Trapped Nightmare

If you would like to be notified of future posts, follow me on:

My Instagram:

Main

My Artwork 

My Twitter:

Main

My Artwork 

❤️Updating Every Saturday Evening (Japan Time)

(Translated and Arranged by Saya)

When I was ten, for a period of a few weeks, I kept having terrible nightmares.

I was still a child so I now have only a vague memory of it, but according to my mother, every night I would scream and thrash around violently on the floor, while clawing at my own throat.

I would then wake up in the morning soaking with sweat. 

This happened not only once, but continued every single night throughout the period.

I was terrified of going to sleep.

Soon I fell ill from lack of sleep.

I became just skin and bones, and my face turned grey. 

We went to see doctors and even psychics, but no one was able to tell what was wrong with me.

I continued to be tortured by the nightmares.

Both my parents became as thin as a rake too from worrying about me.

They actually looked more sick than I was.

Anyway, as I mentioned before, I was cured of this condition after a few weeks, 

and the person who saved me wasn’t a psychic, a monk, a Shinto priest or a clergyman.

Can you guess who it was? I’m pretty sure you won’t be able to. 

The answer is “a hypnotist.”

He was an acquaintance of my father, and just an amateur hypnotist, but he once instantly cured a minor phobia of my father’s in the past. 

To be honest, I was skeptical at first, but it became quickly apparent that I was highly  susceptible to hypnosis just like my father.

Based on this, the hypnotist decided that the best course of action was to make me forget the nightmare.

Strangely enough, I remembered the content of the nightmare vividly even after I woke up. 

The hypnotist sensei made me write down the details of the dream on a piece of washi (Note: traditional Japanese paper)** shaped like a house.

It was so painful for me just to recall it… I hated the task.

The sensei put the washi inside a box and pasted an ofuda (Note: a Shinto paper talisman) over the lid to seal it shut. 

He then hid the box in a secret place known only to him and me.

I can’t tell you where it exactly is, but let me describe it as “a place where the box can easily be taken out of if needed but no one else (not even my parents) would be able to find.”

The sensei said that the nightmare was now trapped inside the box, so I had nothing to fear anymore — unless I opened it again.

And he was right. 

From that day onwards, I was released from the nightmare.

You can’t imagine how grateful my whole family was for the sensei. 

But the box which trapped my nightmare inside it was still in my possession.

This fact remained stuck in the back of my mind.

After I graduated from university and came home for a holiday, I suddenly remembered that box.

Once the thought of it entered my mind, I couldn’t let it go.

I remembered how scary the dream was, even though it was such a long time ago that I had forgotten what it was about.

The fear I felt then left a deep mark in my mind.

But very often, what is terrifying to a child seems silly and insignificant in the eyes of an adult. 

Also, being an adult myself now, I could sort of understand the tricks the sensei used to hypnotise me. 

I wanted to see the box again, so that I can confirm to myself how silly it all was and transform the whole story into a joke.

With those thoughts in my mind, I secretly went to get the box.

The box still had that ofuda over the lid. It looked rather pointless now that I knew the sensei didn’t have any psychic power and the ofuda was merely a tool to reinforce the effect of the hypnosis. 

I began to scratch at it to peel it off.

That was when the scene from the nightmare, which I had completely forgotten for the past ten years, started to replaying itself in my mind, without warning.

I was inside a Japanese-style room, and looking at moonlit shoji windows.

The bamboo leaves on the engawa (Note: a kind of a porch) were casting shadows on the shoji.

There was one squarely cut gap in the shoji at the top, and a round face of a middle-aged man, grinning like Ebisu, was peeping into the room. 

Ebisu, a god of fortune

But I saw only the face. The shadows on the shoji belonged to the bamboo leaves. There was no shadow of the man’s body.

Behind me were double fusuma doors.

I knew that there were an endless row of rooms behind them, all divided by fusuma in the same way. 

Coo… coo… 

I heard some faint sounds like a pigeon cooing.

This was followed by sounds that went bang, bang, bang! The sounds were growing louder and louder.

Someone was rapidly approaching me, dashing at full speed, opening a fusuma after a fusuma.

I heard a man’s deep voice, giggling and squealing with ecstatic joy.

Those noises were getting louder and louder. I became paralysed with fear.

I must not turn around. That was the only thing that I was sure about.

Bang! 

Finally, the fusuma opened right behind me. 

The thing drew near me and breathed on my neck from behind. The breath reeked of raw meat. It did that intentionally, I thought. Then the thing began to speak, whispering low into my ears ….

… the box fell from my hands.

Thud! I came back to my senses as the box hit the ground.

I put the box back to its secret place and went home.

So even now, the box is still in there, with my nightmare trapped inside it.

————————

**- Washi

Washi in various colours 

Washi origami papers

https://japanobjects.com/features/washi-paper