Bogeyman

Night time. It was when the sky painted itself navy blue with mystery, when the stars twinkled cheekily and the moon hung high, inflicting it's luminous glow onto earth below. Night time called for all nocturnal creatures to crawl and slither out from the safety of their cracks in the earth. It was the time when all human beings climbed stair cases and slipped under their duvets, cuddling up with soft toys or significant others. A time for insomniacs to stare at television screens, purchasing useless objects from bid up TV to waste the agonisingly slow hours of the night.

Night was the time Emily Carson dreaded. She usually put off sleep for as long as she possibly could. She'd sit in a chair, reading love stories to try and flood her mind with positive and happy thoughts, hoping it would sway her dreams to end up the same way.

These actions rarely worked. She'd almost always wake up at some point during the night, cold sweat clinging to her skin and soaking her duvet. She'd end up with tears streaming down her cheeks, sobs racking her terrified body after the terrors of the night plagued her dreams, slowly turning them into horrific, graphic and bloodthirsty nightmares.

Emily was haunted by things that went bump in the night, the mysterious tapping on the window, the monsters that hid under her bed, the one's waiting in her wardrobe, peeping through the crack between the two doors, ready to strike when she was most vulnerable. She felt like a small child most of the time, not a twenty two year old woman.

The thing that frightened Emily the most was that there was no explanation for her nightmares. They weren't reoccurring dreams, it was different every night. Over time, as she lived and experienced more, the nightmares became more graphic and terrifying. They often included her being followed and attacked, by faceless men who shielded their heads with dark hoods. The monsters that had infected her dreams as a child were still present, they had grown and were still as scary as they had been to her six year old self. Every element within those dreams was horrific and it chilled Emily to the bone to think about them.

With no explanation, came no cure, and she was at the end of her tether. She was making herself sick, avoiding sleep for as long as she could, staying up and researching her nightmares. She hoped something was wrong, she hoped a part of her brain wasn't working as it should, so it could be taken away and she could finally have a decent night's sleep.

Emily was truly alone and isolated. No one understood what she was going through. The doctors and her parents had put it down to an over active imagination. Emily was always making things up as a child, so they had concluded that had carried on into adulthood, and it was something that she would eventually grow out of.

But Emily was grown up. She had done all the growing she was going to do. If she wasn't going to grow anymore, then she couldn't become too big for the nightmares, and they'd forever be a demon sitting on her shoulder, ready to infect her mind like a disgusting disease and put her through hell each night.

The cause of her nightmares was like a rhetorical question. There was no answer for them.