I have always been scared of the dark, ever since I was a little girl and shared a bed with my sister I would wake up in the middle of the night from a nightmare usually on top of her, she never seemed to notice. I would just lay there unable to move and listen to the silence of the dark. This went on for years until my family moved us to a bigger house and I had my own room where I slept with the lights on. The first time I knew something strange was going on, was at eleven, sleeping in my new room; I had stayed up watching cartoons and like always left my light on, my room door locked and the blinds shut because of my phobia of stalkers.
This one night I woke up around 3 a.m. To the touch of someone tracing a shape with their finger on my lower stomach slightly above my hip, the shape was that of a star or a triangle and as soon as I awoke the touch stopped. I looked around the room and noticed the TV was on a different channel, the lights off, my blinds open, and even more frightening my underwear were around my ankles, but my jeans were still zipped up and buttoned (I have a tendency of sleeping fully dressed); Of course the first thing I did was turn on the lights and check my door but noticed it was still locked. The next morning I told my mom but she just laughed it off saying it was probably a dream especially since I was the only that had a key. After that the sleep paralysis began. They happened a few times in the same room, but this time my bed was in the middle facing the closet, it was always around 3 a.m. I would snap out of my sleep and feel everything around me but I couldn't speak or move my body. There was just this really heavy feeling on top of me and I could hear a voice speaking and laughing, then it would just go away.
I always felt a presence of someone staring at me around the house, and again I played it off as my paranoia. Until one day as I sat in the living room in front of a window, I saw a tall man wearing a blue shirt quickly walk from my front yard into the backyard, thinking it was my dad I ran to the back but saw no one there. This has happened to four other women in my family who always run to the back to encounter this man but never do, and like always we only catch a glimpse of his shoulder and color of his shirt. Everyone has also been scared of the living room at night, where it gets especially dark, there is this one couch positioned on a corner where at night a shadow of a man sitting forms.
I live in Houston and in an area that was left without electricity for two weeks after hurricane Ike. Afraid of the dark as I am, I decided to sleep in my moms room hoping it would help with my fears, but that night I had a dream of an old lady telling me about the rituals her husband and her performed in the house, and how some books where stored in the attic, she also explained that they committed a sacrifice exactly on the spot where I was sleeping and began to laugh. That's when I woke up and realized I was sleeping on the side of the room that was a new addition to the house, making the spot where I was sleeping a part of the backyard hidden enough to be seen from neighbors.
The most recent ghostly dream I've had was also in the dark, but this time it was of my moms' deceased sister. My aunt died when she was pregnant some years ago. In my dream I didn't see a body or face; I just felt her calling me into my moms' room by moving some black shoes that had been left against the wall. When I entered the room her spirit was standing against the wall where the shoes had and I stood next to her. She spoke to me through thoughts in my head, crying she pleaded me to tell her family that her death was not an accident, that her husband had hurt her (as we all suspected), that she couldn't leave without telling us, and to take care of her daughter (she was expecting a little girl). I promised her I would and felt her spirit leave my side relieved. The next morning after waking up I went to my moms room and along the wall I had been standing to in my dream I noticed my aunts picture hanging on the exact same spot as she had been standing the night before (the picture had been previously hanging on the opposite wall, but my mom moved it to its new place a few days before), in the picture she wore black shoes.
According to my mom the day she took me home from the hospital after my birth she saw an elf lurking behind the door to the bedroom we were sleeping in, at the time she thought it was a child in her sleep daze but later realized there had been no children in the house. I have also come to a few near death experiences. I wonder if they have anything to do with my fear of the dark or the nightmares; any ideas?