#sleeping

May 18, 2011. My name is Greg, I just moved into my new house in Pennsylvania. Me and my Girlfriend have had the house for at least four months now and we've managed to mold it into what we've wanted for years. My Girlfriend, Carmen works almost the entire day so I find myself with the entire new house to myself with a lot of time to kill. But lets just cut to the chase...

On May 4th 1989, in my town of Cumbernauld, Scotland. A 6-year old boy by the name of Connor Docherty was reported missing by his mother Joan, she reported that her son was particularly tearful one morning and seemed to be inconsolable. She attributed it to the random emotional tantrums and outbursts of a six year old, dismissing any seriousness of it. However it’s estimated that sometime that night, he vanished from his home without a trace. Detectives swooned in to try and find DNA samples…

12/02/11

I read a book as a child. I summed it up and added a few details. --------------------------------------------------------------------- "Mr. Weston the doctor will see you now." The nurse hung up the intercom. Even though Sam was really nervous, he started to laugh at the fact that the lady called him Mister. That was his Dad's name. It was October 31, 1973, and 9 year old Sam Weston was in the hospital, about to go into surgery. He had to have his tonsils removed.

I can hear them when it's quiet. They hide in the vents. They laugh at me. I don't know why. Maybe it's because they know they've got me. I can't do anything to stop them. There's no one I can tell, everyone would think I'm insane. Now I just have to wait. They'll come to collect me when they're ready. Not on my time, god no. They won't come for me until long after my mind has completely unhinged.

In the fall of 2011, a man hung himself in a bottling factory of a popular over the counter sleep aide company just outside Chicago. The man worked as a quality control manager and had just been laid off to save the company money. In the morning, the cleaning crew found him swaying in the breeze from the air conditioning system with a note in his breast pocket that read “sleep tight.”

Bedtime is supposed to be a happy event for a tired child; for me it was terrifying. While some children might complain about being put to bed before they have finished watching a film or playing their favourite video game, when I was a child, night time was something to truly fear. Somewhere in the back of my mind it still is.

Normally you sleep soundly, but the thunderstorm raging outside is stirring you from your sleep. You begin to doze, then another crash jolts you awake. The cycle lasts most of the night. So you lay there, eyes open and outward, looking at your room stretching out before you in oblong shadows. Your eyes move from nameless object, to object, until you reach your mirror, sitting adjacent to you across the room.

The following are the final excerpts from the journal of Dr. Arnold Richards, who, at sixty-seven years old and in perfect health, was found dead in his bedroom, lying in a pool of his own blood, a single sleeping pill in his hand. The incidents surrounding the events reported in his diary were investigated thoroughly, but the case was never solved.

Russian researchers in the late 1940s kept five people awake for fifteen days using an experimental gas based stimulant. They were kept in a sealed environment to carefully monitor their oxygen intake so the gas didn’t kill them, since it was toxic in high concentrations. This was before closed circuit cameras so they had only microphones and 5 inch thick glass porthole sized windows into the chamber to monitor them. The chamber was stocked with books, cots to sleep on but no bedding, running…

“Daddy, I had a bad dream.” You blink your eyes and pull up on your elbows. Your clock glows red in the darkness — it’s 3:23. “Do you want to climb into bed and tell me about it?” “No, Daddy.” The oddness of the situation wakes you up more fully. You can barely make out your daughter’s pale form in the darkness of your room. “Why not, sweetie?” “Because in my dream, when I told you about the dream, the thing wearing Mommy’s skin sat up.”