The Nightmare Beneath the Bed

I still remember the elaborate bedtime ritual of my childhood. The running leap from the doorway onto my mattress. The careful arrangement of stuffed animals along the perimeter like sentries. The absolute certainty that if any limb dangled over the edge, something would grab it and pull me into the darkness below.

My parents tried everything. Night lights shaped like cartoon characters. The flashlight they let me keep under my pillow. Dad's theatrical monster checks, complete with exaggerated movements as he peered beneath the bed frame. "Nothing here but dust bunnies, kiddo," he'd say with a wink.

Mom was more pragmatic. "There's nothing under there that isn't under every other bed in the world," she'd assure me while tucking in my covers so tightly I could barely move.

They were wrong. Both of them.

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I outgrew my fear around twelve. One night, I simply realized how ridiculous it was to be afraid of empty space. I started using the area under my bed for storage—shoes, books, the basketball I wasn't supposed to bring inside. The childhood terror faded to a quaint memory, something I'd laugh about with friends during sleepovers.

By the time I finished college and moved into my own apartment, I'd completely forgotten about those fears. My first real adult furniture purchase was a platform bed with drawers underneath—maximizing storage in my tiny studio. No wasted space, no irrational fears.

The dreams started three months after I moved in.

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They were subtle at first. I'd wake with vague impressions of whispers, a sense that I'd been talking to someone all night but couldn't remember the conversation. Then came the dreams of falling, of the floor beneath my bed opening up into an endless void that I'd tumble through until I startled awake, sweating.

I blamed it on work stress, on the adjustment of living alone. I bought blackout curtains and a white noise machine. I tried melatonin, then stronger sleep aids.

Nothing helped. The dreams intensified.

I started seeing things in the periphery of these nightmares—shadowy figures that seemed to watch me fall. Sometimes, I'd hear laughter echoing from below, a sound that was almost familiar but distorted, like a childhood song played at the wrong speed.

Then came the night I dreamed of hands. Dozens of them, pale and long-fingered, reaching up through my mattress, grasping at my sheets, my pajamas, my skin. I woke up screaming, certain that my blanket had been pulled halfway off the bed.

It had.

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"You're experiencing sleep paralysis," my doctor said, scribbling a prescription. "Common with your level of sleep deprivation. These pills should help regulate your cycle."

They didn't.

The next phase was worse—I began sleepwalking. I'd wake up in different parts of my apartment with no memory of how I got there. One morning, I found myself curled up in my bathtub, shivering. Another time, I was standing in front of my open refrigerator, staring blankly at the contents as dawn broke.

The worst was when I woke up on the floor beside my bed, halfway underneath it, as if I'd been trying to crawl into that space.

That's when I called my parents.

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"I'm just going through a rough patch," I assured them over video chat, trying to hide the dark circles under my eyes. "Maybe I need a change of scenery."

My father suggested a vacation. My mother, always more perceptive, studied my face through the screen.

"Is it the bed thing again?" she asked quietly.

I laughed too loudly. "What? No, Mom. I'm not six anymore."

But that night, after we hung up, I found myself staring at the narrow gap between my platform bed and the floor. The solid wood panels of the storage drawers should have been reassuring—no open space, no darkness. Yet I couldn't shake the feeling that something was wrong about it.

On impulse, I pulled out all the drawers. Behind them was a small space, just a few inches high, running the length of the bed frame—a design quirk, nothing more.

Except for the small handprint in the dust at the very back, far too small to be mine.

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I moved out the next day. Left most of my things, broke my lease, paid the penalty. I didn't care. I crashed on a friend's couch for two weeks while looking for a new place, and for the first time in months, I slept without dreams.

My new apartment came with a bedroom large enough for my old childhood bed, which my parents still had in their attic. The simple metal frame stood high off the ground, leaving the space beneath completely open and visible from anywhere in the room.

"No monsters under this bed," my dad joked as we set it up, unaware of how my hands trembled.

That night, alone in my new place, I lay awake staring at the ceiling. The empty space beneath me felt vast and wrong. Around three in the morning, exhaustion finally overtook my anxiety, and I drifted into uneasy sleep.

I dreamed of my childhood room. In the dream, I was small again, peering over the edge of my mattress into the darkness below. Something moved down there, shifting in the shadows.

"Hello?" my child-voice called out.

The darkness rippled. Then a voice answered, high and sweet like a child's, but with an undercurrent that made my adult mind recoil even within the dream.

"You're back," it said. "You finally came back."

I tried to wake up, but the dream held me.

"We missed you," the voice continued. "The others said you wouldn't return, but I knew better. I kept your fear safe for you."

"What are you?" I managed to ask.

The darkness parted like a curtain, and I glimpsed what lay beneath—not a monster, not a boogeyman, but a mirror realm, twisted and wrong. I saw my childhood bedroom reflected as if underwater, and figures moving within it—shadowy versions of myself at different ages, all with eyes that gleamed too brightly.

"We're what keeps you from falling through," the voice said. "The nightmares that anchor you to your world. Every child knows we're here. Every child feeds us their fear. But you forgot us. You stopped believing."

"And now?" I whispered.

"Now we're hungry again."

I woke with a gasp, my heart pounding. Sunlight streamed through my windows. Just a dream, I told myself. Just a dream.

But as I swung my legs over the side of the bed, my foot brushed against something soft. Looking down, I saw a small stuffed bear—one I recognized from my childhood, one that should have been packed away in my parents' attic with the rest of my old toys.

Its glass eyes gleamed in the morning light, and its stitched smile seemed to widen as I stared.

I haven't slept in my bed since. I've moved the mattress to the living room floor, away from any furniture, any shadows, any spaces where things might hide or slip through.

Because now I understand what my parents never could. The monsters under the bed aren't there to drag you down into their world.

They're there to keep their world from seeping up into ours.

And they're most dangerous when you stop believing in them.

Most dangerous when you grow up and forget to be afraid.