Tentacle Monster

One of the denizens of my nightmare world, I believe, is my mind's response to my body's physical pain. I suffer from chronic, widespread, unexplained pain. I've been diagnosed with Fibromyalgia. There are things I am able to do to reduce that pain, but sometimes, in the depths of sleep, I end up letting my body fall into a position that makes it worse. If I roll onto my back, my lumbar area seizes up and the muscles across that area get sore. If I don't wake up right away, that moves around to my belly and lower ribs. Then, I dream about the tentacle monster.

I never seem to be able to see the monster itself. Its physical impression is more of a warping of the light that comes from sources on the other side of it. However, I do get a definite sense of how it looks. Its main body is a solid but soft, fleshy, slim core. It's almost kind of cylindrical, but it's rounded and puffy at the top and bottom, like a half-deflated souffle, or a jellyfish.

Like a jellyfish, it has a multitude of long, soft, fleshy tentacles. These seem to be attached to the top and bottom. Some of the ones on the bottom are shorter and more solid, though it's tough to say if there are bones. Those, it uses to propel itself about. The others seem to range from around a foot to around four feet long, at about an inch to two inches thick. These, it uses to prod and, I can only guess, feed. Its attack involves initially searching with those longer tentacles, until it finds something solid. Then, it pushes, wraps, and squeezes.

I can feel the tentacles wrapping around my waist and my ribs. Wherever it touches, it gives little jolts of electricity. This feels almost like being tickled, except that it is really, really painful.

It pulls me in toward that solid center. As bad as the pain is from the tentacles, I'm really afraid of what will happen if I can't escape.

I fight by grabbing at the tentacles, squeezing and pulling them apart. It hurts my hands to be zapped by them, but if I don't fight, this thing will devour me.
When I start hurting it, I am hit by the sensation of of something pushing against the top of my head, but it pushes beyond the skin and into the inside. It makes me feel drugged, with that heavy-headed sensation that happens as a side effect with some pain medicines. I know that is a defense of the monster's, and that I am injuring it, so I continue to attack the tentacles. I can feel them pressing into the flesh in my back, breaking through the skin. The pain is excruciating.

The battle continues this way, with more tentacles wrapping around me as I tear apart the ones that are all ready there. The longer we fight, the more covered in tentacles I become, until I can barely breathe. It is a losing battle every time, lasting until the pain becomes too severe for me to take.

When I awaken, I always feel like I lost, and something was taken from me, but the real pain is never as bad as the pain from the dream. I don't know if that last bit is because when awake, my brain masks pain I all ready know I have, so that I can pay attention to my surroundings and activity, or if it is because when asleep, my subconscious multiplies the pain in the dream because of the nightmare setting. Either way, a change of position alleviates some of it, and if I go back to sleep, it will fade further throughout the night. Only rarely do I ever have that dream a second time in the same night.

When I was a kid, though, I used to sleepwalk.. I would dream of fighting this thing in my room, and I'd hide under my desk to limit the directions from which tentacles could attack and the number that could get to me. I would bite, scratch, kick, grab, punch, anything. Every time I had that dream, when I woke up, I really would be under that desk.. I know that scientists say that sleepwalking does not take place during the dream state, but in my case, either it occurred in response to the dream, or the other way around, because the two went together more often than not.

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?