Ever since I was a kid, I've had these weird dreams. It always started sweet. With me playing in the playground, eating dinner with my grandparents, or having a family outing to the local park. Before long, I see it. The owl. It looks just like a barn owl, except its body is longer and from its neck down its covered in some dark silk. Making it hard to tell what the rest of its body actually looked like. It's neck could stretch out for miles.

When I saw it, the same thing would happen. A faint screech echoes from the distance, and a horrid fear starts to grow within me, a fear like no other like a fear for existence itself. My body would start to shake, my heart would beat louder, and I could feel the blood run through my veins. With this horrid feeling, the owl would stretch its neck closer and closer until eventually, I would wake up.

At first it was just once every four months, but as time passed it became once every other month, once every month, every week, and then...

Eventually I would experience the dream even if I just closed my eyes.

For some reason my parents thought I needed god instead of some sort of doctor. So they took me to our local pastor.

He told me that my dreams where signs of the devil having his hand over my soul and that I needed help so not to be thrown into hell and its eternal damnation.

After hearing that my parents took me to every single exorcism or spiritual ritual they could find. It was horrid. Every day, I was subjugated to tiering rituals without any pause, and in the end, they did nothing. In fact, my dreams just increased, if anything. Leading my parents to go to more rituals hoping to fix me.

After years of this, one of my friends who had seen what my parents had put me through advised me to talk to some therapist or anyone but my parents. Since they seem only to have worsened my condition.

I took her advice, and at the age of 18, I booked an appointment. I sat and talked to them for hours on hours every week. I told them about my parents insisting on "fixing me", my nightmares, and of course about the owl.

Because of these seemingly endless nightmares, I started to fear owls. Every picture I saw would bring me back to my dreams. Every time I heard the word, I swear I could hear it's screech.

They told me that my dreams where probably just a byproduct of my stressful childhood. She convinced me that the owl was most likely a symbol or a metaphor of how I saw my parents.

But I knew that was bullshit.

The dreams started before all of the rituals and preachers. But, at that point, it felt like I couldn't relate it to the words of my psychiatrist or the priests.

Even when I told them this, they suggested another possibility. That it could maybe be a trauma from the first dream, and thus it sticks with me. So she gave me a solution. Medication.

She suggested pills of all different kinds that would help me with my dreams. I never understood the words they where called, but none the less she told me to take them. I didn't understand why sleeping pills could help me since it was in my dreams I felt vulnerable.

However, this last possibility felt like the first reasonable I had heard in years. So I trusted her, and I started taking regulated doses of sleeping pills and other drugs.

That night was the first time I had a good night's sleep. I only saw the owl for one moment that night. I wasn't in the garden or at a playground. I stood in a forest.

No sound of any kind. All that there could be was the owl. Sitting high up on one of the branches of the thick oak trees. I saw not much of it. Only its twisted body being hidden by it's wings and its uncanny face staring down at me. Almost like it was questioning my existence.

Just like that, I was then thrown out of the forest and back into sleep.

Eventually, the dreams would fade away, and I didn't even need the pills for much longer. Maybe she was right. I was just scared of that first nightmare that I let it shape every dream after it.

So the times that the dream would come back, I just pinched myself to wake me up or simply remembered that it was just a dream. Nothing else.  

With the owl no longer haunting my dreams, I could focus more on my studies, my social life, and eventually work. I lived my life happy. I reconnected with my family and even met the woman I would marry.

But even though I felt so much better, there was always this one feeling that itched in the back of my head. That fear would grasp its cold hand around my heart every time I saw an owl in the wild.

That paranoia that never quite left me would always resurface when I felt at my lowest. That with every rock bottom I hit that the owl was watching, even the most proudest achievements I made, I always felt that paranoia sneaked its way to my heart.

Yet I lived on. I kept going through the paranoia and my fears. I grew up, I got married, became a father, and I was happy. For in the end, I realized that it was just a nightmare. Nothing else. Nothing more.

I saw it today.

I...

I dont know what to think.

It was just like before, I dreamt like normal and then it appeared, but today was different. I wasn't dreaming about some childhood memories. The ground was pitch black and I could see the night sky clearer then ever. It felt like I was standing barefoot on wet grass. Like it had just been raining.

I spun around to try and see where I was and when I did it just appeared. It's elongated and shrouded body was almost invisible, blending in with the dark ground. The only thing completely visible was its head.

Just like before, this unsettling feeling crept up my spine and I started to panic. I started to retaliate. It was just a dream, a stupid nightmare, and it would not win. For I knew that when this panic hit me, I always woke up. So I stood, closing my eyes and waiting for me to wake up once more.

However, I never woke up.

I tried to pinch myself like before but I was still there. I looked back towards the owl and now it was closer. Its feathered face was just an inch away from mine.

It didn't breath, it just stared in empty silence. I started to hyperventilate. It felt like I was on the verge of death. I screamed and shouted at it. I cursed it to leave me alone and asked it why it was back.

No reaction.

With every step away I took away from it, it was still just an inch away. That was when I cracked. I sat down covering my eyes so I couldn't see it. Grasping at the hair on my head, almost tearing them out. I peaked up to it once more.

I stared into it's hollow eyes as it had covered my vision of the colorful night sky completely.

That's when I heard it. For suddenly, it moved its beak in a way unfathomable to an owl.

It spoke.

It spoke in  a voice that was not supposed to be real.

It uttered its horrifying truth.

"I am the one who sowed these lands. I am the shepherd of the flock you inhabit. I am the one who gave life to the children that shall inhabit this world. I am God, and you are not my children."

...

I haven't slept for four days.