Dream #2: Shoes in the Ceiling

I tried screaming, but my mouth wouldn’t work.

My siblings were standing on couches around me. At least, they had been. When I looked around the small studio apartment, I couldn’t quite tell if they were still there or if they’d slipped away when I wasn’t looking. 

That sounds weird, but that’s what it’s like inside a nightmare. Strange things happen. The presence of someone nearby. Then the sudden hollow realization that they’re gone. They might have never been there at all. 

We’d been in some kind of warehouse, everything washed in grayscale like an old photograph. Then we were in the back rooms, and somehow those rooms had become a studio apartment, looking out from high above a dark city with strange lights. One wall was all windows, half-covered by rotting drapes. It was nighttime outside, and the darkness leaked into the apartment like water in a rainstorm.

I felt an urge to look up at the ceiling. I stood on one of the couches that lined the other walls when I glanced at the ceiling tiles. There was a vent in the ceiling, maybe three feet square. Just large enough for something.

And then I knew something was up there.

I knew it with the kind of certainty only found in nightmares. The certainty we wish existed when we’re awake, only in nightmares it’s always a dreadful confidence that something isn’t right. That the strange is about to taunt us and push us to the limit. Knowing without knowing. Dread arriving before the thing itself.

I tried to call out to my siblings. You guys! There’s something up there! Something’s coming!

My mouth wouldn’t work. The words wouldn’t come. My lips were useless. Numb. The words came out in a mumble. A scream stuck in my throat. A helpless groan. The voice in my head, screaming at my mouth to work.

And here’s what I understood, even in the dream: if I hadn’t said it – even just in my head, even just to myself – nothing would have come.

Yet because I named it, I had also summoned it.

The vent cover fell, clattering to the floor. I was still trying to force the words out. Look! Did you see that? I’m telling you something is coming!

I couldn’t make a sound. And the growing certainty that I had done this. That I was doing this with my thoughts. Commanding that something to come closer, to reveal itself. Giving it permission to exist. 

Then a pair of shoes dropped down through the opening.

Old tennis shoes, Converse or something like them, dangling down. Something was sitting up there in the shadowed crawlspace above the ceiling, legs hanging down just far enough for me to only see the shoes. Just the shoes. Nothing else yet.

I put those shoes there. I made them appear. Not consciously, but with that dream-logic certainty. I was both victim and architect, that this was happening to me because I was making it happen.

The shoes swayed slightly.

I was screaming now. Trying to scream. Trying to get any sound out, but also knowing that even my attempt to warn someone was part of it. Part of the summoning. The horror wasn’t just coming for me. I was calling it down.

And then the eyes.

Bright white in the darkness above. Not zombie-flesh or rotting meat, nothing that specific. Just eyes looking down at me. Watching. And I knew, the way we know things in dreams, that whatever was looking down was smiling. I couldn’t see the smile in the dark, but I knew it was there.

That’s when my wife woke me. 2:30am in the morning. I was breathing heavily, heart hammering against my ribs harder than I can ever remember. We’d gone to bed around nine-thirty. I hadn’t woken once in the night until that moment.

What makes my skin crawl is not just this specific dream, but the realization that I’ve had these dreams before. Not this exact dream, but dreams like it. Dreams where I’m aware I’m dreaming, aware that I’ve been here before in some form, aware that something terrible is about to happen. Most people who experience lucid dreaming use that awareness to reshape the nightmare, to escape, to wake themselves.

I instead finish the summoning. In the world of the nightmare, I always feel forced to do so. I know consciously that I don’t want to summon, yet I do anyway. I can’t help myself. It’s already this bad, why not make it worse? Nothing can be worse at this point.

This has happened to me for as long as I can remember. Back in middle school, I’d fall asleep at my desk (during the peak of swimming season, exhausted enough to drop into dreams immediately). In one, a boulder was falling from a cliff directly toward me. The instant before impact, someone dropped a calculator on the floor next to my desk and I woke. The sounds matched perfectly with the events of the dream. The dream rock and the real sound arriving at precisely the same moment.

It’s happened dozens of times since. My wife shaking my shoulder becomes the hand of something in a dark hallway reaching for me. A door closing downstairs becomes the vault sealing in whatever tomb I’ve found myself in. The timing is always perfect. The horror always peaks at the exact instant I wake.

But last night was different. Last night I understood something new. I wasn’t just experiencing the nightmare. I was conducting it.

My sleeping mind was monitoring the real world. My wife stirring beside me, perhaps sensing I was in distress, moving toward waking me, while I was orchestrating the dream to crescendo at precisely that moment. But more than that: I was aware, inside the dream, that I was making choices. That by thinking something is up there, I was putting something up there. That by trying to warn my siblings, I was ensuring there would be something to warn them about.

I’m Lovecraft’s dreamer realizing I’m also an Elder God. I create the threat by naming it. By saying “something is coming,” I make something come.

The question that haunts me now, twelve hours later with my hands still unsteady: Why? Why would I do that to myself? Why, when given the gift of awareness inside a nightmare, would I use it not to escape but to worsen the horror? To pull the thing closer? To make it more real?

It’s like picking at a scab. It will hurt, it will scar, but the action can’t be stopped.

The rational part knows that my sleeping mind incorporated my wife’s touch into the narrative, that the “perfect timing” is just my brain’s way of creating coherence. The rational part knows that the sense of agency I felt, the belief that I was summoning the thing, was another layer of dream logic. A trick of consciousness.

But the irrational part, the part that was in that studio with the uncovered vent, knows something else. It knows I recognized this dream while I was in it. It knows I’ve been in dreams like this before. And will be again. It knows that some part of me, however deeply buried, wants to see what comes next. Wants to know what happens if my wife doesn’t wake me in time. Wants to finish the summoning and see what climbs down from that ceiling with its white eyes and invisible smile.

It knows that next time I dream, I’ll do it again. I’ll look up at whatever ceiling presents itself. I’ll think something is up there. And by thinking it, I’ll make it true.

The most terrifying part of a nightmare isn’t the monster.

It’s realizing I’m the one who keeps inviting it in.

Sleep well.

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Note: ChatGPT helped create the image.