Every night for the past week, I’ve been waking up in the ocean. I don’t know how this started. It just… Began one night. And I don’t mean I’m dreaming of the ocean, no. I don’t know how, but I am PHYSICALLY transported to the ocean. Like I said, it began a week ago. I went to bed as normal, after spending some hours on my computer. Turned off the lights and crawled into bed, and soon I fell asleep. I’ve never really had any problems falling asleep, nor have I ever woken up in the middle of the night before. So, when I first opened my eyes, I thought it was morning.

But it wasn’t. The first thing that hit me was the fact it was wet. It seems like a stupid thing to think when you wake up in the middle of the ocean, but that was my first time, and the first thing I noticed was that I was wet. But I wasn’t cold. Then, I noticed the darkness. Or rather… The lack of sunlight. You’ve probably seen those graphs that show how deep sunlight goes into the ocean. The Mesopelagic Zone, also known as the Twilight Zone, is located between 200 and 1000 meters below the surface, or 660 to 3300 feet. In it, the sunlight barely manages to reach some of its parts, and life has adapted to not rely on photosynthesis like in the upper parts of the ocean.

But I was deeper. I was a LOT deeper. But it wasn’t the pitch black you’re probably imagining. I’m not sure I was seeing the bioluminescence of creatures or if I was capturing some sort of light the human eye naturally cannot perceive, but I wasn’t in a vast, dark emptiness. Nor was I being crushed to death by the insurmountable pressure exerted by the tons of water above me. For a moment, I was filled with panic, and I flailed my limbs, trying to swim upwards. But then, I noticed OTHER things. First, I didn’t need to breathe. I touched my neck but didn’t notice any gills or anything, so I imagine there was another reason why I could breathe underwater. Then, I realized I could move with an ease that would put Olympic swimmers to shame. It wasn’t that I now had a fish tail, but I could move in ways that just… Worked. I could cut through the ocean depths in a way the human body was simply not built to.

By now I was thoroughly confused. After all, I’ve never been one to remember my dreams, let alone have livid dreams. And yet, there I was, in that strange, lightless not-darkness of the depths. I didn’t know which way was up, which way was down. I had no sense of bearing, no direction I could aim myself to. And so, after a few moments of just floating there, I began to swim. I picked a random direction, and I began to swim. You’d think the vast depths of the ocean are empty… But you’d be wrong. There is life down there, and in my first night, I’ve seen many different creatures. I’ve seen tiny crustacean creatures that sometimes glowed, sometimes just swam around. I’ve seen eels with fangs the size of my fingers, I’ve seen anglerfish with their glowing antennae… I admit, my first night in the ocean depths was surprisingly pleasant.

But, just before I woke up the first night, I felt a tug in my mind. It was a strange sensation, very faint and distant, but I noticed it, just before I felt my body growing light, and then I woke up in bed. I’d have passed it up as a simple dream if it wasn’t for the fact my skin felt moist with sea water. It wasn’t sweat, my room was far too cold for me to have sweated that much, but it was, in fact, water. Water that coated my entire body, from head to toe. My clothes and my bed were dry, yes, but I wasn’t. That first day, after I woke up, I just laid there in bed, trying to process all I’ve seen. I DID try to pass it off as just some strangely vivid dream, something I’ve never experienced before, and the wetness to be just sweat. I finally got up and headed off to my day as normal.

That second night, after I fell asleep, I woke up in the ocean again. Somehow, I could tell that I was roughly in the same place I’ve left off the previous night. Honestly, there was nothing around me that’d signal that it was the same place. I still couldn’t see the bottom, and you can’t really use bathypelagic fauna as waypoints… But, something deep inside me told me I was in the same spot. It wasn’t the same day, too, for I had been studying this interesting axe-shaped fish the previous night, before I was whisked away and woken up, and there was no such fish around. So, I began to explore. And, instead of going up, I started to go down. Or at least what I thought was down. I traveled in a downward angle, going forward and down, for a few more minutes, before I realized something. That tug in my mind. I could feel it again. And it was stronger now. Even now, I can’t properly explain how it feels. It’s like a light tugging, like a fishing hook, that was guiding me ever so slightly toward something. If I turned my body, the tug wouldn’t move. It would remain in the same direction. After noticing it initially, I tried to resist it, but it was to no avail. If I tried to swim away, it seemed to tug a bit harder. It made me unable to concentrate, if I tried to swim away. And so, I began to follow the tugging.

I continued to see creatures of the deep there. Squids, jellyfish, strange fish with bulbous eyes and more. I even saw a shark, like those 500-year-old shark that just swim around looking all weird. It was a bit different from those, and seemed… Larger. The second day went smoothly too, although by the end of it, I could notice that the darkness of the depths was a bit… Different. And that the creatures I was seeing were also stranger. Before, those shrimp-like creatures were pretty tiny, barely visible. Now, I could see ones that were the size of the nail of my pinky. Some of the eels I saw at the end of my second day were well over 6 feet long.

Again, when I woke up, I was slick with water. By now I was doubting my initial theory I was just having vivid dreams and sweating up a storm. But I didn’t know what to think, so I just didn’t think about it. It was during the third night that strange things began to happen. Everything started as normal, really. I went to bed, woke up in the same spot as before, and began to swim, following the tugging. Around me, the vastness of the ocean. After a few minutes of just swimming around, I noticed a shape in the distance. It was far, but I couldn’t tell how far it was. It moved around in a strange way, and only after a few more moments of observation was that I realized it was a giant squid. I could see its long tentacles trailing behind its tubular head, including those two long ones. I stood there, mesmerized, watching that deep-sea colossus just swimming around.

Then, movement from above caught my eyes. A long shape swam down from what I assumed was the shallower parts of the ocean. It swam with surprising speed for such a large creature, and the squid barely had any time to brace for impact before the beast attacked it. I gasped as I realized what it was. A sperm whale! I watched as the titanic creatures battled, but the whale had the upper hand. All this was happening well over 300 feet from me, I’d say. Maybe more. I just floated there, watching as the whale used its jaws to kill the squid and begin to consume it. And then, I saw it. Further back from the whale’s position, something stirred in the darkness. Something massive, far larger than the whale itself. I watched in horror as a creature far larger than any living being I’ve ever seen before began to move, displacing water as its powerful body moved with an impressive amount of speed. It slammed against the lower half of the whale, a large maw opening to bite the whale in the flank. I saw the whale attempt to swim away, but the beast took a chunk of its flesh. Blood was clouding the water, but I saw the beast attacking the whale again. I don’t know if it was a massive shark, if it was another type of whale, or something older, but I knew I needed to get the hell out of there, and that’s what I did. I began to swim away, following the tugging, which was growing more and more incessant.

I was going down and down and down. Even though I swam faster than any other human out there, the scale of the ocean is just massive. And now part of me was terrified of the gigantic creatures that seemed to inhabit those depths. I saw other underwater creatures around me, and they were stranger and stranger. I saw crustaceans that looked… wrong. Too many legs, too many mandibles, too many eyes. By the time I woke up, I was just reaching the bottom, and just before I fell unconscious, I could see the benthic floor beneath me.

I woke up with a jolt that day, breathing heavier. Slick with water, as always. The memory of the massive beast that ate the whale was in my mind. When I got home later that day, after my usual day, I began to search about the deep ocean. That’s how I learned about some of the creatures I’ve seen, but of course, there’s not much to go from. We know more about the surface of the moon than the depths of our oceans, and if what I was seeing was true, things should remain that way.

That night, I had a bit of trouble falling asleep. The thought of leviathans swimming around me, ready to swallow me whole with many-fanged maws, was terrifying. So far, nothing I’d encountered had attacked me, although I know that, at least when I’m in my sleep, I can feel things underwater. I’ve felt the hard carapace of a nautilus-like being, I’ve touched shrimps bigger than my hand. But I ended up falling asleep, and when I woke up, I was just a few yards over the bottom of the ocean. I could see the sediment of the ocean floor beneath me. Creatures crawled and swam around, bottom feeders. I saw a sleeper shark swimming around, before attacking a trilobite-like creature. Which should not be possible, as trilobites died millions of years ago. And yet, it was there. It wasn’t a horseshoe crab, or a giant isopod. It was a trilobite. That thing was larger than a dinner plate. I decided not to ‘walk’ in the bottom of the ocean. Last thing I wanted was to disturb one of those creatures and have it attack me.

At first, the area around me was devoid of any sort of landmark. It was just a vast stretch of mostly flat oceanic floor, with gentle, short slopes here and there. At one point, I saw something that looked like a large rock, but when I approached it, I was shocked to see it was, in fact, the carcass of a whale. I couldn’t tell you which type of whale it was, as it had been dead for a while, and the scavengers of the deep ocean were doing its thing on it. I could see all sorts of beasts crawling in and over the carcass, and I found myself floating there for a while, just watching as strange benthic beings burrowed their way through the spongy, dead flesh of the whale.

Finally I moved on, as the tugging began to grow stronger, after I watched the creatures. It’s hard to guess how long it passed, but I’d say… Half an hour, maybe 45 minutes? It’s hard to say. But the tugging pulled me out of my trance, and I began to swim again. I continued my progress through the ocean floor, as if drawn to some spot I did not know about, but that called to me non-stop. And then, the environment began to change. The vast emptiness of substrate began to give way to more rocky ground. Now, I could see strange crags jutting out of the rocky and sandy ground. These were like islands in the emptiness, as they contained more life… Stranger life. I saw a creature that, from a distance, looked like a ray, just swimming above the rocky ground. But, as I moved a bit closer, I saw it actually had an exoskeleton, and two pincer-like claws protruding from its head, and two eyes that bulged outwards. It swooped down and grabbed smaller creatures on the bottom, and cracked their bodies and shells with its powerful pincers. I finally felt myself being whisked away, and woke up in my bed.

By now, I’ve more or less grown used to my nightly trips through the ocean floor. Sure, I was terrified of some of the things I’ve seen, but so far, nothing seemed too interested in attacking me, and I could see creatures that should not exist in our time. That day, after I got home, I decided to post my experience online, and see if anyone had a similar tale to mine. Alas, it seemed like, at least in the forum I posted, no one had any idea of what I was experiencing, and some people called me a liar, some people seemed interested and some just said I should stop taking drugs before sleeping.

The fifth night started as usual. I went to bed and woke up in the abyssal depths of the ocean. The tugging seemed more insistent now, and I could hear… Strange things. Sound travels differently underwater, and although my ears seemed adapted to hearing underwater, there wasn’t a LOT of sound going on, except for what was made by the creatures around me. I’ve heard whales, I’ve heard sharks and those prehistoric beasts… But now, what I was hearing was like… Whispering. Very quietly, in the back of my mind. Almost easy to drown out, but always there… That creeped me out, truth be told. I couldn’t understand what was being said, it was just a very quiet noise. Hell, maybe it wasn’t even actual whispering, and just some far-away geological phenomena. But I kept swimming, through the rocky ground. Now, more and more landmarks seemed to appear. I saw fumaroles spewing black or white mineral-rich water, and I kept my distance from those, as I could tell the water around them was hotter. I also saw stranger and stranger creatures around them. Crabs with too many legs, prehistoric predators, sharks with circular jaws full of teeth…

But then, I stopped when I saw something looming ahead. It wasn’t a creature. It was a rock. It stood on its own, taller than the other rocks around it. But what caught my eyes was not its size, but its shape. It was rectangular. Perfectly rectangular. My mind raced as I tried to understand the megalithic block in front of me. It was too perfect to be natural. It stood at a 90° angle; its sides were clearly worked smooth. I approached it slowly, afraid of what I would see once I approached it. But the tugging, that constant tugging, guided me to it.

Reaching the stone, I could feel my eyes growing wide as I saw its closest face. It was just slightly pitted, but I could see it was perfectly smooth in places where the crustaceans didn’t cling to it. It was a black monolith, standing alone there. The whispers seemed to grow louder as I approached it. Well, relatively louder. I still couldn’t make out what they were saying, but now they were harder to ignore. Against my better judgement, almost as if I wasn’t in full control of my body, I reached forward with a hand, and pressed it against the stone. It was smooth, and strangely warm. And then, it began to glow. It was a faint green glow, but it was glowing indeed. It was so sudden that it actually scared some of the sea life that was around it, and I saw strange creatures swimming or crawling away from the rock. But I remained there, staring up to it.

If I had to guess, the rock was well over 100 feet tall. It was just… Staggering tall, and now it was glowing, almost like a glowstick. Not a bright one, but it was visible. And then I saw another glow in the distance. Similar in color, but far away. I felt dread starting to build up in me, but I began to move again, toward that next glowing rock. And it was a similar monolith, and I could see another one off in the distance. Wildlife seemed to avoid those colossal structures now, and the more I followed them, the more I felt my mind starting to… Swim. Thoughts started to fill my head, like the whispers. I couldn’t grasp them, but they were there.

And, to my utter shock, when I reached the last of the glowing monoliths, I saw it overlooked a depression in the ocean floor. It was vast, far too large for me to hazard a guess. But it was filled with angled structures, vast promenades and statues that defied explanation. I was overlooking a city. And, to my dismay, I could see, off in the distance above the city, large figures swimming around. Some of those figures were shaped like whales or sharks, some seemed to be more amorphous, some looked like colossal octopi or squids. I couldn’t see them properly, they were just too far, too vast and too impossible for me to perceive. Even my enhanced eyes, used to the depths and the lack of sunlight, couldn’t properly grasp their size. And then, I woke up.

I woke up in my bed, crying out in distress. I was hyperventilating, my mind trying to understand just WHAT I had seen. I’m no stranger to the Lovecraftian stories, I love the Cthulhu mythos, but I don’t believe I was seeing the lost city of R’lyeh, no. None of the statues were of the humanoid-shaped, octopus-headed Cthulhu. But there was no denying that what I had seen was almost out of a Lovecraft book. I decided to call in sick that day, and spent the whole day just reading online, frantically searching for information. As you can imagine, nothing came up. I was dreading going to sleep now, but I’m not someone who can manage to stay up for a long time, truth be told. That night, I ended up going to bed still.

That was last night. The sixth night. I woke up in the same spot as last night. Overlooking that cyclopean city, with its structures unlike anything I had seen before. I began to follow a road down to the city proper, my movements almost not mine. By now, the whispers were words, and although I couldn’t understand them, I could tell that they were speaking to me. What, I did not know, nor did I want to find out. I followed the road, paved with black stones, each the size of a school bus. I felt like an ant in a house, everything was just so… Large.

Above me, the creatures swam, impossibly high in the ocean. I could see leviathans that could put any creature that has ever lived on Earth to shame in size. I could feel their gaze on me, making me feel impossibly small. I felt words in my mind, in a strange language. I felt the tugging, that damned tugging, guiding me. From within the gargantuan structures, I could feel eyes watching me. Not eyes of sharks or shrimps or other creatures like that. Beady eyes that carried an evil intelligence in them, their owners hidden by the darkness that not even my eyes could pierce. I saw what seemed like a tentacle poking out of a building, but instead of the suction cups, it had countless finger-like protrusions that wiggled. But then it was retracted out of view.

I was going down what seemed to be a main avenue, wide and vast in a way that nothing humans could build would ever come to match it. At the end of it, a structure sat. It was… Ugly. Large, with square blocks, it reminded me of a massive dolmen, made of the same dark, perfectly cut stone. Its interior was shrouded in darkness, but I could feel a current of water moving in and out of it, as if something massive was breathing in and out, in there. I didn’t want to move, but my body was not my body anymore. The voices in my head, they were reaching a crescendo of chattering, chanting and speaking. My body shook, and yet I moved.

Finally, I reached the end of the road. I stood in front of the impossibly tall entrance to the ancient, humongous dolmen. And then, an eye opened within the darkness. A single eye, horizontal and forward-facing like a human’s. But it was not a human eye. It was massive, larger than a sperm whale. The sclera was black, darker than the darkness around it. The iris was red and seemed to glow like fire. The pupil, a sickly yellow color that made my stomach turn. My mind was trying to process what I was seeing, when a second eye opened, a mirror of the first one. Whatever it was in there was now fixating me with its terrifying gaze, as the voices in my head drowned out any thoughts I could have. And then, a third eye opened, this one vertical, in the middle and above the other two. I could feel the current of water growing faster, as if the beast within was breathing faster, eager to sink its fangs into the tasty little morsel that was now in front of it.

And then, impossibly slowly, something began to emerge from the darkness. It was a saurian snout, not quite like a crocodile’s, not quite like a dinosaur’s. Each of its fangs was massive and looked impossibly sharp for its sheer size. I was frozen in place, as this beast slowly emerged from the darkness. Or rather, just its head. And, before I was taken back to dry land, I could swear I saw it smiling at me.

That happened this morning. I’ve been awake all day and typed this all out. I don’t know what will happen to me once I fall asleep, but I know one thing. I’ll try my best to not fall asleep anytime soon. When I woke up today, I could feel my skin… Different. I don’t know how to explain it, but I’m not feeling comfortable. At the same time, I’m terrified of what I will see if I fall asleep. I decided to write this down, for posteriority. I have a feeling that, once I do fall asleep, that… Thing will be waiting for me… I can already hear strange noises. Maybe the deep ocean should remain undisturbed…