As a grad student, I moved in with my friend who had his own place. It was nice enough, except in my room there was no bed, so I slept on an air mattress. It beat buying a new one.
One cold winter night I lay fast asleep. I sleep better in the cold. Deeper. Must be a side effect of being Canadian. Anyway, sleep had overshadowed me like a thick fog. I was out for the count, and nothing would wake me.
Nothing, that is, except a gunshot.
Bang! The noise was unmistakable, even at three in the morning. Screams erupted from across the wall in the apartment next to ours. The screaming was loud. Piercing. It wouldn’t stop.
Somebody’s getting murdered, I thought to myself. Why can’t they be quiet?
The screaming continued, but as it did, I eventually realized that the screaming wasn’t actually coming from next door. It was coming from me! My heart was racing a million miles a second. I was sitting up in bed, arms flailing, sinking lower and lower into the floor.
No. I wasn’t sinking. I was being pulled. Something – some demon from an unseen realm – was pulling me into his dark domain.
Finally, I stopped sinking into the floor. Eyes wide, I looked around the room, heart about to explode through my chest. Had it all been a dream? I was still on the ground, though; that part was real. As I slowly came to my awakened senses, I realized my air mattress had burst, and my weight had slowly let out the air, causing me to sink. So it wasn’t a demon after all!
The next day, my roommate asked about the screams.
“I think our neighbor got murdered,” I said. And then I went to class.