Sometimes it gets weird

I used to move in my sleep as a kid. I can't just say I was a sleepwalker. I did a lot more than that. I hid under the desk in my room, and fought with things no one else could see. I once almost broke my brother's nose when he came in and found me that way.
Again, I've never stuck to the normal causes for sleep disturbances. Though it happens more when I'm stressed, I don't have to be stressed at all for it to happen.

Recently I had one that has me baffled. I've had it a few times, but what I'm going to write about here has only happened once, thank goodness.

I'm in my bed, alone. It's dark.. It actually seems like it's later in the day than the light indicates. I would have thought that the sun should be up, but it isn't. A noise has awakened me from a dream I wanted to finish. I can still feel the sense of being I had in the dream. I'm sure that if I could just get back to sleep, I'd continue on with it.

Unfortunately, I can't get comfortable. No matter what I do, I'm either in a bad position, too warm, too cool...
That is when I realize my covers have slipped off. No wonder I can't get back to sleep!

I tug at the top of the blanket to pull it back up, and something tugs back.. For some reason, I'm not afraid. I wrestle for my blanket. It is pulled out of my hands.

Now, I feel exposed. That finally scares me. Its one of those dreams in which it feels as though the blanket would be the perfect armor, and now it's gone.

I feel a pair of hands touch my feet. They let go, and then I can half hear, half feel whatever it is moving around the side of the bed. I can't see it, because I can't open my eyes all the way. In fact, I now cannot move well at all. My body feels heavy, and my muscles weak. I can't even turn my head.

Beside me, the thing is breathing. It sounds like a human.
I feel its hands slide under me, then its arms, and then it is lifting me off of the bed. It picks me up in an embrace, like a groom about to carry his bride over the threshold of their new home. There is neither heat nor cold in its touch, only pressure. I can still hear breath coming from it, but I don't feel any air movement. Even its chest is still.

Now, I am terrified. I don't know what has picked me up, or what it is going to do to me. I struggle to move, focusing all of my energy on kicking out of its grip. My foot wiggles a little, but it feels as if I am trying to wiggle a ten ton truck, instead. Still, the thing clasps me to its chest a little more tightly. It begins to move very smoothly and rapidly toward my closet.

I really, really don't want to go where it is taking me. I get the very distinct feeling that we're going right through the wall, and into another world. I can even picture where we will come out. There is a cavern. The walls are damp, but not really wet. The floor is the same, with a trickle of water running along the lowest part. It occurs to me that a lot more water must sometimes flow through that hole. The thing that is holding me is going to take me to that place. If it does, my body will die, and I'll never get out of there.

The thing holding me has moved around to the foot of the bed. The closet is only a few feet away. I can see the door.
I don't know what my kidnapper's plan is, and I don't want to find out. I struggle to turn my head, move my hands, anything. I can't get my muscles to follow my brain, but in my efforts I finally let out a stifled moan of fear.

My own voice wakes me up. Oddly, I feel myself falling, and am jolted fully awake as I land on the floor at the foot of my bed, with my feet pointing toward the closet and my head inches away from the box springs.


As soon as I awoke, I sat up. Realizing where I was, I at first assumed I must still be dreaming, and shook my head really hard to wake myself. That usually works, as long as I can do it. Often when I have a nightmare set in the location where I am sleeping, and about a being that wants to cause me harm, I experience the weighty, weakened kind of paralysis that I describe with this one. I know, though, that when I woke up on the floor, it wasn't a dream. I got up for the day because the dream had creeped me out enough that I couldn't be in the room with that closet. I am not sure how I ended up on the floor in that position, except that maybe I'd been walking, and when I woke I jolted and fell. Otherwise, I would have to believe that something really was carrying me, an idea too scary to accept. 

The thing that creeps me out the most, though, isn't the dream. It's the news I got a few days later. I live in an apartment building. The wall the closet is on is the shared wall between my apartment and the next. My next door neighbor had died the day before, and his body was not found until a few days after I had that dream. My nightmare occurred hours after his spirit had departed this world, while his empty, dead body lay waiting to be discovered. It's such a weird coincidence that it always gives me the chills when I think about it. What if it wasn't a dream? What if something really did pick me up and try to cart me off?

What if that thing was Death?