than myself. They'd be better-equipped to help you sort through all this than I am.
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