I had this really weird dream again for like the second time??

It starts off I’m in my dorm with my roommates and we’re watching this PBS creepy paranormal thing where this guy kept observing in photos he was taking with this modified camera, there was this short, humanoid figure standing near him in all the photos. It was a brownish color with gold lines all over its body and it was vaguely ‘baby shaped’ so he was calling them baby demons or whatever. It wasn’t only him that had those creatures around. He took pictures of people that were experiencing paranormal phenomena, and more often than not, those creatures would show up. Almost everyone that had those creatures around them died shortly after. Then, shortly after the guy that was observing this phenomena disappeared.

The next thing I remember was that my roommates and I were taking a road trip somewhere along the eastern seaboard and we were making notes of how crazy exaggerated the tides have been for the past few months. They were, like, record breaking tides.

When we get back to the room after this trip, there’s a photograph shoved under our door of that guy. That guy from the PBS show that disappeared. The photo is 3 separate photos stitched together and in all of them you can see that ‘baby demon’ whatever it is. We got freaked out and we threw the photo out into the hallway, and seconds after I shut the door, I look through the peephole and the photo is taped over the peephole. We tried throwing it away, burning it, everything, but the photo would come back. 

A few days later in the mail we got this camera, one that looked like this guys.

We got to thinking about why we kept getting the photo and why we got this camera, and then it kinda dawned on us all at once that maybe now one of us were being followed by those creatures in the photo. So, we take the camera, and we take a bunch of pictures of ourselves, both in groups and not. We all sat down in the main room again and kinda have this moment of “which one of us is being haunted by this?” and we looked at the pictures. 

Every. Single. One of us. Had those creatures around us. We all did. 

We tried to figure out why they would show up in pictures but not to our eyes, and we kinda hypothesized that it was because these creatures were some sort of high energy beings that existed not in visible light, but in the infrared, and that the camera was just sensitive enough to pick up the creatures.

Then I looked out my window, which was overlooking a courtyard, and took a few photos where groups of people were standing. I look at the pictures. 

Everyone had those creatures around them. Hundreds of them were in those photos. 

Once my roommates and I calm down, we tried to figure out what that all meant. Other people before us that had these creatures around them were killed somehow. The guy that was observing these photos disappeared.

I was the only one in the room to wake up the next morning. Everyone else was, just, dead. As if their heart stopped beating in the middle of the night. I leave my room to go to the front desk and as I walk out, there’s no one in the halls. No one at the desk. The entire place was empty. I run outside and, thankfully, see a few people. They run up to me and ask what the fuck was going on and had I heard the news.

Apparently, those tides that have been really extreme, washed out pretty much anywhere within a 50km distance of the ocean overnight, and people, billions of people, had died in the night.

I explain to them the pictures I was taking, of the creatures and how I had somehow lived, and they asked to take me to take pictures now, so I ran and got that camera and started taking pictures. There were ships, hundreds of them in the air, and on the ground were hundreds of creatures, taller and much lankier than the ‘demon babies’ but with the same basic anatomy. They were all standing in some sort of military pattern and completely silent. They take no notice of us. To the east is a much larger ship with a ramp to the ground. We run over to the ship that we can’t see with the naked eye, but when we go to step foot on it, the ramp ripples below and becomes briefly visible before disappearing again. The 4 of us wander onto the ship and it’s chaotic at best. The interior is visible, suggesting some sort of cloaking device, and people are running and screaming as most of them are being slaughtered. 

Again, no one takes notice of us 4. We wander through the ship and soon find a ‘meeting room’ type area where these aliens, now visible, are sitting at a table. Some humans are there too. The aliens have translators on so the humans can understand what’s happening, and the 4 of us go and sit down in the 4 empty seats at the table, that are side to side of each other.

The aliens talk about what happened, that they wiped out the ‘unnecessary’ humans, and kept the useful ones, gesturing broadly to the 7 of us humans at the table. They talked about how they caused the tides because their mother ship was so massive, that once it got in sync with the moon, it could just completely destroy coastal areas. 

The last thing I remember before waking up was the aliens talking about their secondary breed of themselves, those ‘demon’ things that were surrounding everyone, as the ones who got to choose who lived and who died.

Story: *is supposed to be about creepy/bizarre/horror/paranormal things*

Me: 

Story: *is actually just about an inaccurate representation of a mentally ill person who is experiencing symptoms of mental illness, written by someone who obviously has never experienced those symptoms first hand and is just trying to be edgy* 

Me: 

When I was nine, possibly ten, an author came to our school to talk about writing. His name was Hugh Scott, and I doubt he’s known outside of Scotland. And even then I haven’t seen him on many shelves in recent years in Scotland either. But he wrote wonderfully creepy children’s stories, where the supernatural was scary, but it was the mundane that was truly terrifying. At least to little ten year old me. It was Scooby Doo meets Paranormal Activity with a bonny braw Scottish-ness to it that I’d never experienced before.

I remember him as a gangling man with a wiry beard that made him look older than he probably was, and he carried a leather bag filled with paper. He had a pen too that was shaped like a carrot, and he used it to scribble down notes between answering our (frankly disinterested) questions. We had no idea who he was you see, no one had made an effort to introduce us to his books. We were simply told one morning, ‘class 1b, there is an author here to talk to you about writing’, and this you see was our introduction to creative writing. We’d surpassed finger painting and macaroni collages. It was time to attempt Words That Were Untrue.

You could tell from the look on Mrs M’s face she thought it was a waste of time. I remember her sitting off to one side marking papers while this tall man sat down on our ridiculously short chairs, and tried to talk to us about what it meant to tell a story. She wasn’t big on telling stories, Mrs M. She was also one of the teachers who used to take my books away from me because they were “too complicated” for me, despite the fact that I was reading them with both interest and ease. When dad found out he hit the roof. It’s the one and only time he ever showed up to the school when it wasn’t parents night or the school play. After that she just left me alone, but she made it clear to my parents that she resented the fact that a ten year old used words like ‘ubiquitous’ in their essays. Presumably because she had to look it up.

Anyway, Mr Scott, was doing his best to talk to us while Mrs M made scoffing noises from her corner every so often, and you could just tell he was deflating faster than a bouncy castle at a knife sharpening party, so when he asked if any of us had any further questions and no one put their hand up I felt awful. I knew this was not only insulting but also humiliating, even if we were only little children. So I did the only thing I could think of, put my hand up and said “Why do you write?”

I’d always read about characters blinking owlishly, but I’d never actually seen it before. But that’s what he did, peering down at me from behind his wire rim spectacles and dragging tired fingers through his curly beard. I don’t think he expected anyone to ask why he wrote stories. What he wrote about, and where he got his ideas from maybe, and certainly why he wrote about ghosts and other creepy things, but probably not why do you write. And I think he thought perhaps he could have got away with “because it’s fun, and learning is fun, right kids?!”, but part of me will always remember the way the world shifted ever so slightly as it does when something important is about to happen, and this tall streak of a man looked down at me, narrowed his eyes in an assessing manner and said, “Because people told me not to, and words are important.”

I nodded, very seriously in the way children do, and knew this to be a truth. In my limited experience at that point, I knew certain people (with a sidelong glance to Mrs M who was in turn looking at me as though she’d just known it’d be me that type of question) didn’t like fiction. At least certain types of fiction. I knew for instance that Mrs M liked to read Pride and Prejudice on her lunch break but only because it was sensible fiction, about people that could conceivably be real. The idea that one could not relate to a character simply because they had pointy ears or a jet pack had never occurred to me, and the fact that it’s now twenty years later and people are still arguing about the validity of genre fiction is beyond me, but right there in that little moment, I knew something important had just transpired, with my teacher glaring at me, and this man who told stories to live beginning to smile. After that the audience turned into a two person conversation, with gradually more and more of my classmates joining in because suddenly it was fun. Mrs M was pissed and this bedraggled looking man who might have been Santa after some serious dieting, was starting to enjoy himself. As it turned out we had all of his books in our tiny corner library, and in the words of my friend Andrew “hey there’s a giant spider fighting a ghost on this cover! neat!” and the presentation devolved into chaos as we all began reading different books at once and asking questions about each one. “Does she live?”— “What about the talking trees” —“is the ghost evil?” —“can I go to the bathroom, Miss?” —“Wow neat, more spiders!”

After that we were supposed to sit down, quietly (glare glare) and write a short story to show what we had learned from listening to Mr Scott. I wont pretend I wrote anything remotely good, I was ten and all I could come up with was a story about a magic carrot that made you see words in the dark, but Mr Scott seemed to like it. In fact he seemed to like all of them, probably because they were done with such vibrant enthusiasm in defiance of the people who didn’t want us to.

The following year, when I’d moved into Mrs H’s class—the kind of woman that didn’t take away books from children who loved to read and let them write nonsense in the back of their journals provided they got all their work done—a letter arrived to the school, carefully wedged between several copies of a book which was unheard of at the time, by a new author known as J.K. Rowling. Mrs H remarked that it was strange that an author would send copies of books that weren’t even his to a school, but I knew why he’d done it. I knew before Mrs H even read the letter.

Because words are important. Words are magical. They’re powerful. And that power ought to be shared. There’s no petty rivalry between story tellers, although there’s plenty who try to insinuate it. There’s plenty who try to say some words are more valuable than others, that somehow their meaning is more important because of when it was written and by whom. Those are the same people who laud Shakespeare from the heavens but refuse to acknowledge that the quote “Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them“ is a dick joke.

And although Mr Scott seems to have faded from public literary consumption, I still think about him. I think about his stories, I think about how he recommended another author and sent copies of her books because he knew our school was a puritan shithole that fought against the Wrong Type of Wordes and would never buy them into the library otherwise. But mostly I think about how he looked at a ten year old like an equal and told her words and important, and people will try to keep you from writing them—so write them anyway.