It all looked familiar somehow. Not unlike da'ja vu but with an eerie twist. I have been here before, I know I have, but when and where? The sensation was strong and reeked with impeding doom. I strained to see clearly, but everything was oddly out of focus like images through a fun house mirror, distorted and pulled at angles.

Familiar how, I wondered. Nothing was clear.

The descending moonlight was shifting the shadows. Giving birth to altered images. The gloom being created was overtaking me. The weird light created hovered over the surroundings advancing my fear. A voice was whispering my name. A hollow tone but repetitive. Hanging murky just outside the edge of my vision but moving steadily forward.

I was frozen in place, my will power extinguished. Breathing was becoming impossible. My lungs allotted me shallow gasps and nothing more. The burning in my chest was willing me to run, but making it impossible to do so. 

A representative of Satan, rising from hell, he appeared before me. Hanging on to the last thread of sanity, I turned to face my tormentor. 

The shrouded form, lurking in the dimness, glared back at me. Its gaze beckoning me. Its vileness spreading over me like an infectious disease. The face, half veiled behind a cloak, revealed nothing but a dark image of horror.

The volume of silence was increasing my terror. Without warning out of the black mist a steel blade, resembling an icicle dangling from the darkness, entombed between deformed fingers dropped in front of me. The breath of this dark creature was death itself.

Suddenly a movement in the shadow released my panic and freed my arms from their imprisonment. My hands tore at this evil to send it away. The knife, impotent without its master, spiraled to the floor.

Abruptly the haze was broken. A familiar voice summoning me. "This is the last time I will call you, Get up." 

My senses returned and relief washed over me like a fresh rain. A dream, the realization engerized and flooded my soul. Being granted a seemingly new lease on life, I leaped from under the tangled sheets. In my quest to escape my nighttime torment, I became hopelessly captured by my own blanket, and found myself propelled to the floor.

Feeling very foolish for the second time in this short day, I attempted to right myself. A scream, unlike any scream ever, gushed from my mouth. The knife, its blade lodged in the wooden floor, gave me promise of another night to come.