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Like many nights, you struggle to stay asleep for more than just a couple hours at a time.
You often jerk awake in a panic, sitting at attention in your bed as though someone has yelled your name. Other times you've imagined having yelled, usually just a fraction of a second before shooting up from under the covers.
Sometimes there are nightmares, but not always. You can hardly remember what they are, but even the fear and discomfort single-handedly haunt you in your waking hours. These episodes have been more frequent as of late, and it was getting harder to feel well rested by the day. The nightmares are getting easier to picture as time goes on, yet only one detail reliably sticks out, obscuring all others.
There is a man - a handsome man, in each of them. He dresses with class, with taste, but he wears these awful sunglasses. If you were to see him walking along the street tomorrow, there is nary a chance you would recognize him. Save for those glasses. Nobody you have ever seen or known outside of a dream wears those.
Your therapist suggests your condition is stress related, and you believed her for a time. But even after you started this "self care" business and took up the painstaking ordeal of learning how to relax, nothing changed. Instead, you stopped discussing it after seeing no progress. The human mind can only withstand so much. Maybe these things will go away on their own.
But they haven't yet, as this man is in the same unknown vision that rips you from the ether tonight. You startle awake, and after realizing that you are still in your own apartment, in your own bed, you lie back down and stare out your window. Counting people on the sidewalks like they were sheep usually brought you back to reality, but there isn't a single soul to be seen. Only the polyphony of a distant city nightlife punctuates the streets.
Except there is something wrong.
You feel a presence with you. An ominous aura seems to permeate the atmosphere, though nothing is visibly out of the ordinary. It has to be your mind playing tricks on you, the fright of that nightmare still altering your perception. Even so, you force your eyelids shut like a child, pulling the blankets over your head and leaving a small opening to take in cool, fresh air. You figure that if you can manage to fall asleep, daylight will come sooner; they're called nightmares for a reason, right? But not long after hiding under your comforter, what was previously an air of ill-omen turns markedly sinister.
Eventually it dawns on you: he is the nightmare. He alone is that nameless being who brings terror to your dreams, who wears a skin suit and walks among men, though he is not a man himself.
Sweat beads above your upper lip, between your thighs, and in your armpits. You are an animal, you are hunted like prey, you are set to expire at any moment. For you are now wholly convinced it is no longer an illusion crafted by the devil running amok in your head...but something all too real.
If you dare to check the room now, you will surely die.