Dreams and Pareidolia

Pareidolia: the imagined perception of a pattern or meaning where it does not actually exist.

This is not a collection of more (un)fiction by forum users but rather their unsettling accounts of how the mythos seems to creep into real life. Perhaps people exaggerate when they say that the Slender Man could be standing under any of those trees, but it’s best not to look, anyways.

See also: Original Mythos Meta, Comment Chain, Rodzby Incident, Original Mythos Images, Create Paranormal Images, Slender Man Images

Content

I read this thread while in bed last night, and if you wanted to go off on a tangent about slender man haunting the dreams of those who research him, you'll be telling the truth. Not quite a nightmare as I didn't feel the usual fear that goes along with them, but very odd dreams that started with running from an apparition of him in the distance and ended with him catching up to me and ripping my chest open with his tentacles as I tried to fight back, at which point I woke up.

I'd love to see the storyline extended and it would make a kickass movie or book if you promised it would end with the researcher being killed by Slender Man instead of a happy ending.



I keep thinking of him like the creature in It, where he's been around, and people even know that he's there (or that something is very very wrong, at the very least) but that people don't want to know, and that's why he's able to do what he does… whatever that is.

I don't really want to know what he does, come to think of it.

Farchanter:

Also, two nights of no sleep! Thanks, Slender Man!

I was reading this last night in bed on my laptop… in a bed which sits directly against the window… I thought I heard scratching a couple of times. For Chrissake, I'm a war veteran and I was scaring the shit out of myself.



I had another dream about the Slender Man.

The first involved me and a bunch of kids that for some reason I was in charge of. I decided to take them down to the park so they could run around, play on the swings and stuff like that, but as we got closer to the park gates, a thick fog started to creep its way over the ground and soon our vision was pretty bad due to how thick the mist had become.
I could see the park's trees vaguely in front of us and then I had a horrible thought. "This is when he comes," I thought to myself, looking around at the fog. I wasn't scared, though. I knew he was out there somewhere, but I felt no fear about it, as if it were just natural that he would be.
I turned to the children and told them that we wouldn't be going to the park today because of the Slender Man hiding in the fog. That was it.

Last night, in my dream, I woke up in bed. (I may have actually woken up, but that thought is a little too creepy, so I'm going to say I only 'fake' woke up in my dream, for my own comfort).
My room was dark, obviously, and I couldn't see anything clearly. My eyelids were heavy and my eyes were burning with tiredness. I was looking towards my computer desk which is beside the bottom of my bed when I suddenly realized there was someone else in the room, just out of my field of vision, standing right beside the bed head and just beside my pillow, if that makes sense. I knew that if I raised my eyes, I would see him. I knew it was The Slender Man without even looking, something just told me that it was him.
I moved my eyes a fraction upwards, but was compelled to stop at a sudden surge of bizarre panic that told me I *really* did not want to see him. He was staring at me, I knew that much, and even though I felt nervous about not being able to see him, any time I moved my eyes I felt this stab of intense fear that made me stop. So, fully aware of this other presence in my room, so close and watching me so silently, I closed my eyes and hoped to fall asleep soon, expecting to feel his hands on me at any moment. I fell back asleep and that was that.

Two nights in a row. :( Not making this up.



Dolly Parton:

I'm a grown woman and have never been more disappointed in myself.

archwhore:

I know how you feel, when my boyfriend is at work and the house is dark, I can't relax until I've turned on enough lights to illuminate the whole house. I also can't sleep unless our bedroom door is closed and locked. Not that a silly lock would stop Slender Man, but it makes me feel better. Maybe it would just slow him down long enough for me to escape through the window.

I feel ridiculous and he makes fun of me, but goddamn slender man.

Dolly Parton:

That seals it, I'm getting a dog.

BooDoug187:

Animals can't stop it.



I'm starting to think we may have accidentally created The Slender Man. The sheer amount of effort and fear going into this…

I dreamed of him last night. He turned up in a dream I was having where I was in an abandoned department store still full of clothes (that I loved, by the way and was stealing) and when I tried to get out he was just there, watching, watching. I was frozen with fear, knew I was dreaming but couldn't wake up, and he kept watching.

Thanks.

My friend told me about a Nigerian folk tale with elements similar to the Slender Man, I'll have to get him to send it to me.


Last night was the first night I didn't dream of It for a week.
And only because I got myself in a state where I couldn't dream.

As to the thought-form idea- yes, that frightened me a bit, but I think if we keep saying 'It's not real I don't believe' and try and fill our mind with something else when It visits we'll be alright. Right?

I haven't heard from my friend since I asked him to track down the Nigerian stories. He's not answering his phone.



I was looking for a wallpaper for my new widescreen monitor and I came across this little ditty. Something's a bit off about it and I'm wondering if I'm seeing this so called slender man?

ark105.jpg

I dreamt of the Slender Man, but it wasn't caused by this thread.

It happened years ago, when I was a wee child, living with my parents. In that dream, I was getting something to drink from the fridge, I turned around and saw a creepy man that did not seem quite normal in the backyard. He would have been at least 8 feet tall according to what I was seeing. He turned around, I tried to scream but couldn't. I then dropped the bottle I held. I woke up at that point.

I was around 7 or 8. It was one of the creepiest nightmares I have ever had. In fact for the following years, I became extremely scared in the dark.

The Slender Man is real, it has existed forever in the back of your minds. You see it in the corner of your eyes, you might be on the third floor like I am, but you know that if you turn around, if you look through the window, he will be there. He's been watching, to him, you are already a victim. He's just waiting for the moment you realize it is unavoidable.



I had a dream the other night about this movie that was coming out, an animated Dreamworks or Pixar deal. It was about a boy and his family. They were getting ready to move to a different state and trying to sell their house, and the boy would try to scare off anyone who came to look at it. His parents asked why he kept doing this, and he said, "I don't want anyone else to live here."

"Why not?"

"Because the tall man will take them away."

Right then it stopped being a cute kids movie and turned into one of the scariest things I've dreamt in a long time, as the boy and his family flee for their lives. Fuckin Slenderman.



He wasn't the Slender Man, as far as I know… but when I was a little kid I'd have dreams of this little guy in a suit or tux who would chase me, and try to hurt me. Sometimes my family would look on and laugh. He was horribly scarred in his face, and short… about my height at the time.

It isn't really all that relevant, but somehow this thread has me thinking about those dreams again.



I've just got home from a house party. Walking home at 3AM I come down my street, for whatever reason the street lamp in front of my house is completely missing the top section so it's pitch black minus coming out of the side of my house is on.

I'm walking down and as I go around the corner the lamp post ends up with the light at the side of my house behind it. The lamps around here have yellow squares with numbers on. In the dark I saw a tall figure with a white block at the top with a tie slide out of the side of my house. I thought it was the slenderman and I slowly advanced holding a bottle of wine by the neck ready to beat the shit out of something.

Thankyou Something Awful for causing me to sober up VERY quickly.



I just read this whole thread, the slender man stuff is awesomely creepy for the most part, but I know it's not real. So I'm woken up at ~4am by some random loud thump that was probably a car door slamming or some random thing and I'm seeing slender man everywhere and just beyond the shadows outside my windows and I'm wandering around the house kind of freaking out and kind of scared to go into that next dark room and I'm seeing but not seeing the floating slender man from entry #6 and oh god why the fuck did I watch that shit right before bed D:



You know, I've been watching this thread since its inception nearly, and this Slenderman stuff is driving me absolutely crazy. I know its not real, but when I drive home from my friend's house in the dark of night, I constantly paranoid that SM is gonna pop up from around a tree.

I'm just glad noone posted SM pics from Utah. Or at least, none that I can remember.



Solid Cake:

I had to walk several blocks home after dark last week. We have some creepy-ass trees in here in Ohio. They just don't have enough leaves on them, giving them a very skeletal appearance almost all year round. I got about halfway there and then thought of Slender Man.

And I couldn't stop thinking of him. Every rustle and crunch was him coming closer. Oh god he's here….

I panicked and nearly started crying. I huddled under a lone streetlight and called my boyfriend and told him to come get me.

I hate you guys :(

crazkylo:

This same kind of thing happened to me yesterday night. I was walking to a friends house who lived like 10 minutes (walking distance) down the road. About five minutes along I thought "heh, these woods sure would be a great hiding place for slender man, I should take a picture of them!"

I continued on like normal and then started hearing rustling in the woods slowly getting closer. I stared to panic and ended up sprinting the last 4 minutes to my friends house. He had no clue what I was going on about until I showed him the thread :(

Millard Fillmore:

Seconding this.
I went to my friend's birthday last night and we all decided to hike up this small mountain/large hill at around 9:30 at night. It was a group of roughly eight of us, all tromping through the forest and we eventually came upon a dead end, but the trees closed around the path up arhead and it was so fucking dark just in that spot. We were all quiet until someone said, "Yeah, let's turn around."

Guess who ended up in the back of the group. Me. Guess who turned around and looked back at the damned creepy path. And the whole time I was looking deep into the forest, actually hoping to find…him. I was enthralled and scared all to hell at the same time.

So yeah, thanks Paranormal Images thread.

Der Ev-Man:

Thirding. I went outside for a quiet smoke before bed and I got to thinking about Slender Man. Suddenly, every little noise that I hadn't been paying attention to was his terrible tree-limb tentacles coming to rip me apart. And every movement that the trees made was him getting closer and close in camoflage.

I think Slender Man may make me quit smoking before bed. Damn his creepy hide.

Treppenwitz:

God, this exact thing happens to me every time I go out for a smoke late at night. Every little rustle or sound is amplified and manipulated to slender man sounds.

Reverend Gnome:

…keep an eye on any suspicious-looking trees around your home. You never know for certain whether all those branches are really just branches.

Can you say for certain you know how many branches those trees even have?



This just happened.

So my parents and I were sitting out on our deck and having talks about, y'know, everything. We have this light that comes on at dusk on the side of our house that's on the edge of a thickly wooded area. This light is super bright and bugs the heck out of me when it shines through my window at night.

Anyways, I was doing something with my phone and I look up and notice the light's out. Hooooly shit. I say, "Who turned the light off?" my mom jokingly says, "I did with my mind powers."

I mumble, "Slender Man…" She says "What?" and I repeat it, louder.

She says, "You know that's not real, right?" Me: "…yep, but I'm still a bit freaked out." The light usually doesn't go off like that.

She says this, and I lose it.

"You don't have to be scared of anything, I'll rip the guts out of anything that comes near you."

I say, "THAT'S WHAT HE DOES!" And I notice I have tears in my eyes. Wow. At this point, I feel like a pathetic moron, but I couldn't help that I was scared.

I mean, she was correct…right? Oh dear.
If I see any suspicious 'tree branches', I'm going to flip my shit.



I'm so glad this thread is still going on, weeks and weeks ago I was following this but ultimately thought, "fuck this, I want to see "real" paranormal shit-not something I know is fake from the get-go!", and went off somewhere else. At that moment, I was on page three, only a few posts before Victor Surge's first unveiling of The Slender Man.

Somehow I caught wind of him, somehow I just knew about him and began to search his name. I was soon directed back here and followed the thread. That was two days ago, I have been irrationally scared of him since. I've babbled about him and his mythos to all my friends (even when they tried to change the subject, even when they tried to talk over me), I've given the link to my boyfriend yesterday and now he's obsessed.
I was too scared to sleep last night (the sudden thunderstorm didn't help), so I called him to take my mind off things and see of he can help me rest. He just read aloud the stories and postings in this thread. He hasn't answered his phone all day.

I live on a quiet suburban street, now I think there are far too many trees here. It doesn't help that my room is in the attic, I keep expecting his awful face in the window that's so, so high up from the ground…

When I first saw his pictures, was I the only one that didn't outright think he was evil? Maybe he doesn't want to harm people, maybe he just…takes them away somewhere? Somewhere pleasant and safe. Maybe he thinks what he's doing isn't bad at all? Perhaps he considers himself a "good guy" in all of this? I don't know…I tend to be too much of an optimist. I think it's a defense mechanism.
Also, for the past day the song "Kids" by MGMT pops into my head at random when I read the thread, especially the beginning lyrics; "You were a child, crawlin'on your knees toward it."
It's such an upbeat song, but when you actually listen/read the lyrics…
Goddamn it, what have you all done to me?



Turkeysandwhich:

I hate you guys. I read all this stuff like 4 hours before I went to sleep, thought "oh this is kinda fun and creepy, not gonna lose sleep over it". Nope, I sat there the night before school starts again unable to sleep for like 2 hours, woke up at 2, then 4, each time taking forever to get back to sleep.

kizeesh:

Of course not, you can't sleep while he's actually looking at you.

The real question is do you remember what woke you each time?
*tap-tap* very soon
*tap-tap* very soon

he has such a gentle voice…

Turkeysandwhich:

Yeah my bed is right below my window. I kept trying to move the curtain in front of it so I couldn't see outside, but it never seemed to cover the whole thing… the trees swaying in the wind…

Now I'm not gonna be able to sleep tonight either, thanks.



I know it's crazy but this is completely true. I thought I saw a pointed ended shadow the other night outside my window. it looked like a black cat's tail only thicker and floating and my brain just screamed Slenderman tentacle. Now there was sod all there and it was blatantly a trick of the light as I came into the room but I still froze on the spot for a second. All because of something that grew out of a few photoshops and a story about some missing kids.



Holy shit, it just now occurred to me that I, too, have dreamed of the Slender Man. THREE YEARS AGO.

I'm not even kidding.

I don't know how I could have forgotten about it, considering I decided to start writing a short story about it (which is currently shelved). I remember three things about it:

1) It was black, tall, tentacled and wraithlike. Looking directly at it made it more difficult to see.

2) It made a sound that I don't think I could describe if I tried. I did try, though. From the afore-mentioned short story:

I’ve had a lot of time to think about that wail, and I think I can describe it to a good degree of accuracy. Bear with, because it’ll probably be difficult to imagine if you haven’t heard it; but I’ll try. Have you ever heard of a tuning fork? Tuning forks are one of the weird things that I can recall perfectly; and yet I can’t remember the name of my own wife. Well, imagine a tuning fork that is badly out of tune. Imagine it was hit hard, but doesn’t fade out at all; it just keeps on producing a low, atonal vibration which grates against your nerves like hearing a billion fingernails raking down a billion chalkboards while biting into cheap white Styrofoam. Layer on top of that a thick, almost cranial buzz or vibration – I always think of being inside of beehive when I hear it. And creeping along underneath all of this, there’s something that reminds me of locusts rubbing their wings together, but when I listened, I realized that it sound slithery… and wet.

3) When it touched my leg with one of its tentacles, it was like black fire.

At the end of this dream, I managed to get away from the thing, and just managed to escape the house I was in, when some kind of high gravity event took place, and the house collapsed into itself, along with a significant portion of the surrounding neighborhood, and me, as well. And after that, I was forced to repeat the same encounter DOZENS of times until I managed to get away in time.



Fuck you hippies, I'm never gonna sleep. Sleep schedule's all fucked up and I'm exhausted because I'm trying to wrench it around. Being scared shitless certainly helps. But I already deal with annoyingly regular bouts of sleep paralysis. That shit fucks with my head enough as is. And I see standard 'scary' shit - aliens out of the corners of my eyes, bugs, (and this is just me because fuck them) every so often a beholder or something. Now I'll be waking up but not waking up, unable to blink or move in any way, and the Slender Man will be there. Standing next to my bed. Looming over me.

And staring down.



I stayed up until five in the morning reading this thread fascinated and absolutely terrified by the slender man. The next day at work the combination of lost sleep and emotional stress gave me a massive migraine during which I lost the ability to speak properly - a temporary dysphasia.

That's right - the slender man broke my mind. Good job, goons.



genesplicer:

So, honestly, how many of you look around for the Slender Man when you are outside after dark? My back yard has lots of places he could be…

Daeren:

I do *sigh*

My house has a huge backyard with lots of places to hide on the foliage on the edges.

Bad Munki:

Likewise. My neighborhood has very widely spaced streetlights, with lots of trees here and there, as well as an empty lot across the street with a dark line of trees at the far end.

Slenderman is the shadows under the trees. Slenderman is that brief moment before you turn on the light when walking into a dark room, and the same moment when you leave. Slenderman is the leaves you can hear skittering down the road, but are unable to see. Slenderman wakes you up in the middle of the night and won't let you go back to sleep because you can feel him watching you.

Sire Oblivion:

Could be? He's is. He's everywhere, yet nowhere.

Look behind you.

Astrofig:

I hate going out to let my dog out at night now. So many trees, so many long shadows that look like branchy arms, so many that seem to change when you look away and then look back, or seem to creep closer to the house….



When I was little, around 9 or 10 years old, I dreamed of a tall, slender man dressed in a black suit and tie. Every night for weeks. I've always remembered the dreams, but I never remembered the sleepwalking—my parents told me recently that I spent weeks sleepwalking to their room, sitting at the foot of their bed, and muttering a quiet conversation they couldn't decipher.

In the dreams, the tall man came to my house, tapped on my window, entered, and killed my family. I watched as he bit off their heads, chewed them up with a ghastly crunching sound, and swallowed with an audible gulp. He then grinned at me with his bloodstained needle-teeth, and simply left.

I've read this whole thread and the Slender Man really taps into those childhood dreams. I haven't gone outside in the dark since I started reading about it, except to go to work and come home. I don't even look out the windows after dark. (And it gets dark so early nowadays.)

So, a combination "good job" and "fuck you for life" to everyone who has posted pictures and stories. (Especially those photographs taken in the fog…oh god )

(This is actually true. In my dreams, he was called the Headman. He even drove a black Lincoln Town Car with a vanity plate on the front that read "HEADMAN"—that's how he gets to your house, drives right into the driveway with his snazzy car. The utter ridiculousness of this lessens the terror of neither the Headman dreams nor the associations my damned brain has made between the Headman and Slendy.)



This is single handedly one of the best supernatural mythos I've ever read. The only problem is the dreams. They started out innocently enough, if it can be considered as such. Walking down my street after going to the store for a late night pack of cigarettes or random energy drink and on the way back home hearing twigs crack and fallen leaves crunch underfoot but hearing it echo close behind as if I were being followed. Looking over my shoulder I see him, just outside the ring of light from the street lamps. He would just be standing there watching me, I would start to hear children giggling, after a few tense seconds of staring I would simply turn around and break ass back to the house. I can deal with those dreams, my mind just combining my last few actions of the day and the idea of one of most terrifying creatures imaginable.

Now my dream from Saturday night was truly excruciating. The night itself started storming early that evening around 5:00 PM, normally not so bad but I’ve been reading the thread and kept hearing the trees next around the house swaying in the wind and occasionally scrapping the roof. Next thing I know there’s a loud tapping on the windows on the side of my house, and my dog faces them and starts raising hell I throw the blinds open and I see something, not sure if it was a tree or something else. What could be called an act of sheer stupidity; I ran outside with nothing more than a flashlight and hammer I went to investigate. Luckily enough it was just a tree that decided that a dark stormy night was the best time to let loose it’s over abundance of acorns on my house. After a quick smoke and cup of warm milk I decide to turn in for the night.

Now I don’t typically remember my dreams too well but this one stands out in my mind even after a couple days. The dream starts off with me in my hometown walking around at dusk. I find myself walking to my old middle school. When I reach the front entrance I stop dead in my tracks. The lights in the front lobby are off so I can’t see too far in. All of a sudden I get a feeling of dread, hopelessness, and failure and the lights start to turn on all over the school. As I stood there looking at my alma mater I realized what happened. He came and got everybody. No child or member of faculty was left untouched. There was blood everywhere and thin strips of flesh covering the walls and floor. As I stood outside the doors I fell to my knees and started crying. Knowing that even though I was aware of his existence only warning people would have created more casualties. I think the most disturbing part is the sheer hopelessness that I felt at knowing there was nothing I could have done to help anyone.



You know when you're super tired - maybe you've been in bed for half an hour but just can't sleep. Well, when I'm in this state sometimes I'll hallucinate. I'm not awake, but I'm not quite asleep - I don't think its sleep paralysis and I don't think its quite a full dream - but usually they are quite vivid.

1) A few weeks ago I had one of these experiences. I was lying in bed (in my old house, I moved out about 2 weeks ago), there was a window next to my bed and one at the foot of my bed. Outside the window at my feet there is a roof which covers the dining room downstairs, so it is perfectly feasable to climb out and sit on there. In this instance there was someone there - I'm sure you can guess who it was! He was crouched on the roof, staring at me with his eyeless face. After a few seconds he slowly put his hand up and pressed it against the glass - then I snapped out of it and he was gone.

2) A couple of weeks later, the first night in my new place. I am lying in bed, pretty shattered (I'd spent all day putting up blinds and picture hooks - one of which held a big mirror to my bedroom wall). I looked over and in the darkness I saw a tall dark and thin figure in the mirror - his arms curled and twisted and seemed to bleed out of the mirror and down the wall. I blinked and looked again, he was slinking into the wardrobe which is at the bottom of our bed (the door is always kept slightly ajar cus we hang so many clothes over it!) and just like that he was gone.

I know both of these experiences were just in my mind, but they freaked me the *bleep* (apologies) out. I know they were probably caused by a combination of too much MH and the stress of moving out of the family home.

Has anyone else had any freaky MH dreams? Caught a glimpse of Slendy or Masky out of the corner of their eye in a darkened street?

Does your fear of Slenderisation prohibit you exploring nearby wooded areas? Have you been injured, tripped or fallen when it wasn't your fault? You could make a claim!…



I've always had issues with my insomnia, so it's become a useful tool for me on those nights when I realize it's better to just stay up the rest of the night than to get like 2 hours of sleep. Just think about Slendy and… boom! Every shadow is pure terror, endorphins in go-mode!

On a more serious note though, I've always suffered from an irrational fear of the dark and the unknown, so it's put me in a precarious state of mind, especially given the fact my house is right next to the woods, there's trees all around, and I can't see clearly more than a few feet away from me.

Also, the fact that someone's suggest he's a tulpa has left me traumatized for life.
"don't think about slenderman, don't think about slenderman!"



I swear I've seen him. After I saw 26 I was walking to school in the morning. It was foggy as all hell and I thought to myself that this fit perfectly with slendy. Then I look to the trees and I see a tree. Only it looked nothing like a tree. It had the branches reaching to the ground and no trunk from what I could tell from a distance. I ran to the bus stop, but I had to look back to see if it was following me. Yet when I looked back, the tree-like figure was gone. Nowhere in th rest of the fog or anything. Gone. I was relieved and edgy for the rest of the day. Oh god, I hope I was just being paranoid.



I am now having nightmares about the slender man too. This is a big deal however, because I never remember my dreams unless they hold some meaning or prediction. So the fact that he keeps appearing in my nightmares, is making me afraid to go down to the woods to film something today.



I had a dream that whenever you said "Operator", Slenderman would show up. Sometimes you wouldn't see him.
So, in my dream, I said Operator. I then looked to a nearby window and there he was. Just standing there. I got closer to see if what I was looking at was real, and all I heard was this deep dark menacing tone. Then I ran. I ran as fast as I could through a crowd of people who didn't even notice him. Every few moments I would look back.

He would always be standing only a few feet behind me. I was the only one who could see him. There was no escape.

The creepiest part was even though he had no face…he was smiling. Like, you could sense he was enjoying all of this. This sense that your pathetic running will be useless in the end. He will get you.



Vinny:

A few months ago, I was staying in a hotel. I had a dream that I woke up and slenderman was next to my bed watching me sleep. He had a face that looked like an alien. I woke up and it was still dark out. I hate waking up from a bad dream when it's still dark.

So I went back to sleep and guess what, I had the EXACT same dream.

I've never had the same dream twice in a row before. This was also the only dream I remember where I am in the same room as I actually am in reality.

hsemagliG:

I've had this dream too.. Wtf?



This isn't technically a MH/Slender Man dream, but I still figured it was relevant.

The other day I woke up at about 4am. Wide awake. Thing was, I hadn't had a frightening dream. So I was just sitting there thinking, "Why am I so awake? It's not like I had a dream about the Slender Man or anything." Then I started to think about the Slender Man. What if he WAS in the dream, and I don't remember or didn't notice? I started to sort of play it back in my head. I just remember that I was in my old childhood neighborhood as my current self. Then I stopped at a nearby house where I had to babysit some kids or something. That was it. No Slender Man, nothing sinister.

Then I had a frightening thought. Maybe he was there, but my memory of it was gone. Then I had another thought. ALL THOSE KIDS ARE NOW DEAD.

Took me a while to get back to sleep.

Sometimes even by not appearing, the Slender Man can still be terrifying.



Oh boy, do I have a fun story. I made this account specifically for this post, so here goes… I've been up for over 36 hours, so forgive me if my writing isn't exactly the clearest. I'll try to clarify things later if needed.

I started watching Marble Hornets sometime around April or May of this year. I'd heard Slender Man mentioned in passing by someone at school, and when I read a forum post that mentioned him, I decided it was time to figure out what it was all about. So one Friday night I sat down and looked through the original SomethingAwful thread in which he was created, then various YouTube videos, and finally the entire Marble Hornets series up to that point. It was a long night. I didn't sleep a whole lot.

A couple months later it was a nice summer evening, and I was hanging out with my friends. I was telling a couple of them about SM and MH, trying to explain them and whatnot. I was really getting into it. Later on we split, and I started to walk home. This is where the creepiness starts.

Walking down the sidewalk just ahead of me, I could see someone walking in light-colored pants and a dark jacket with his hands in its pockets, which was how I was dressed. It had gotten dark by that time, and he was far enough away where I couldn't see the details, but I could still tell the colors/style of clothing. At first I thought he was walking towards me, and then I realized he was walking in the same direction I was.

Now, when I walk, I tend to drift from side to side instead of just going in a straight line. It's just something about the way I walk. I was watching the person in front very closely, and I noticed that as I drifted to one side of the sidewalk, he drifted to the other side the same amount. This wasn't just him looking like he was moving relative to my position — I could see where he was in relation to center of the sidewalk, and it was always the opposite of my position. After a while it got less noticeable, but it still chilled me.

Now to get to my apartment, I could keep going down the street I was on and turn left after a while, or turn left earlier and then go down an parallel back road with no lighting that runs alongside a soccer field. I'd originally intended on going down this back road to enjoy the dark, but then I saw the person in front of me go down that road. Now from where that road connects with the one I'm on, there's only one way you can go, and that's toward my apartment. I was a little freaked to see him go that way, and when I drew up to the little road that leads to the back road, I stopped to look into the darkness. At the time I could have sworn I saw him standing by the fence, moving in perfect time with my movements — the next day I concluded it could have been a sign sitting back there messing with my eyes in the dark, but I'm still not sure. It doesn't exactly explain everything that happened before that.

Needless to say, I stuck to the main street with street lights and traffic and all that. Now, up until this point, it's just a story about an incredibly creepy doppleganger-like experience that just happened to occur the same night as I went into describing Slender Man/Marble Hornets to people. This is where the shit hits the fan.

I turned to go to my apartment, and by a separate building I had to go past, there was a person standing against the backdrop of a streetlight so that all I could see was a black mass. He was just sort of swaying from side to side, standing there for apparently no reason. I thought something looked odd, and that's when I noticed that his arms tapered down to a point and were dragging along the ground.

I kept walking, only because I wanted to appear natural. In actuality, I was trying hard not to scream. I never took my eyes off of him, and as he turned to go inside I saw with relief that it was just a regular looking guy holding a lanyard w/keys.

It wasn't until the next morning that I realized something. He was only holding one lanyard. What was the deal with his other arm? And it certainly didn't explain his odd behavior, or the person who had been walking in front of me the whole walk back.

You know how you can kind of hear when an electronic appliance is turned on, like a TV? I got that in the middle of writing this. It's gone now, but I'm still a little unnerved, seeing as how I'm the only one awake in my apartment right now. Could just be the sleep deprivation, which I'm going to go remedy right now.



I avoid dark and wooded areas like the plague.

The other night I had been jogging with a friend when he inquired about Marble Hornets. I instantly realized we were jogging in the middle of the night in a park with heavily wooded areas, turned toward him, and said, "We need to leave. Now."



I felt so much like I needed to make an account for this thread, so I will tell you about a strange dream I remember having at a young age. This was long before Marble Hornets, about eight years ago, when I was eight years old.

I dreamed that a very tall, thin man with no face, (Slendy) with his back to me, was standing about 10 feet in front of me in a white void. There was nothing anywhwere except him. I felt confused, and sick. I was coughing and it felt like my lungs were going to explode. He turned to me, and spiders began to appear out of nowhere, (I'm an arachnophobe), and started to follow Slendy as he walked towards me, slowly. I was paralyzed with fear, but then I woke up and began vomiting up blood. I was taken to the ER that night, and it was confirmed that I had had a nosebleed while I was sleeping and it had ran down my throat into my stomach.



The other day one of my friends had told me about something strange that happened while she was driving home at 1 in the morning. She saw an old lady on the side of the road waving her arms like she need help or something. She was standing at a dip in the road with a guardrail behind her, if my friend had been driving on the other side of the road she probably would've hit her. When she stopped and rolled down her window to see what the woman needed, the old lady leaped over the rail behind her and ran off into the forest. My friend has said it didn't look natural, and it didn't make sense that someone, much less a woman of that age could accomplish that. I live near where this happened, and my friend also informed me that she was running in the general direction of where I lived. Not necessarily towards my house, but enough that I've been keeping my eyes out.

Anyway, yesterday I persuaded her into showing me where this happened to "hunt" for this mysterious old lady. I was making jokes about it the whole time. Looking at where it happened, I also agree that an old woman probably couldn't jump that rail.

The creepiest part here is that as we were driving away all I could see were the silhouettes of trees (as it was probably midnight or later), but in the middle of them, I swear I saw the shape of an unusually tall man.
Everyone that was in the car with me knows about the MarbleHornets videos, but I haven't told any of them what I saw.
I'm really hoping it was just my imagination.



I also introduced many of my friends to marble hornets. I have made a photoshopped Where's Waldo style image of slenderman too.

I have had two slenderific experiences:
My friend and I were in my car gazing at the stars (I have a sunroof) on her property. Her home is surrounded by thick woods, and a supposedly haunted church was located near by.
We were talking about random stuff, and I made a joke about slenderman. I often joke that he lives in the woods by her house.
I turn on the radio, and a talk radio show happens to come on, and the voice says, " he's coming".
I quickly change the station, slenderman on the brain.
The next thing I tune to is a song, and the lyric is "run as fast as you can"
My friend is completely freaked, as am I. She leaves and I leave. I turn on the radio again, and I hear ringing bells. It was a jewelry commercial.
Nothing happened that night, but it freaked me out.

The second incident-
My mother and I were alone at our house on new years eve. My father was not there. My mother and I stayed up late and watched the "ball" drop. We both heard a strange noise in the kitchen (we were in the living room) that resembled a sneeze or something metallic. later, I was alone in the living room, sitting by the front door. I heard firecrackers outside in our neighborhood, so any strange noise would be drowned out. for some reason I looked at the doorknob and it TURNED. fast and deliberately, one turn to the right, one to the left, then stillness. I dared not to open it, because it could very well have been a thief or worse trying to get in our house. nothing happened that night, but I couldn't sleep. we called the police and they put us on extra patrol.

these things could have been mere coincidence and a prank , but I just don't know.



Mostly I lurk here but I had an experience of a dream that would really take place in a video like Marble Hornets.

I was walking down a trail with a friend (whom I haven't talked to in 5 years) beside me in the forest that is right by my house (great place to live while you're watching Slender Man videos huh?). Right at the end of the trail is an abandoned toolshed with the doorway facing in front. We both walked inside the shed, inside was a table, large in width. On this table was a bunch of carved messages (operator symbols, names, etc). One message read that was seemingly related to both my friend and I. It said, "LOOK BELOW." Below the table was a cardboard box with a bunch of messages on the sides and with an operator symbol on the top. We opened it and found an old photo of us, seemed like our faces were burned off from the photo. There was another message in the box at the bottom. This message said, "LOOK BEHIND U." We both looked in that direction and there he was, standing in the doorway of the shed.

I snapped out of the dream.

This pretty much scarred me from going into the forest that's by this house again.



Ok, so this isn't my story. It's from a friend. ( The same friend that helps me with theories and I'm trying to get to join up on here. ) But it's horrifying as all hell. She has a history of almost regular sleep paralysis and finds it to be enjoyable or fun for the most part.

Except this time.

I'll post the conversation but edit out our screen names for privacy's sake.

Her: Well…y'know how I've said that sleep paralysis has never been scary for me?
Her: Well. After the nightmare, I knew I was half-awake because I could feel my bed and it's how I always feel in sleep paralysis. I could hear my parents running downstairs and screaming to me that we needed to get out of there.
Her: At the top left corner of my vision (It was like my eyes were a computer or something XD) There was a list of words scrolling down, in the green computer font seen in movies.
Her: It was an alphabetical list of words that described fear or negative emotions. I can't remember them all but I remember stuff like angst, envy, emergency, panic, etc.
Her: But the list stopped scrolling down towards the end of the O words.

Me: To The Ark invaded your dreams.
Me: OPERATOR.

Her: Yep.
Her: I shit you not.
Me: It said Operator??!
Her: Yes.
Me: Holy shit
Me: I would have pissed my pants.
Her: And the list wouldn't scroll down anymore.
Her: I just about did.
Her: When I finally did wake up, I was too fucking scared to move. My face was frozen in a "D8" face for 10-15 minutes.

She also described the half-dream in vivid detail.

Her: Well then. I "woke up" (was still half asleep, remember) and I was trying really hard to move. I felt like I was shaking my head back and forth but I couldn't get anywhere. And like I said, I heard my parents running down the stairs sounding really scared and yelling to me that we all need to leave.
Her: But they never even came close to my door. I just heard them running around downstairs.
Her: I heard some kind of hissing noise, like a valve leaking. And that list was making a faint *blip* noise with each word it scrolled down.

Me: How fast was it scrolling?
Her: It started off slow, then got to a pretty medium-fast pace.
Her: Then stopped dead at 'operator', and kept doing a little jump thing like it was trying to scroll down to the next word, but couldn't.

Her:Then as I was finally able to start moving, all of it just kinda faded away. The list and the sound of my parents. My ears were kinda ringing a little, though.

(end synopsis)

That actually creeped me the hell out. It seems like something ToTheArk would do in one of his vids. Sleep paralysis creeps me out, especially since I'm prone to vivid nightmares, some involving our slender friend.



I'm currently staying at my parents' house. With today's Twitter activity, I've been keeping a vigil all evening, just waiting.

Like five minutes ago, I stepped out of the bathroom, and the lights in the hall started flickering. Everything in the house dimmed, but didn't go out completely. The outside lights cast long, convulsing shadows across the lawn, and the trees were suddenly menacing.

"I don't want to die," I squeaked.

We just searched around the house. Oddly, the lights are fine in my room and in the kitchen, but they're out everywhere else.

There's only one possible explanation in my fevered imagination.

Edit: One neighbour so far is having the same problem. Hopefully, Slendy goes after them first.



I remember having dreams about Slenderman. But that is all. I don't remember the dreams, just having them. Slendersickness?



I was going to post about a week and a half ago, but I'm reluctant to share my stories. Things have gotten a bit worse since then.

Fifteen days ago I feel asleep on the couch in our living room. This is normal: It's a lot nicer to sleep in there in cold weather than to freeze in my room upstairs even when I have three blankets (I live in Canada and we had tons of snow still). I woke up at 2:27 am and decided to go sleep in my bed until the morning.

It takes a while for me to get to sleep, so I heard our clocks downstairs chime a couple times before getting tired of waiting to sleep. I looked up through my doorway, and outside a window in the next room was something that looked somewhat like the Slender Man. I scribbled this down quietly in a notebook beside my bed so I could tell if it was a dream the next day, and tried to just ignore it and go to sleep. Every time I looked up I saw the same white face reflecting the light from the moon.

The next morning I woke up with a bad headache that lasted about two and a half days. I've gotten maybe four headaches in my entire life. Right after the headache faded out I got a chest cold and terrible cough which has gotten steadily worse. I went to a clinic today after phlegm completely blocked my throat this morning, luckily I was able to cough to breathe. I was given two puffers and had to get a chest x-ray done.

I haven't seen the face looking in the window since that night two weeks ago, and there's nothing out there that I might've mistaken for it. I'm hoping I was just seeing things. The funny thing is I never get sick. I once went about five or six years without missing a day of school for any reason other than a field trip.

Oh, and the large Maple tree in our backyard has about three branches that look to cross at a single point from where my head sits when I sleep on my back, and another, smaller tree has grown up directly behind where the three branches cross. At night it looks like the Slender Man is chillin' with his tentacles out about fifteen feet from my window.



I've had a few Slenderman-related dreams, but two stick out in my mind as the freakiest. I'll copy them from my dream journal and paste them here, if anyone's interested in reading about what goes on in my head. I apologize that these aren't literary masterpieces, but I wrote them down right after I woke up so I wasn't too concerned about them sounding great. Plus, I'm too lazy to fix them now XD

August 1st 2012

Last night's dream was simple, but it had a profound effect on me. I was sitting on my bed at night with my bedroom door closed. I got up, opened the door, and saw the Operator standing at the end of the hall. When I woke up, it was still dark and I really had to go to the bathroom. Took me a half-hour to finally gather up the courage to open my bedroom door. Of course there was nobody there, but I still almost had a heart-attack.

September 14th 2012

Had a dream last night where my dad, sister, and I were exploring an abandoned building at night. My sister and I both had flashlights, but my dad didn’t so he followed me. My sister decided to explore the second floor while dad and I would look around on the first floor. The electricity in the building didn’t work, but this was the only sign that it was abandoned. Other than that, it looked like a normal house. After walking around for a while, my dad and I got bored. We decided to go upstairs to find my sister so that we could all leave, but when I shined my flashlight up the stairwell I saw the Operator standing at the top of the stairs. My dad was a few steps behind me, so he didn't see it. Without saying a word, I booked it out of the house. I ran and hid behind a bush in the neighbor's yard, but no one else ever came out of the house.



Ugh… I hate myself for admitting to this.

Every so often as I have worked my way through the MH series, I have had dreams related to it. Not overly common. Not nightly. But I hate them.

Let me tell you why I hate them.

Most of the time, when you fall asleep and slip off into a dream, its quite obvious that you are in a dream. I dream fairly consciously and have a lot of dream control. To put it simply, I know when I am asleep, it has a different feeling from reality. I can make decisions in my dreams. I can control and change the content.

Not the MH dreams.

I go to sleep, and I dream I am in my bed. In my room. Nothing is different. Nothing is out of place. If the dog or the cat were on my bed, they still are. If the news was on the TV, it still is. Most disturbingly, I have no control… and it doesn't feel like a dream. It feels like reality.

In these dreams I will get frustrated and give up on sleeping and go wander about, to encounter some typically freaky MH things. Or, I will stay in my bed, too chicken to go out and wander, or maybe just too tired. Yes, I feel tired. I breathe in these dreams. I have vivid dreams to begin with, but the smells, the textures, everything just feels so real… anyways. I will stay in bed, groaning and grumping in my mind about not being able to fall asleep. Debating on getting up or staying where I am. I'll toss here, turn there, open my eyes to look for the clock… and there's someone on my desk, staring at me. Or there's that tall fellow himself, just outside of my bedroom door, or in the corner. When I wake from these dreams, its not the waking sensation you typically get from waking up. Its like I never slept at all. It literally fades so seamlessly into reality that I've sat in my bed, staring at a part of my room, wondering where the masked figure perched on my dresser went, or staring at where I last spotted Slender Man. One day, I literally jumped up and ran to get my video camera. Another eerie note is that if I am stuck wandering, I have to return all the way home in my dream, and back to my bedroom before I can wake up.

Sadly, I don't get the cool story dreams like you guys do… I just get that. A few times I have hung out with Alex or Jay, but its really rare. And in the one dream I DID have, where I remember feeling like it was a dream, Jay had no eyes. Just a blurry spot mending his eye sockets into nothing, no matter what angle you looked at him from. In that dream, I know I was a proxy. Not Hoody. Maybe not Masky, but maybe. I don't…really remember what my mask looked like. I remembered I had to follow him, but if I got too close, my head would start to swim and my throat would close. If I got too far, shadows darkened and my vision swam. It was like something (Slender Man?) was spurring me forward, giving me warnings, but at the same time 'mastering' me in such a way that if I got too far, there was the looming threat of something bad happening to me.



I can only imagine the crippling paranoia Jay must go through. Sometimes in the middle of the night I go into the kitchen of my apartment and I freak out that slendy has somehow gotten in and is hiding in the living room. Jay must feel that paralysis everywhere he goes. It makes the character a lot more deep.



I had a dream last night…

It started off in my room at night as I set up all the tools to perform an occult ritual (table, black cloth, candles, knife etc) and I started by sitting cross legged before it, the knife on my lap.

After around 12 minutes of chanting under my breath, I stopped being able to breathe. I rose my head, clawing at my throat and convulsing. It felt like there was something leaking from my eyes, ears and nose all at once and my heart was going crazy, before I started vomiting a large amount of blood onto myself.

After I stopped puking blood I felt a sharp pain in my chest and I couldn't feel my heart beating anymore, promptly collapsing. Before I "passed out" (had a gray spot in my memory for the gap between these points) It felt like something cold was invading my brain, like an icy liquid feeling under the skin in my head.

I eventually rose from the floor with a big headache and after getting my head together I grabbed the camera I had trained on me performing the ritual.

What I saw was laced with static and other distortion but from what was visable, halfway through the ritual when I stopped being able to breathe, The operator appeared behind me, just standing there. Several times before I threw up my face suffered distortion that made it look like all features were eliminated while distortion around TO made him look like he had a fully formed face.

Once I had collapsed he took a step towards me and the recording stopped.

Unnerved, I went to the bathroom to get some water and clear my head, and as I looked into the filing cabinet mirror I saw my reflection and what had happened to me in the grey period of my memory.

I had no face.

Then I woke up.

Thanks for terrifying me brain, I'm sure I'll pay you back someday.



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