There’s something I’ve never really written about publicly before, partly because it sounds strange, and partly because even now — at 50 years old — it still unsettles me.
As a child, I was terrified of going to bed.
Not just the usual childhood fear of the dark, but a deep, instinctive dread of lying awake in a dark room waiting for sleep to come. Even then, it felt like more than imagination. It felt like vulnerability.
One night, something happened that cemented that fear permanently.
I woke up as I turned over in bed and, still half-asleep, became aware of something sitting beside the bed watching me.
I froze instantly.
It was small and squat, crouched low, with an oversized head and large hands. I can still picture the shape of it now. I remember an overwhelming certainty — not a thought, not logic, but certainty — that if it realised I was awake, something bad would happen.
So I stayed completely still and silent.
Every so often I would risk opening my eyes again, and it was still there. Waiting. Watching.
The room itself was silent in that strange way houses are at night, where every tiny sound feels swallowed by darkness. I hid under the duvet at one point, trying to convince myself it wasn’t real, but the fear absolutely was. I lay there for what felt like hours, too scared to move, too scared to sleep.
Eventually exhaustion won and I blacked out.
The next morning, it was gone.
I immediately checked the place where it had been crouching. Nothing. No marks, no sign anything had ever been there.
But the feeling never left.
Even now, decades later, I still struggle to sleep in complete darkness. I need some kind of light in the room. A lamp. A glow from a hallway. Anything. That experience embedded itself somewhere deep inside me.
And it wasn’t the only thing.
For periods of my childhood and teenage years, I had recurring experiences that blurred the line between dreams and being awake. They always started the same way: I would “wake,” but the only thing I could see was a single frozen image of my bedroom in daylight. No matter where I turned my head, that image stayed fixed, like reality itself wasn’t updating properly.
Around me, I could sense activity. Movement. Presence. Sometimes I had the feeling I wasn’t even in bed anymore. But visually, all I could see was that one still frame of my room during daytime — despite knowing it was happening in the middle of the night.
It’s one of the strangest things I’ve ever experienced, and I still don’t know what to make of it.
Maybe it was trauma expressing itself through nightmares or sleep paralysis. Maybe it connects somehow to the abuse I experienced as a teenager — being drugged by the priest who groomed and abused me. Maybe my brain was trying to process fragmented memories in symbolic ways. Or maybe it was just the mind doing frightening things in states between sleeping and waking.
And yes, there’s still a part of me that wonders about stranger explanations too. Little green men, entities, something paranormal. Who knows.
What I do know is this:
Whatever it was, it was horrible.
And even now, as a grown man, part of me still dreads waking in the dark and seeing something sitting there waiting. Which is why I still sleep with a nightlight.
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