String

It happened when I was 14 or 15 years old. I came home drunk one day and quickly went to bed so my parents wouldn't find out. I woke up in the middle of the night for no apparent reason. I felt awful—it felt like I'd either really upset or angered someone when I got drunk. And I had these delusional thoughts in my head—not even thoughts, but a nasty inner voice. By the way, I'd had that voice a couple of times before, always when I'd done something thoughtless or something I later regretted. Maybe someone else has had this too. The voice in my head sounded like mine, but the tone was somehow nasty and mocking. Hearing it always made me feel sick and scared.

And this voice reproached me—like, how could I be such a fool, what am I thinking, and why do I need all this? I somehow pushed these intrusive thoughts away and began to fall asleep, when I felt something choking me. I began flailing my arms in a panic. My arms encountered no obstacles, and the suffocation disappeared, but before that, I heard two thuds: the first loud, the second dull (for some reason, I immediately imagined the dwarf had fallen). Fear gripped me, and my heart pounded wildly. I grabbed my neck, and found some kind of rope wrapped around it. I ripped it off and stuffed it under my pillow. I quickly came up with explanations, like maybe I'd dreamed it, or maybe the rope had just been lying in the bed and I'd twitched and gotten tangled in it. Somehow, I managed to fall asleep.

I woke up in a good mood the next morning, remembering nothing of the nightmare. I lay in bed for a while, then reached under my pillow and felt the same rope I'd ripped from my neck the night before. I pulled it out—it was a guitar string. My mood suddenly worsened, and the fear returned. The guitar was on the other side of the room, and the first string was missing, even though all the strings had been there just the day before. And next to the bed lay an overturned stool, somehow ending up not in the kitchen, but in my room.

After that, the voice in my head appeared a couple more times. And each time, I had the feeling that whoever was speaking to me truly hated me and would kill me, but something was stopping them...