7. My roommate invaded my dream.

No one ever believes me when I tell this story, but here goes. So it was my third year in college and I was roommates with a friend I had known from high school. The guy was a little odd. Didn’t make friends easily, made lists constantly, played video games obsessively (sometimes for 18 hours straight) and talked in his sleep. But he was a fun guy to have around to keep things interesting.

So one night I was asleep and dreaming the he and I were on a huge pile of trash looking for something. I woke up and took a leak. When I walked back into the room, he rolled over in bed, still asleep, and said, “I found it. It’s over here.” Then thrashed and went back to sleep.

The next morning he had no memory of it and I know I was awake. I think he was in my mind.

8. There was a shadowy figure standing at the foot of my bed just staring at me.

Bear with me—I’m not insane.

I woke up in the middle of the night and there was a shadowy figure standing at the foot of my bed just staring at me. This wasn’t an intruder in the normal sense, it was made of something darker than shadow like and its form was outlined because it seemed to absorb the tiny bit of light in the room. For some reason I knew it HATED me and wanted to hurt me, but I was completely unable to move so we just stared at each other for who knows how long.

Then it started moving on all fours kind of sideways over my feet and legs across my body. This was especially terrifying because it was slow and deliberate and its limbs were grotesquely long on an otherwise emaciated body. When it got to my chest it thrust its “face” in front of mine and started pressing down on my chest like it was trying to stop my heart.

All of a sudden, it was just gone and I could move again…but I still felt a massive pressure on my chest like I was having a heart attack (go figure considering the circumstances). I didn’t sleep the rest of the night.

The next morning I tried to research this thing and found out it was something called a “shadow man” or a “shadow visitor” and people had been having encounters with them for years and years.

But the logical explanation for this is sleep paralysis. I dreamed the whole thing, but I was dreaming that I was in my bed while physically in my bed so I was not able to differentiate dream from reality or when the dream started/stopped (of course the horrifying demon-shadow disappearing is a good indicator of when it stopped). The pressure I felt in my chest was just really intense fear, and because you sometimes get that tightness in extreme circumstances the dream just kind of worked it in.

The human brain is a real piece of shit sometimes.