The NoSleep Podcast - NoSleep Podcast S3E13

Episode Date: November 17, 2013

It's episode 13 of Season 3! We have five tales for you in this episode, featuring stories about strange dreams and the sounds and visions of otherworldly entities. The full episode features the following stories. The free version features only the first two tales.  "The Girl in My Dreams" written by Jonathan Stiles and read by Peter Lewis. Music by Brandon Boone. (Story starts at 00:02:50) "A Face in the Crowd" written by The Claverhouse Email Series and read by Kyle Akers. (Story starts at 00:19:30) "Not Now, Eric" written by Claire Newman and read by Kristin Gjerløw. Music by Brandon Boone. (Story starts at 00:34:40) "3913" written by Mitch Truesdale and read by David Cummings. (Story starts at 00:50:40) "Whispers" written by Alex Kerr and read by Gary Etchingham. (Story starts at 01:21:25) Click here to learn more about The Claverhouse Email Series Click here to learn more about Peter Lewis Podcast produced by: David Cummings Music & Sound Design by: David Cummings, unless otherwise noted This podcast is licensed under a Creative Commons License 2013. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As the sunlight fades to darkness, the frightful tales creep into your mind. There will be no sleep. And now I was listening to. There's little boys who died. Peace in the window. Brace yourself for the no sleep podcast. It's episode 13 of season three. Welcome to the show.

I'm your host, David Cummings. We have five tales for you in this episode, featuring stories about strange dreams and the sounds and visions of otherworldly entities. I hope everyone had a safe and enjoyable Halloween. In case you miss them, make sure you check out the Halloween bonus episodes that came out at the end of October.

I'm grateful for all the positive feedback we received from those shows. Now that my short post-Halline break is over, we're back into our normal routine of bi-weekly episode releases. We have some new narrators lending their voices to this episode. Christen Yarrow and Gary Etchingham make their first visit to the podcast, so we extend a warm welcome to them. Also, returning to the podcast after a long absence, is Kyle Akers. It's great having Kyle's excellent narration back with us again. And since we're all set to go, let's get things started.

Our first tale takes us into the ethereal world of dreams. Author Jonathan Stiles shares a tale about a specific recurring dream with an unsettling encounter. Narrator Peter Lewis reads the tale for us about the person who is, quite literally, the girl in my dreams. Keep this short, mostly because it's been a while since the incident and the details only get hazier with time. I don't dream very often, but when I do, they're pretty vivid. Usually they're silly and harmless.

I've run through all of the classics. Dreams about flying, falling, being in strange situations without my clothes, that's sort of thing. I've tried my head at lucid dreaming a few times, varying degrees of success, mostly because I don't dream frequently enough to apply what I learn. No practice, no performance, as it were. I'm telling you this now, because it seems like the right time for this kind of story, even if it doesn't end like you'd expect. After all, I'm here to tell it, and I'm doing perfectly well. I'm still sane, safe and happy, but like I said, the memories are fading with time, and I want to keep it somewhere that I can come back and visit. So, let's begin, shall we?

Dreams I have, there's only been one recurring dream, and boy, has it been a cut above the rest. The earliest I can remember having it is when I first started the seventh grade, and the last time I had it, was when I was finishing high school. The last instance is what really cemented the dream as strange in my mind. That and the fact that they only ever happened in the autumn months, starting around Halloween and going for a month. They'd stop around my birthday in November. Normally it goes something like this.

Soon after falling asleep, I wake up in a clearing. The sky is dark, it's clear. night time. Sometimes there are stars in the sky and sometimes there aren't. What doesn't change, though, is the moon. I might forget the rest of it, but I don't think that moon will ever leave me. It's silver, a bright and gleaming silver that is so close and clear that it casts sharp black shadows on the ground. The shadows are cast by trees, great, big pines and cedars like the ones in the woods by my house, but completely unfamiliar. Him, I checked my woods to see if I could find a way to this clearing, and I never did find

trees like that. I looked for the clearing because I was looking for her. It never seemed important at the time. I can still remember her how she would sort of appear out of the trees. She was always my age, and from what I can remember, she seemed to age as I did. Her skin was pale, so pale as to almost be the same shade as the moon overhead. In contrast was pitch black, no light reflected off of it not a single bit. Her eyes were the same shade, black and without pupils. I never found this strange until I woke. up and realized just how unnerving they were. On occasion, I would be able to get close enough

to see her ears, and I can remember that they tapered to sharp points, like those of an elf or a bat. I say on occasion because she would never stay still for long. She would say something to me, and I'd reply. I know that what she said was important, but no matter how hard I try, I can't remember. I wish I could. She would smile at me, the smile sweet and predatory at the same time. And then one of us would chase the other. Sometimes she'd chase me, sometimes I'd chase her,

and we'd move faster than normal with more agility than I could ever hope to have when awake. It's easier to move in a dream, right? I can remember flashes of moving over the forest floor, over logs and through brush, either pursuing or being pursued by her. Sometimes we'd take to the trees springing from branch to branch in our bid for more speed. It was wonderful, in the old sense. It inspired wonder. I never managed to connect my newfound ability with the fact that I was asleep and dreaming until I woke up.

And even then I would need a moment of lying in bed to realize that I had experienced that dream again. Eventually, the chase would come to an end. I would bring her down or she would do the same to me. By unspoken agreement, the prize was always the same, and that prize was a kiss. You might think that to be nice or sweet, but I can assure you it was anything but. For one, I can remember it burning, like you had touched something very, very cold. For another, the loser was never happy to get it. And I think it only ever burned when she kissed me, not the other way around.

It was a thing of dominance and possession, not love or even lust. After the kiss, she would say something to me. I could usually hear something call close by some sort of animal, but before I could identify it, I would wake up. After dreams like this, I usually had a bad day. I would be low on energy irritable. On one occasion, I even had mild hallucinations, but I think that was just from general exhaustion as I hadn't slept over that weekend. That was the usual dream. In the fall of every year, that same damn dream would happen at least once,

and probably more often than that. I tried ignoring them at first, chalking it up to hormones, but the next year that had happened, I decided to investigate. I checked out books on dreams, psychology, sleep disorders, that sort of thing. From our school library and the local library, turned up nothing I was surprised. I had read a lot in middle and high school, and I wasn't accustomed to the answers not being in a book. I'd like to tell you I took the next step right away, but I didn't start looking through the paranormal books until freshman year of high school. I thought of her as Fayish, so those were the first ones I looked through.

Nothing. I looked through books on vampires, ghosts, even extraterrestrials with no sense. success. Aside from instilling a lingering interest in that area, the books were of little help. School got in the way, and after a while, I just looked at it as a thing that happened. I never took it to a psychologist or even brought it up to my parents, partly because I didn't know how to bring it up, and partly because the effects were pretty negligible. I passed my classes and functioned around people. I just felt drained when doing it. So I let it continue through sophomore year, through junior year, and into my senior year.

The dream never varied much, and though it struck me as odd that it only happened around that time of year, I never paid it much mind except for in the mornings. After all, the dreams stayed inside my head, and that's all that mattered. Until senior year, the last year I had those dreams. It was in the beginning of November, I think, the second week. I'd been under a bit of stress in school, a typical drama, compounded on top of a big project due soon and a band concert coming up, so I had been losing sleep and a lot of it.

I think, over the course of a few days, I only got three or four hours of sleep a night in between consoling teenagers and doing work. To top it all off, I had to figure out what to do for my birthday with my family and friends as I was turning 18. So when things settled down and I had finally finished the project, I was looking forward to some much-needed sleep. That night I turned in early and fell asleep quickly. My parents knew not to bother me because of the huge workload I had gotten through, so I was undisturbed for the rest of that evening.

Nothing unusual there I had done this before. It was difficult. different this time though. For one, I knew I was dreaming. I thought I would surely wake up, seeing as that's what happened the other times I became lucid, but I stayed there in the clearing. Sure enough, the girl appeared, but she was different. Her pale skin was marred by cuts, small, shallow scratches like she had gotten on the wrong side of a cat. Her black eyes were Wide with fear I can still see and remember to this day. She had never had that expression before, not in all the times I ran with her. Even though I couldn't understand what she was saying when she spoke, I knew what she meant.

As she broke into a sprint alongside me, her meaning became all too clear. Run. I did. even though I had no idea what was going on. Up to this point, the dreams had never been particularly frightening to me, just unnerving upon close inspection, but this time it wasn't just frightening, it was terrifying. I ran, but I could feel the air burning my lungs,

my legs and arms burning with each step, and it was new to me. I can't remember how we got there, but we entered another clearing. Stones, massive standing stones rose from the ground, and the girl leapt for them. I followed, scraping my knee on the side. Finally, after scrambling to the top, I thought we were safe from whatever we were running from. I should have known better, and what happened next is something I wish I could forget. Things came out of the forest, things that looked like people.

but all wrong. They ran fast, faster than I had ever seen, ever gone, but their limbs were on backwards. Not like they had been attached backwards, but like they had been twisted back 180 degrees. They didn't run so much as scuttle at us. They were covered in something dark that looked like mud and smelled like carrion. Their faces were the worst, though. They had had eyes, but where hers were black, theirs were white. Milky, pure white. They had no noses that I remember, but they had mouths much bigger than they should have been. They had huge, flat teeth and massive tongues that flicked out of their mouths and over their lips before going back in.

And they knew where we were. I can remember flashes of what happened next. I remember one getting up the nerve to leap at us and me punching it in the head and hurting my hand pretty badly. Another managed to get purchase and before we leapt to another stone it managed to grab my leg, leaving a scratch like a very long crescent moon. I can remember the very end of the dream. She looked at me. It almost seemed like she was debased.

something. Her face looked quizzical and scared. I couldn't have stopped what happened next, even if I had seen it coming. I swear she sprouted claws from her fingers and took a swipe at me, dragging them across my chest. I was left with four bleeding cuts and fell onto the stone. She planted a knee on my chest and leaned in for a kiss. The others had hurt, but this one really hurt. I had never felt so much pain. It was like kissing broken glass and cold nails. I teared up, and before I could do anything else, she ran off of the stone.

I could barely see her running for the tree line, and I could tell that she didn't have much of a lead on the pack of things before she vanished. I woke up soon after. At first, it felt like a nightmare. I had those occasionally, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized that it didn't feel like it. For one thing, my arms and legs hurt like I had just run a long time. I managed to convince myself that it was just psychosomatic and that it was all in my head until I went into the bathroom to clean off the sweat and pull myself together.

I wish I could tell you that there were four bleeding marks across my chest, but there weren't. Not even redness. No, whatever she had done to me hadn't left any evidence. What scared me, though, was the mark on my leg. It was long and curved like a crescent moon, and my knee was scraped to hell. That was three years ago. I finished school, joined the military. The military settled into life.

That day I covered my leg up, avoided friends and family, and thought for another dream. Even if it meant meeting those things again, because I wanted to see what had happened to her. One of those dreams. I know why. Much as I hope to see her again, I don't think I will. But every time I go to sleep, especially around this time of year, I find myself thinking of that dark-haired girl. and every night before I fall into the black of sleep, I find myself wishing for those dark woods once more.

Like most people, a normal routine is what makes life calm and controlled. But when you start to notice things that are far from ordinary, the results can be quite disturbing. In this tale from the Claverhouse email series, narrator Kyle Acres explains how one man dealt with the problem of seeing things that no one else could see and what he kept seeing was a face in the crowd. They say you should never really believe anything until you've seen it with your own two eyes. Well, my eyes have seen more than most and I still don't know what to believe.

One thing's for certain though. I know my own fate is sealed and has been for some time. Let me tell you, it doesn't end well. But I'm getting ahead of myself. First things first, I better tell you how it all started. Just another normal day in a normal town with me, a normal guy, going about my business, and running late as usual. I don't drive, so I find myself on buses a lot. I'm an engineering student, so mostly I'm going back and forth to and from classes.

headphones on, music blaring, skimming through notes from my last class trying to figure out where I'm supposed to be and what I'm supposed to be doing and exactly how late I already am. Bus rides give me a little slice of time where I can almost relax and try to catch up with myself again. So I'm half zoned out, not really paying attention to anything but the music in my ears and the complexities of my schedule in my head when I glance out the grimy bus window. and my eyes randomly settle on something that instantly stops my heart in my chest. There's a corpse walking around out there. It's a face I only glimpse for a moment in a crowd of people waiting to cross the road, but it's smashed and bloody and horribly misshapen. One side of its skull squashed so flat there's no way it could belong to a living person.

The sight of it steals the breath from my lungs. The bus moves on and I turn in disbelief to look more closely at this moment. possible sight, but it's already lost in a sea of people in the surge of the crowd as it spills over the crosswalk. I put it down to overwork, to tiredness, to an overactive imagination, or a dirty window, or to anything else that I can think of, but a part of me still knows what I saw. That was a dead thing. A dead thing up and walking about in the middle of a bright sunny day.

But I can't think that. That's insane. So I put it out of my mind and get back to the same. to being late and making excuses and trying to catch up with all the reading and studying I should be doing. Only the next day, I see it again. I'm traveling back from a morning class this time, and as the bus belches and farts from stop to stop, I happen to look out through the window, and there he is, sitting alone on a bench in the park, with people walking past him as if he's a perfectly normal person. But he's not normal. He's a corpse. His skin is ivory white, streaked with

blood from his horrific injuries. His limbs are broken and twisted. His body looks as though an evil giant has picked him up and just squeezed. Sharply splintered bones poke through his flesh, lacerating him from the inside out. And no one seems to notice but me. By now I'm sure I'm seeing things. Obviously I've watched too many zombie movies or something, but I'm having some sort of breakdown. The bus rolls on oblivious, and soon he's out of my sight, leaving me wondering whether the whole world's gone mad or whether it's just me. For the remainder of the journey, I scanned every face and every crowd through the filthy window of the bus, have afraid of what I might see. But there's nothing out of the ordinary. Everything was as it should be,

and the world carried on as before. But that was twice I'd seen him now, the same person each time. My head was spinning and I felt sick to my stomach. Needless to say, I didn't sleep much that night. The next day, getting on the bus again, my nerves were even more strained. Was I going to see that mangled bloody body once more? I pressed my face to the window of the bus like a wide-eyed child, determined to spot the walking corpse if it was out there again. So I almost didn't notice him when the bus stopped, and he walked right on.

Waited in line, paid his fare, and nobody batting. in an eyelid. And of course he strolls down the center of the bus and sits down right next to me. I'm paralyzed by a mixture of fear, revulsion, and an overwhelming sense of unreality. I mean, this can't really be happening, can it? Dead men don't just get up in the morning and decide to take a trip into town. And if they did, wouldn't people make a little more of a fuss? I can't bear to look at him, but I can feel his obscene presence beside me the entire time. His hand rests on top of the seat in front. It looks as if it's been ripped to shreds,

with stark white bone poking out from the torn flesh. The cuff of his shirt is pristine and neatly pressed. His arm bends unnaturally between the wrist and the elbow, and again between the elbow and shoulder. I steal a glance at his face out of the corner of my eye. The right side is a destroyed mass of red, raw tissue. His eye sock at a gaping hole, and his skull has been flattened like an egg shell with patches of scalp trailing from clumps of blood-matted hair.

It's all I can do to stop myself from throwing up. I try to focus on the person in the seat in front of me, on the street outside the window, on anything other than this nightmarish monstrosity sitting next to me. But even though I'm not looking at him, he's all I can think about. The rest of the world seems washed and out of focus. I can even hear him breathing. a dead man's breath rasping in his throat. I feel like I'm going to pass out.

Eventually, after I don't know how long, the bus grinds to a halt again and the corpse gets up and wanders off as if it's the most normal thing in the world. Nobody stares after it. Nobody screams as it walks out under the world again. Nobody seems to care on the slightest, except me. I'm a nervous wreck. Half hoping to wake up at any moment the warmth and comfort of my

own pet. Only, of course, I don't. I stumble off the bus in a day as a few stops later, and shambled through the streets like a zombie myself. I need to collect my thoughts, so I wander into a coffee shop, get myself a coffee, take a seat. The world seemed to be spinning on its proper axis again, so I wanted to take some time to catch it up. So what had I seen? Was I being haunted? That didn't seem likely. Although I'd seen the corpse three days in a row now, it seemed to ignore me just as the other people ignored it. Was it some kind of ghost? Doubtful. The ghosts seldom have changed for the bus. As I sat there, lost in my own thoughts as my coffee went cold, I began to notice something happening on the street outside. Cars were

stopping in a small crowd had gathered. All the faces turned upward, looking at something above, level. Curiosity got the better of me, so I left my coffee untouched and went outside to see what was going on. I left the shop and turned my head upward to follow the gaze of the crowd. Just as I did so, a series of gasps and screams pierced the air, and I saw what I first assumed to be a bundle of rags tumbling from the roof of a building across the street. It wasn't until it hit the ground with a jarring thud that I realized it had been a man. I kept walking towards the scene in numb surprise as most so the bystanders turned away in shock. I could hear the sound of police sirens in the distance growing louder.

In just a few paces I found myself looking down on the crumpled tangle of flesh and bone. He had landed on his right side, leaving half of his skull crushed and almost flat, and his face had a familiar mess of shredded flesh. I later found out that he'd been a local, a man who'd lived a largely reclusive life, with few friends and who'd finally succumbed to loneliness and despair, and decided to end it all that day. There was a picture of him in the newspaper.

He looked normal, ordinary, and I even felt like I half remembered seeing him around somewhere. Yet somehow, for some reason, I couldn't for the life of me understand. I'd seen his death before it had happened, seen it made real in his flesh before the event. But why? And why me? I hadn't known the guy and I wasn't at any position to help.

So what was the point of it all? I did my best to not think too hard about it, but that's easier said than done when you've literally rubbed shoulders with death. Luckily, my schedule was as hectic as ever, so I was able to keep busy and didn't have much time to dwell on things. I found myself walking to classes a lot more, though. Bus journeys had lost their appeal somewhat. Things seemed to be getting back to normal until just a few days later.

Picture the scene. Another ordinary day, another ordinary class. and me, running late, as usual. I sneak into the back of a class a good ten minutes after it started and try to look inconspicuous as I shuffle around getting all my stuff out and ready to start taking notes. It's a big class, so I'm thinking I'm doing a good job of not attracting too much attention to myself. And then I noticed something out of the corner of my eye.

There's a guy a couple of rows down, hiding at the back like me, who doesn't look quite right. At first I think maybe he's fallen asleep or something, because his head seems to be at an odd angle, and it looks like he's knotted off. But I know something is badly wrong when he turns slightly to the side, and his head lulls sickeningly on his shoulders. His neck is broken. It's then I noticed that his skin is a washed-out, lifeless blue, and what I first took for a necklace around his neck is actually a livid welt from some kind of rope or cord. So it looks like I've got another corpse on my hands, or a potential one at least. But maybe this time I can do something. Maybe things aren't as inevitable as they were with the first guy.

Maybe I can help. All through the lecture I'm formulating plans, thinking of ways to approach this guy, what to say to him, how to stop him from doing the terrible thing that I can see in him, all without seeming like a lunatic myself, of course. Finally, the lecture finishes, although I haven't taken in a single word. All my plans, such as they were, fly out of my head as I see the guy get up and move quickly toward the door. I'm out of my seat in a flash and after him,

pushing my way through the crowds to try to catch up. But he's too fast for me. At one point he turns around and catches a glimpse of me running after him, flashing me a look with his glassy, dead eyes that I simply cannot fathom. I follow him for as long as I can, but he's soon lost in the sea of people surging through the corridors. For the next few days, I turn private detective, asking around to see if anyone knows him or where I might find him.

It was hardgoing. He didn't seem to have many friends, and for the most part he kept himself to himself. What I did manage to find out only worried me even more. Apparently he'd had mental issues in the past, and recently he'd been becoming withdrawn and distant. I found out where he lived and knocked on his door several times, but there was never any answer.

I was beginning to despair. I resolved to give it one last try. This time waiting until late at night to call around his house and hope of finally catching up with him. I climbed the by now familiar steps up to his apartment door and was pleased to see signs of life. There were lights on inside and loud music was playing. I hammered on the door but no one answered. Trying the handle I was surprised to find it unlocked. So I slipped in, my heart racing in my chest.

The apartment was a mess, like a cave of a wild animal with rubbish, He drew about everywhere and meaningless symbols scrawled on the walls. I think I knew what I was going to find before I even pushed open the door to his bedroom. His body was hanging from the light fitting, swinging gently back and forth as if pushed by an invisible breeze. I cut him down as quickly as I could, but it was already too late. He looked just as he had when I'd seen him in the lecture room before. Neck broken, lips black from suffocation, and quite, quite dead. I laid him on the bed, called for police in an ambulance, and waited.

I felt hollow and strangely numb. On a small writing desk in the corner of the room was a handwritten note, reading it turned my blood to ice in my veins. He had obviously been delusional, caught up in some terrifying fantasy where secret government agencies were watching him and men out to do him harm. In recent days, he wrote, the situation had worsened, and he had realized that his only escape was distrast. measure he had now taken. Someone had been making inquiries about him, pumping his friends for information, and even calling at his apartment while he hid, terrified inside. So by trying to help him, I had pushed him over the edge, killing him as surely as if I'd placed the noose around his neck myself, I felt sick to my stomach. An overwhelming sense of guilt and hopelessness rushed over me.

What was the point of being able to see these horrors if there was nothing I could do about it? if all I could do was make things worse. It all seemed so senseless, like something out of a bizarre nightmare. Only I knew there would be no waking up from this. These days I don't get out much, and I try to keep myself to myself. I don't make plans or look towards the future anymore. What would be the point? I try to avoid mirrors and shop windows,

because every time I catch a glimpse of my reflection, I see a white, cadaverous face with a neat round bullet hole in one temple. and an ugly jagged exit room on the other side of my head. Our episode has come to an end. Thank you for spending time with us at the No Sleep Podcast. If you would like to learn how you can hear the full-length version of this episode, featuring many more stories, please visit the NOSleeppodcast.com and click on the Season Pass link.

Purchasing a season pass will help support everyone who contributes to the podcast and in return you'll get 25 full length episodes and three exclusive bonus episodes all for only 1999 this is david cummings thank you for listening and join us again for the next episode of the no sleep podcast