Hypnopompia started as a dream—one that left me questioning reality in a way I hadn’t experienced since childhood. This story lingers in the eerie spaces in my mind between dreaming and waking, where reality is fractured, self-awareness blurred, and the mind drifts between presence and displacement. That day, I woke as two people—anchored in the familiar, lost in the surreal.

As an autistic writer, much of my work is shaped by my experiences with dissociation, derealization, and depersonalization. My lifelong struggles with insomnia, lucid dreaming, and childhood moments when the line between dream and reality felt razor-thin all shaped this piece—and likely my experience at the moment when this story was my reality. Hypnopompia begins at the precise moment a woman, lost on an astral journey, is reunited with her body.

While this piece stands on its own, I keep returning to the world it hints at. The concepts of astral travel, fragmented consciousness, and unseen entities lurking at the edges of reality feel too rich to leave behind. I can easily see Hypnopompia evolving into something bigger—perhaps a novel or a serialized story that further explores the protagonist’s fractured existence and the forces that may still be watching from the other side.

I hope you enjoy Hypnopompia. Let me know your thoughts!

Maybe it was the 20 milligrams of melatonin I’d taken before bed, but,

I came awake suddenly. One moment, the blissful nothingness of deep sleep; the next, the brutal full consciousness usually reserved for mid-day. The words “I found me!” were ringing in my ears like the ting of a high bell reverberating through my bones. Added to that was the irreconcilable sensation that I was physically in two places at once. I was looking at two different views of my small bedroom that overlapped each other in a way that churned my stomach, filled my mouth with hot saliva, and spread an aching, clammy chill across my skin. Disoriented and confused, I recognized that there was that me in the bed, who had just woken, staring at the version of me standing in the doorway of my room. But I was also the me in the doorway. Distantly, fading, and somehow disconnected, but it was my voice ricocheting off the empty white walls. I remember hearing it, I remember it startling me awake, but I also remember saying it; I remember standing there in that doorway filled with triumph and joy, looking at the sleeping body that was also me lying on my bed. What’s more, I’m still standing in the doorway, I’m still lying in my bed, and I am not alone with myself.

At the first instance of waking, I was more the me in the door than I was the me in the bed. But as the seconds passed, I was less that me and more this me, the me in the bed. I felt memories and thoughts slipping from my mind like a fading dream, rapidly dissipating like so much smoke and sand slipping through my fingers. Only one terrifying certainty remained. She, the me in the doorway, had been speaking to something. And that something was still in the room.

It was a dark cloud, a presence that clung to the upper left corner of my room, though there was no darkness there to the eyes of the me in the bed. The me that seemed now to be the real me, the solid me. Regardless, its ephemeral presence, both there and not there, filled the room with a pressure that sat on my chest and pressed against my eardrums, heightening the frantic thrum of adrenaline-laced blood rushing through my head.

It observed me like a well-fed lion observes a mouse, indolent and replete. There was no doubt in my mind that I was little more than a mouse, shivering, frozen, hypnotized by my own terror. Its personality felt cold and distant, clinical and alien. I imagined it might be wondering what it would feel like to prick me and poke me, bat me around a bit with its smokey nonexistent paws, rattle my cage until my brains oozed from my eyes, and I died a twitching ignoble death.

And yet, I knew—somehow—that I had been lost, stranded across time and space, so very far from myself, and this creature, this entity, had led me home. My companion, my—friend?