Creepy - Scare Me To Sleep: The Diary of a Parasomniac

Episode Date: March 8, 2021

Which came first?***Written by Red Creek Young***The Grey Rooms podcast is available here: https://open.spotify.com/show/7p3D98H06RfUWkusfLIrUX***Check out our reward tiers at patreon.com/creepypod***You can also subscribe to us on YouTube:https://www.youtube.com/creepypod***Produced by Steve Blizin***Title music by Alex Aldea***Intro/Outro Narration by Joe Stofko Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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Thanks. Now, this is creepy. A podcast dedicated to sharing the most famous chilling and disturbing creepy. and urban legends in the world. Whether these stories truly happened or are simply fabrications is for you to decide. These stories may contain graphic depictions of violence and explicit language. Listener discretion is advised. Creepy Presents

Scare Me to Sleep, the Diary of a Parasomniac. Written by Red Creek Young and produced by Steve Blizzin. Then picks up and whistles through the trees. Is it carrying a voice? Is it somebody's scream? Been writing scary stories most of my life. It started when I was young. A lonesome only child left to face my fears with no real friends or siblings to confide in.

My parents raised me with the idea of rearing, an exceptional, independent child. And they did. I read myself my own stories to scare myself to sleep. I know how backwards that sounds. But as a kid, I recognized that fear was something that I contrived. It was my choice whether to let it control me or to create it myself, so that I knew each detail of the web of bullshit I'd spun so I'd sleep soundly through the night.

this has worked for me most of my life. I found that I still like telling myself these stories even as an adult. Some of us will never grow too old to be afraid of the dark. However, lately I've been seeing remnants of them too much in my everyday life. What were once consolation stories I created out of fear now seem to be reflected in my surroundings as though I wrote my wild-child, wildhood fears and fantasies into my current reality. Sometimes it's just a feeling I've described in one of my stories,

a common fear. Other times it's a character from one of my stories come to life to scare the bejesus out of me. And the worst of it is when I find myself in the same situations faced by the protagonist of my stories. I'm worried that I can't decide whether the stories are coming to life and haunting me.

or if I've been subconsciously recording my real-life experiences, and I'm just now discovering that they not only terrify me, but have been inducing a paranoia that's making me question every aspect of my life. Was this my childhood coping mechanism exacerbated by years of drinking and drug use into a lifestyle condition? Or have I simply driven myself into such serious paranoia that I'm hallucinating my greatest fears? I'm documenting these experiences both as I remember them and from a series of notes I keep on my bedside table. This is real. This is happening to me. And I'm not sure what to make of it or how much time I have left.

But if there's anyone else out there who sees the absolute worst, most blood-curdling possibility and mundane life, and it's eating them alive, Then I need to share my experiences in hopes that they might find this form and uncover some sort of solace in knowing that they aren't the only adult being scared to their eminent demise. Have any other writers out there experienced something like this? It was some pretty common fears that I first started to notice, something more than a prescribed childhood fantasy. You know, like when you're a kid, and there's still monsters under the bed. And when the tree branches tap and scratch the window with their impatient skeleton fingers,

and suddenly you're so deep in the grasp of fear that the very thought of putting your legs over the edge of the bed is utterly crippling. Well, I'm not embarrassed to admit that even at 25 years old, Something about the dark floor between my bed and the lights which feels like an expanse which could swallow me whole before I ever reach the safety that would flood the room with light and banish my fears back to my imagination. That's normal, right? Other people get their stomach in a twist about all the things that could be lurking in the dark while they lay.

Petrified to dive for the lights, right? But this was only the first of an absolutely common and ordinary circumstance. that started to go awry, for lack of better phrasing, I've always had a problem with sleep paralysis. Another reason the storytelling became so vital to me from a young age and remained so. If you've never experienced sleep paralysis, let me tell you, it's worse than you could possibly imagine. Worse for some than others, from what I've heard, everyone experiences it different. and not everyone reacts to it the same way.

For me personally, it's an immediate awareness of consciousness, followed by a sudden constriction as I realize I can't move a muscle. I'm always aware of my surroundings. I can see and I can hear, but I cannot move or react or even breathe, or at least it feels like it. It's like being buried alive. but left vulnerable and paralyzed where you feel asleep,

eyes wide open to see what lurks about you in the night. That alone scares me senseless every time. But lately, there's something worse going on. And I know it's perfectly common to hallucinate during an episode of sleep paralysis. But this is just different. It seems too real. Too consistent.

I wake up, trapped in whatever unfortunate position my spastic ass twisted into for sleep, staring usually at the ceiling or where it meets a wall. And then the floorboards creak beneath the weight of something taking slow, deliberate steps towards my door. The door handle jiggles a few times. Then the door rattles against its frame as though someone is shaking it, demanding entry. I can't see if the door opens.

There's no light that spills in from the hole. But then I hear the footsteps again, picking their way closer to my bedside. My heart's in my throat. And I mentally beg my lungs to suck in more air to support the scream that's building within my very core. And just when I think I can't take one more agonizing second, and of this intense fear.

It dissipates. And I'm able to drift off to sleep just enough that I jump awake, able to move again. I've always told myself it was all in my head. After dealing with this enough times, I thought I was crafty in deciding to prop myself up to make sure I fell asleep facing the direction of the door. If someone was really coming up to my room,

much less coming in. I'd know about it. But it wasn't the footsteps or the door handle freaking me out now that I could see them. It was the coat rack beside the door. Again, we all went through this as kids, didn't we? As I lay paralyzed in absolute terror staring toward the door.

I feel the eyes of something beside the door boring into my very soul. So sure am I that there's someone there in the dark, watching me night after night, that it makes me think of the last story I wrote about the coat rack draped as jackets and sweaters, just the right size and shaped to be someone watching. But in my story, it wasn't the silhouette of the coats in their rack that created what seems like a man lurking in the corner of the room. It was actually a man who crept in night after night, donned a coat from the rack, and stood in front of it, watching, waiting, hungry. I didn't really start to see the connections to my stories, though, until a rainy day fogged up the windows of my car.

I turned on the interior light to reach into my glove box for a tissue, and I noticed the light reflecting something in the fog of the wind. windshield. It was a handprint, certainly too large to be mine. I didn't think much of it at first, but decided to look around the rest of the car. Maybe some kids that drawn smiley faces or profanity in the dew. But what I found was that the handprints were on every window, especially the large back window, the hatchback. But it wasn't just handprints either. There were other curved shapes to the right of each left-hand print. It took me a few minutes to put it together. But as I pressed my left hand to the windshield to mimic the print,

and balled my right into a fist, and matched it up to the other shape. It was the side of a fist. As though some would have been banging their hand and pounding their fist on the windows. Not wanting to think about it. I flicked down my windshield wipers to brush. the ones in my line to sight away. My body went cold when I realized they were on the inside,

but it couldn't be. I hadn't had any one of my car. I'd done it myself, and one of my stories came to mind. The protagonist never checked the trunk of her hatchback, and she realized it too late when she looked around and saw handprints all over. On the inside.

I began thinking I was just becoming paranoid about these inconsequakes. sequential coincidences. But it wasn't just odd observations anymore. I was consistently experiencing physical manifestations of the creepy crawlers I wrote about. I woke up one morning with what felt like a sty. It wasn't my first by far. When I'm stressed out and not sleeping well, I tend to get itchy eyes that I can't help but rub.

And often enough it results in waking up with one of these demonic pimples between my eyes. eyelashes. But this one was different. When I went to the mirror to confirm my notion, I was puzzled when I didn't see a sty. But God damn was my eye itchy and painful. It almost felt like an eyelash was floating around in it. But it's more painful even than that. Sharper somehow. So naturally I began the arduous activity of peeling back each eyelid as far as far as. as they would go, and rolling my eye around its socket, while I strained in my unbothered eye to look for the source of the irritation, I was sure that on every third eye roll that I glimpsed the piece of glitter floating around. Odd, because it wasn't like I had a girlfriend or

some woman in my life that was crafty or anything, so I couldn't imagine where it'd come from. But nevertheless, I kept seeing the sparkle catching the light. and disappearing just as quickly. Imagine an eyelash made a glass, pulling a Houdini every time you tried to pry it from your cornea. It was maddening. And as I continued to pick and pick over the course of days, I was losing as many eyelashes as I was tears and sanity.

And it hit me. The sandman, I wrote a story about children. and waking up with a single grain of sand in their eyes that they can't seem to rinse or pick out. And as it slowly slices their cornea, they begin to slowly claw their eye out over days. And it was happening to me now, a tiny preface for this one. I have a lot of insects pinned in shadow boxes. I know.

That's creepy to some people in and of itself. But they fascinate me. and I actually don't have any issues or fears when it comes to insects. But lately something isn't right about them. I go so far actually is to say that something's very wrong or off about them. At first, it was just out of the corner of my eye. Just a little twitch or flutter that I wrote off as my imagination. But now I can hear them skittering about.

wings and legs tittering against glass. Some of them sound as though they're suddenly made of metal, a fork scraping sharply against the plate. But the noise isn't always temporary anymore. My waking hours got even worse as I started to feel each morning as though certain items in my apartment have been adjusted just enough for me to notice. I'm aware. That sounds wicked paranoid, and God help me, I wish that it was.

But again, I thought I could outsmart my fear and prove these notions to be a figment of my own twisted brain. I started marking with chalk, then tape, then permanent markers and nails where items were in which direction they faced. It was little things at first. My fan would be facing a different direction than when I fell asleep. The blanket on my bed would be different than the one I fell asleep. But then it started to become more noticeable things, things I couldn't possibly be doing in my sleep. My books would all be facing a different direction on the shelf.

The bookcases themselves would be moved six inches in one direction or the other. The vanity that took two people to move when it was empty would be moved four inches out from the wall. And as I started marking more permanently with the nails, I became sure of the fact that these impossible items were, in fact, being moved without my consent or participation. Needless to say, my sleep was essentially wrecked from whatever phenomenon I'd been experiencing. I started sleeping with my electric blanket on low for the little extra warmth to carry me through the endless chills, but one morning I woke up in pain as though my skin had been set fire

or two on the night. Instinctively, I yank back the blanket to inspect the damage to reveal both legs with strips of severe second-degree burns in the same pattern as the wires in the blanket. That couldn't be, though. Those blankets don't even get hot enough to cause burns. And if they did, it certainly would have damaged the blanket as well as my skin. But nothing. The blanket was cool to the touch. In fact, it wasn't even plugged in. And then the same, As I gathered my wits about me and decided to go have the prince treated, I felt myself pausing to decide, okay, well, what story is this shit from? I was finally beginning to buy that this might all stem from my need to document things

that scare me, but I wasn't afraid of warm blankets. That's definitely not in the stories. But someone being cooked alive, slowly, that was definitely one of mine. It was one I heard a lot as a kid that I adapted to fit my age range. The one about the prom queen who goes to too many tanning beds back to back that she essentially cooks herself alive. Could that be what the electric blanket had in store for me? I think most horrifying of all is something I'm sure isn't real but scares me just the same. My favorite series of stories I wrote were about a female serial killer.

The tattoo thief. When I wake in the night sometimes. presumably because of an itch. The itch doesn't simply scratch. As I pick and claw what itches painfully like fiberglass, my tattoos peel off like stickers in a sticky, fleshy, bloody mess that takes my breath away before I can scream my guts out. I can't quite get to the bottom of this illusion.

It's so real. I feel it, I smell it. I can taste blood. in the back of my tongue. Yet every time I wake up from this particular episode, my tattoos are intact, swollen and scratched, and just as though they were in fact removed and pushed back into place by the clumsy hands of a child. I did attempt to distract myself with hobbies and activities I seek out in times any catharsis.

Writing obviously wasn't going to help me through this state of fright, so I leaned on music and reading to carry me through. But here's the thing, and this is much of why I'm beginning to question my own sanity between believing my own stories or hallucinating my trepidation. Songs, hell, entire playlist that I normally enjoyed when I needed comfort, were no longer there. I don't mean just deleted from my Spotify account. I mean wiped out of existence. Artists and albums who for years, perhaps,

the holes in my happiness simply no longer existed. Nobody I talked to had ever heard of them, and no matter how I googled the lyrics or any aspect of the album to lead me back to these pieces I so sorely missed, they simply weren't there. I could write that off, though. Tell myself that I'd simply mix them up with something else, or I had it wrong, or I was searching it wrong. There had to be some way to explain how this music could simply say. cease to be findable. Books I can't explain to myself at all. Every book I pick up, cookbooks,

non-fiction, sci-fi, textbooks, by the third or fourth chapter, each and every one of them loops back to the beginning. I didn't always notice it right away. I was so determined not to think of anything else. I was throwing myself into reading each and every word on the page. But over time the nagging feeling at the back of my mind began to creep into focus. Something wasn't right. I wasn't able to finish these books for lack of focus. I simply wasn't able to finish the books. Oh, believe me, I checked to see if it was the books themselves.

But when I would flip through them from cover to cover all the pages and chapters and words were there in account of it. But when I began to read them, Every goddamn one of them would at some point end a chapter by circling back to chapter one. And regretfully, the protagonist who faced this same fuckery? Well, let's just say things didn't end well for him. Is the same thing happening to me? Am I going crazy like he was? Or am I experiencing another story I wrote?

Which kind of crazy is it? Now here's one of the most confusing parts of all. Some of the pieces I've written, like the songs I want to listen to, simply no longer exist. I'm sure I wrote them. I'd stake my life on that. We're talking about painstaking hours spent writing and editing these pieces that I remember such intricate details about.

Both the writing itself and the very process of creating them start to finish, and they've simply disappeared. There's no sign of them on my laptop or notebooks. No notes scribbled on bar napkins pinned to my cork board. No evidence that ever existed except the memory of the general gist and the nagging feeling of satisfaction in their being completed and excited to wake up and read and edit them. Even the friends who I've shared my work with before,

who have given me critiquet, and read a lot of my works have no recollection of me ever mentioning these concepts, much less fleshing them out into full stories. So this keeps leading me further down the same damn road. Am I living my stories? Or am I writing my psychotic break into short stories that I label fiction and horror? Just the same as I've been plagued by sleep paralysis from a young age. I've been a sleepwalk or even longer.

I know. It's like bedwetting and you're supposed to outgrow it, especially by your teen years. But I think we've fairly established that I'm a bit of an anomaly and my sleep habits are questionable at best. It doesn't happen often anymore, but in peak times of stress it resurfaces to wreak havoc on my nights and in turn my days. I only bring this up because it's a vital detail in a story I wrote about a girl who was mad because of her sleepwalking and a persistent tinnitus. I find myself horror-stricken to realize the similarities my current situation bears to hers. It didn't end well for her despite her pleas for assistance or guidance or someone to just listen to what was happening to her. And I'm even more terrified that this document is exactly that.

A last plea for help that, like hers, will go overlooked or unnoticed until it's too late. Like her, I wake up some nights with clumps of hair and blood on my pillow. She experienced her tinnitus during waking hours and it drove her mad enough to start tearing her hair out at the roots. I am waking up like this. I'm under the impression that I'm experiencing the tenacious noise of insects in my dreams now. and I'm so far engulfed in the matter that I'm able to rip my hair from the scalp in a fitful attempt to break the dream and rescue myself to consciousness. This isn't what killed her. Sleepwalking was ultimately what walked her right into her own grave.

I've sleepwalked a considerable amount of times, as I've said. But it's different now. It's not just waking up in a different room than where I went to sleep or getting dressed or anything that I'm used to. Now these Parasomniac episodes are turning into a recurring dream come to life to try to kill me. I find myself waking up in the same place every time. There's a lake maybe 100 yards from my back door. And when I wake up from my fugue state, I find myself standing before it. Not in the same place every time either.

I wait closer and closer to the lake's edge. As though some greater force is pulling me closer and closer. closer to a watery grave. And there's nothing I can do to fight it as I'm asleep. I've tried every logical protocol I can think of, from blockading my door to setting home alone-style tripwire alarms to try and wake myself before I'm able to leave the apartment. But it's as though my unconscious mind is acutely aware of what I had done consciously

and can maneuver delicately through any setup, Hell bent on guiding me to the lake's edge. I can feel that there's something sucking me in, as I stand before the glassy black water. The first thing that always registers to me is the sound of the winds screeching through the trees behind me, and it makes me uneasy. Is it just an aggressive breeze,

or is it a distant scream? Are they screaming for help? Or is it my screen? scream, and I'm hearing the wind carried away so someone might hear my ghost. Which story is going to end me? Or will I simply wake up one night at the bottom of the lake? Watching the last bubbles of my muffled screams scurried to the surface, destined to pull the next sleepwalker down to my water grave. Hello, you're lost, aren't you?

Don't worry. We get that a lot. You're our guest here. Your purpose is quite simple. Make a choice. We are the choices we make. Choose a door. Every room tells a story, don't you think, Mr. Beckett? I'm assuming death waits behind every door. Correct? A grim fate.

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