Nightmare Walking

Have you ever had one of those dreams, where you dream you’re doing something, only to wake up and realize you’re almost acting out your dream in real time? The most common instance of this is the ‘it’s completely normal’ wet dream, though there are many other common instances, especially in sleepwalkers, where you see yourself walking along a path, only to wake up and find yourself actually walking somewhere, and other similar scenarios. I, despite no longer being a sleepwalker, have one such story myself, from my childhood.

The year was 1996, I was 5 years old, and had recently lost my great grandmother. I was having these weird ongoing nightmares at the time, where someone would call my name, I’d get up, and walk in their direction, only to be brutally murdered in any number of ways. I remember being strangled, stabbed, hung drawn and quartered, fed to wild animals, and my personal favorite, being pushed into a wood chipper. Often, the voice calling me would be someone I actually knew, whether it be my parents, a friend from school, a teacher, my sister, or Lenny Kravitz asking me “Are you gonna go my way?” Even at 5, I had an appreciation for good music, but I’m starting to get off track.

Anyway, there is one particular nightmare that will forever haunt me. This time, it was my recently deceased great grandmother calling to me. “Wookie” she called… I was a really hairy baby, so that nickname stuck for a while with the grandparents, and aunties and uncles… “Wookie, come give Nan a hug, I have to go now.” I remember getting to my feet, and lazily dragging myself out of the room, in the direction of her voice. Like I said, my nightmares seemed to have an ongoing theme, so even though I was walking toward my great grandmother, I was expecting her to transform into a dragon and bite me in half, or for a ninja to leap from behind a wall and put countless shurikens into my skin, or even a tank just to drive through the wall next to me and crush me under its treads. I usually woke up instantly after dying anyway, so it had stopped being overly threatening. Anyway, I continued to walk down the narrow hallway toward the frail old lady, arms outstretched, when suddenly a loud explosion woke me from my sleep.

I woke with a start, standing in the hallway outside of my room, peering into the blackness of the quiet family home. I turned around, stumbling sleepily back into my room, remembering the dream like a far off memory, and directly in front of me, the window that once sat above my bed sat empty, shattered, with its glass fragments dug into my mattress, exactly where I would have been had I not been sleepwalking…

To this day, I don’t know what caused the window to shatter, nor how the glass had managed to embed itself so deeply into the bed, nor do I know if my sleepwalking was a lucky coincidence that saved my life, or an intervention from another being. If you’re looking for a nice clean ending where everything is wrapped up and explained nicely, I’m sorry to disappoint; I’ve been searching for the answers too. Regardless, sometimes the things that scare us most, are those that we’ll never be able to rationally explain.

Credit To – Uforia