The Reason You Can't Sleep At Night

// He said to me, "There's a reason why you can't sleep at night, yet you don't know what it is, an annoying twitch that keeps your eyes open and focused into blank space. Would you like to find out why?" I agreed to hear. //

Apparently, according to Frank who now was well in his early 30s had been seeing things in his room ever since he was a child, he heard bumps in the night and saw a re-occuring figure that looked back at him from the corner of his eye. Understandably, as a child you believed that there was 'monsters under your bed' or 'in your closet' that used to come out at night and watch you sleep; and as your parents would say, there's nothing there. Anyone reading this cannot deny that at some point in their lives they saw something they can't explain, a movement or shift in the corner of the mirror, the feeling of being followed or watched. Some refuse to see it, some forget but everyone has seen it. It's literally staring at you in the face.

Frank, when he was 8 used to lay awake idle in his bed, facing the door because he was unable to sleep, he knew that someone was in the room. He believed that when it was completly quiet, he heard slight breathing and shuffling like someone was waiting. When his parent's went to bed, and it was in the peace of the darkness his eyes scanned the room looking for any movement of shade in the darkness, but only in the corner of his eye did he see what he was looking for. He referred to it as "The Smiling Man" when he told his friends and parents because he had an uncertain feeling that it was smiling at him if he was still. Eventually, he nicknamed it 'Smiley'. According to Frank, Smiley was as tall as the door, and his outline was distinctive. He would appear in different places around the room, sometimes by the door, sometimes by the window, sometimes the end of his bed, it was only a couple of times that it appeared on the ceiling. A few times, Frank would call out to him saying "Smiley please go away" and "Who are you?" and Smiley would not reply. Smiley would knock on the wall, and make a faint static white noise. Very rarely, Frank had to call out to his parents because he became physically sick with fear, they came in an hurry and turned on the light to which Smiley would be gone. It was during these years that Frank suffered from habits of bed wetting and fatigue from lack of sleep.

He found out, that Smiley never appeared anywhere else. When he slept around friends' houses or downstaris, he would not be there. It was purely connected to his room, and eventually after it became too much him and his parent's switched rooms. He didn't see Smiley after that. Frank grew up, and went on to study Psychology at University. It was only when his friend brought up the name Smiley that did he slightly remember. After a talk with his University Professor, they discussed if such things as Smiley could actually be real. Frank didn't say what his Professor said, only that he hinted that it's always going to be unproved if such entites either exist or do not exist.

Frank did his own research, looking up other people's personal experiences and accounts, although a lot of them were fake or unreliable, one article had stood out on a paranormal blog. The writer had written that there are many cases about figures in the night, which he refers to as 'Shadow people'. According to the article, shadow people exist in another dimension called 'the Shadow dimension'. They can never be seen directly, only as a moving shadow out of the corner of your eye for a brief second. He said that a lot of people mistake ghosts, sprits, general hauntings for shadow people, who harness differences. Ghosts and spirits are believed to be of human origin, an imprint of a horrific act or death. Shadow people are inhuman, they have never walked the earth as living, they just mimicked the human shape and have no understood origin. What the writer pointed out is that for every living person that lives and breaths, so that means you there is an equal shadow entity that latches on us. It's uncertain what the shadow people want with us, or do with us. A common belief is that they wait for us to come of age so that they can possess our bodies and drag our souls to their dimension. However, this is entirely speculation.

Frank never re-looked into it, although after that he noticed strange movements and noises as if someone had been following him. Then one night, when he was drunk he saw a man walk out of his room when he went to sleep. Then he started paying attention, and then his childhood rinse and repeated. He took a photo of what he kept seeing, the layout of his room was different but the entity stood in the same places as his childhood. When he showed the photograph to people, no one else saw it apart from him. He had it developed and still no one else saw what was right in the centre. After suffering the death of his father at 19, Frank forgot about the entity entirely.

Although, Frank did write an article about the experiences, he referred to the entity as a dark reflection of himself, a shadow that was feeding off him, a figure that only he could see. He didn't use the name Smiley in the article. Some time after that, Frank got in touch with a Demonologist, who believed everything Frank said. He said that what Frank suffered was a strange re-occuring connection to an entity, he laughed when he heard what Frank named it. He said, 'Naming it probably wasn't a good idea".

Author's Note: I only listened to what Frank said because I think I saw something as well that I couldn't explain or forgot about. I remembered that I kept thinking I saw a face in my wall, and when I payed attention to it, it kept re-occuring, it kept haunting me. I had trouble sleeping, but I thought it was for another reason, not because I felt like that something was watching me. How does anyone know what happens when we close our eyes, that something touches us, whispers. When we sleep. We are not safe. I want someone to prove to me that these are not real.