How to Have a Nightmare at Will

(Translated from Japanese by Saya)

This article appeared 10 years ago on a magazine in the Readers' Letters section.
The title was what drew my eye to it: How to have a nightmare at will.

"The method is easy. All you need to do is wish that you want to have a nightmare and stomp on the pillow with your foot before you sleep. The dream's level of scariness depends on the number of times you have stomped on the pillow.

If it's only once or twice, the dream will only be as scary as a haunted house in an amusement park, but from seven times onwards, the level of scariness skyrockets. The scariest level is ten."

That was the content of the article. I was just about to go to bed and as it was a very easy thing to do, I thought I would give it a try. I thought it would be boring to have a dream at the scariest level straight away, so I quit when I got to nine times.





That night I had a dream.
In the dream, I was caring for my granddad who had passed away a long ago.
He was somehow bedridden on my bed in my room, with a lot of tubes inserted in his nose and arms.

1. I hated being alone with Granddad.

He smiled affably when other members of the family were around, but somehow when he was alone with me his face would turn ghastly pale, and he would start glowering at me while muttering something under his breath.

I was terrified of him, and one day I pulled out one of the tubes while pretending to be caring for him.
All of a sudden his condition took the turn for the worse, and all the family members rushed into the room.
Granddad, with that ghastly pale face, began tearing at his throat and groaning with pain.
What have I done! He's going to die.
And what if they find out what I've done to him.
I pretended I didn't know what was causing his pain, and ran to his side like the others had done.
It was right then that I clearly heard what he had been muttering.
"You die....you diieee....."

At that point, I woke up.
So that was Level 9. And what a nightmare that was!
In the first place, Granddad had already passed away just before I was born and he could never have stayed in my bedroom.

Besides, the real Granddad would never have said such a horrible thing to me.
In an attempt to dispel my fear, I tried to recollect each detail of the dream.
But that face...
No, I'll forget about it. That was only a dream, and not real.

However, somehow I kept feeling an unpleasantness in the air. It was as if I still hadn't woken up from the dream....

I looked up at the ceiling, and there it was, a gigantic face, ghastly pale, that screamed out,
"YOU DIIIIIEEEEE!!! YOU DIIIIIIEEEEEEE!!!"
The face had followed me to the real world!
Overcome by intense terror like no other, I lost consciousness.

When next I opened my eyes, the face had gone.
Apparently the part where I thought I had woken up was a ruse to throw me off guard and prepare me for the most terrible part of the nightmare.
For the next few days, I was too scared even to touch the pillow.
Level 9 was horrible enough. I wondered what Level 10 would be like.

Since then I never again tried the ritual. I never want to see such a nightmare again.
But there is some other thing that has been bothering me.
When I looked through the next month's issue of the same magazine, I read that some other person had tried the same ritual, and he recorded his own experience in the Readers' Letters.

"The other day I tried the nightmare ritual. Due to my low tolerance of horror, I decided to stomp on the pillow 8 times only. I don't recall the content of the dream, but when I woke up a large, pale face appeared in my room."
It sent chills down my spine. How can two complete strangers have the same dream?

I googled such keywords as "pillow stomp nightmare level" that may shed light on this mysterious ritual but couldn't find any other information.
Can anyone here try Level 10, the scariest level, and see how it goes?