Insomnia

Location: Unknown

Classification: Recovered Personal Account

Status: Unresolved

Evidence Summary

I haven't slept in nine days.

Not slept badly.

Nothing.

I've closed my eyes. I've taken sleeping pills. I've lain in bed until morning staring at the ceiling.

Nothing works.

By the third day, things started moving at the edges of my vision.

By the fourth, I heard people talking in empty rooms.

Sleep deprivation causes hallucinations.

Knowing that helps.

A little.

On the fifth night, I heard someone breathing beneath my bed.

I didn't look.

That's another thing I've learned.

Don't investigate anything you see or hear after midnight.

The coat hanging on the door is a coat.

The whisper from the hallway is the refrigerator.

Then the whispers started.

Every time I got close to sleep, I'd hear them.

Too faint to understand.

Not quite a voice. More like someone speaking from the next room with the door closed.

My eyes would open.

Silence.

I'd start drifting again.

The whispering would return.

After a while, I stopped trying to understand what it was saying.

I was afraid eventually I would.

The doctors tried different medications.

Nothing.

One told me to go to the hospital.

I didn't.

After nine days without sleep, you'll try things you once considered stupid.

That's how I ended up with the chloroform.

An old bottle. Probably dangerous.

I didn't care.

I just wanted to sleep.

I put the prescriptions, the bottle, a flashlight, and my phone on the table.

Then I started recording.

Just in case.

I soaked a cloth.

Lay down.

Breathed.

And for the first time in nine days—

nothing.

I woke to sunlight.

Eleven hours had passed.

I actually cried.

Then I remembered the recording.

For the first six hours, nothing happened.

I was unconscious somewhere outside the camera's view.

Then I heard it.

Whispering.

Faint at first.

I turned the volume up.

It wasn't coming from me.

I almost stopped watching.

Then my sleeping voice answered it.

Twenty minutes before I woke, I walked into frame.

I don't remember doing it.

I placed a folded piece of paper beside the chloroform bottle and walked away.

The paper was still there.

Four words.

My handwriting.

YOU WEREN'T SUPPOSED TO SLEEP.