Week 10 Storytelling: Nightmare

            In the nightmare, lived in a village with a husband and his whole family. This man was very handsome and seemed extremely nice but his family gave me a weird feeling like something bad was going to happen at any moment. We all lived in a small cottage within the forest and we all seemed happy from what I can remember.

            But all of a sudden the bad feeling made itself present when I over heard the family wanting to eat me. I was so shocked I froze in my tracks thinking about what to do. My innate instincts kicked in and I ran for it. I didn’t tell my husband nor anyone. I just opened the front door and ran. But as I ran, one of the family members was outside and when he saw me, he yelled inside the house that I had ran away.

When I turned around after he finished speaking, I noticed that the entire family started to run towards me with a full sprint. All of a sudden my legs grew a few inches that caused me to have bigger strides so I was able to outrun them.

I then explored inside the forest admiring the huge trees. But as I continued to walk deeper into the forest, the trees got bigger and tighter together to where I felt claustrophobia. Scared, I started to run until I came upon a wooden cabin. The wood was rotten on some parts of the house and there was grass growing in the cracks of the house so I assumed it was abandon. Without knocking, I opened the door, which caused a loud scream. The scream was so loud I had to cover my ears until it stopped. I looked around frantically and saw a thin man standing inside the house. I don’t remember what he said but I know he wanted me to stay the night. Since it was late, I agreed and fell asleep on the couch.

            I woke up to a loud stabbing noise next to my right ear in the middle of the night. When my eyes opened, I saw the man trying to strike my head with a spear. I pushed him off and began to run into the forest again.

            After running a couple of minutes, I came upon a small house with a line of dwarfs waking in and out of the house. Squeezing behind one of the dwarfs to get in line, I walked into the house.  As the line moved inside, I saw a black figure coming from the horizon. When the line walked outside, I could see the figure getting closer and closer. The dwarfs prepared to fight the darkness with a dog. When the dog barked a huge wave crashed onto the darkness and drowned it. Then I woke up.

Nightmare by Nicolai Abraham Abildgaard (1743-1809)

Author’s Note: I used the story from Eskimo Folk-Tales called Makíte by Knud Rasmussen (1921). I used the outline of the story like the family chasing the main character out of the house, running into the creepy house and being chased by him, the dwarfs walking in a line into the house and the dwarfs dog barked a wave that killed the darkness. The only things I  added were the family man eaters, my legs growing and the small details of the forest. I created the story as a nightmare because as I read the story, I felt like the situations were so random and weird that it was some sort of dream.