Bad Dreams

Bad

Dreams

This is a work of fiction. Similarities to real people, places, or events are entirely coincidental. Any characters depicted in sexual situations are over the age of 18.

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Bad Dreams

First edition. August 30, 2015.

Copyright © 2015 Brantwijn Serrah.

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Written by Brantwijn Serrah

Cover Design by Brantwijn Serrah

Edited by Jayne Wolfe

Title Page

Copyright Page

Also By Brantwijn Serrah

Thank You For Reading

About the Author

Short Stories

Right Where I Want You

Equinox

Hunting Grounds

Graveyard Games

Novels

His Cemetery Doll

Books of Blood and Fire

Book 1: Lotus Petals

Book 2: Satin and Steel

Chronicles of the Four Courts

Book 1: Goblin Fires

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P
riya couldn't sleep.

She sat, quiet and a touch nauseous, in front of her computer, pinching the bridge of her nose. A cup of coffee—her third in as many hours—grew cold and stale on the desk. She didn't think she could stomach any more of it. She'd been surviving on the stuff for days.

It wasn't exactly that Priya
couldn't
sleep.
When
she slept, she didn't get any rest. She tossed and turned, somewhere between sleeping and waking, for hours at a time. Always unable to make the final, full descent into good, deep, REM-cycle sleep. Instead her mind hovered, awake and aware of the dark bedroom around her. Eerie. Priya could even
see
the room, as though her eyes were wide open. Her whole body, though, lay heavy and motionless as a log.

She could hear, see, and feel her husband beside her, snoring, but she couldn't move or speak herself. She desperately wanted to wake him, because it terrified her. Priya lay stuck in some surreal dream, panicking...and in the morning, when she finally pulled herself up from a sinking tar-pit of non-sleep, it left her completely drained.

This had been happening for more than two weeks. The doctor called it 'sleep paralysis': a state in which the brain failed to enter or complete its REM cycle.

"Stress, probably," he'd told her, and prescribed sleeping pills.

The pills don't work though.
She rubbed harder at her nose, trying to ease the thundering headache beginning behind her eyes.
No...they don't help at all.

If anything, they made the condition worse, because now she was hallucinating on top of everything else. She heard voices whispering her name, or sometimes a startling rush of noise, like the roar of an oncoming train. She smelled spoiled things and sweet things mingling, the vaporous stench of rotten eggs and pungent scent of red wine.

She also
saw
things. A figure looming in the corner. Then, hovering over the bed. A tall silhouette of a creature—
mostly
human—crouching on top of her.

And... she
felt
things. Odd, greedy,
sneaky
things. Dark and disturbingly
arousing
things. Sometimes she found herself so full of lust, she thought if she couldn't satisfy the prowling, slinking need inside of her, she would die.

"All normal effects of sleep paralysis," her doctor assured her when Priya called to explain about the delirium. She left out the last part, though. The part where she woke up with her hands halfway down to her pussy.

"Try sleeping on your side."

She rolled over in the night, though, and then came the sensation of big, hot hands running down her naked back. They caressed her to her thighs, and then back up again. Each touch evoked a burning desire to groan, and she yearned to push the experience further—but she still couldn't
move.
Like a cold lump of stone, she lay face-down in the sheets while some strange being touched her, stroked her,
frightened
her. She wanted to tremble with panic, and she wanted beg for more. While her body floated in strange, drunken pleasure, she fought to move, to cry out. She wanted Ron, sleeping undisturbed beside her, to hear her and wake up to shake her out of it.

The hallucination—the dark presence, the shadowy stranger with the hematite eyes—grew worse night after night. One morning, Priya found herself recalling the scent of wine mingling with the faint, almost pleasant hint of smoke lingering on his flesh.

Now, she groaned and pushed the coffee cup away. The thought of that scent made her ill.

Last night in her dream, the dark creature stooped over her and pressed a hungry, demanding mouth down on hers. She might not have been able to move, but in some distant part of her mind she tried to squirm under his touch—not resisting, but
eager.
She imagined opening up to his devilish presence and asking to be taken. Shameful and licentious desires bled from her, as if from terrible, beautiful wounds. She'd wanted to raise her arms and pull him down on her, to lift her hips in urgent plea for him. He would gratify the sweet, secret desires inside of her, desires even Ron didn't know about.

She'd even imagined she felt the length of a long, wet, and sinewy thing pressing itself against her sex. Not a cock; something like a strong, winding tongue undulating against her wet cunt. She'd woken in a cold sweat, shocked and scared and ashamed but deeply,
deeply
hungry for more.

In silent, furtive humiliation, with her husband still snoring faintly beside her, Priya did something she hadn't done since her teenage years. She slid both hands down her quivering body, and stroked herself into a frantic, quietly gasping climax. Her breath caught in her throat as she came; she ground her teeth against crying out as the wet rush of her juices trickled down her palms.

Then she leapt out of bed in a hurry, rushing to the bathroom to jump in the shower before Ron could wake up.

That had been this morning. Ron said nothing about any wild squirming or whimpering coming from her side of the bed. In fact he never even looked up over breakfast, musing over the newspaper as he ate. It relieved her, really: she expected he'd see the childish guilt on her face, as though she'd been caught sneaking a peek at some especially obscene pornography.

This is ridiculous
.

Easier to think so in the light of day. Well into her forties, Priya long ago accepted she’d left her horny adolescent fantasies behind her. Even when she'd
been
a horny adolescent...she’d never needed sex like
this.

Nothing she read regarding sleep paralysis said anything about such grasping, obsessive sexual craving.

She and Ron...well, they’d never been a frisky couple. Up until now, it turned out perfectly fine for them: their lovemaking, something ordered and efficient. Their routine approach was comfortable.

So why did she find herself lost in such vivid and
disturbing
carnal fantasies? Waking up to masturbate while an unfaithful seed of resentment throbbed in her heart, as though Ron had never truly satisfied her? As though he'd conspired to keep her from all the lascivious indulgences she wanted?

Indulgences she now
had
to know, and immediately, and in such copious, gluttonous greed she might never surface from under the flood of decadence.

Priya sighed, putting her head in her hands and fighting tears of anxious exhaustion.

This wasn't her. This was someone she didn't recognize, not on any level.

It scared her.

***

"R
on?" she asked at dinner, toying with the food on her plate. The nausea from her lack of sleep made food an unpleasant prospect, and she'd eaten nothing since her lunch hour. A little toast and a cup of lentil soup. Though she loved lentil soup, today it hadn't measured up. Nothing measured up.

"Yes, darling?" Ron replied.

"I've been thinking," she murmured, heat rising to her cheeks. "Maybe we could skip your rotary club meeting and spend some time together tonight?"

He raised an eyebrow. "Did you have something in mind?"

"Well," she said. "We might try something new."

"Such as?"

He must see the humiliation on her face. Part of her hated him for not just
knowing
what she wanted to ask.

"Well, we could...try a blindfold?" she offered. "Maybe...tie me up?"

Ron gave her an odd look.

"I didn't realize those things appealed to you," he said, and then found an excuse to avert his eyes. His tone, dry and awkward, made her cringe. It said everything she needed to know about his opinion on the subject.

Priya sighed to herself. She didn't think she should be mad;
she
hadn't known it appealed to her, either. Still, it hurt. As though he'd deserted her when she very much needed him.

They said no more, and he left for his meeting. Dreary and exhausted, Priya couldn't find the energy to do anything besides plod off to bed. She crawled under the covers on her belly, praying there would be no delirious, dark imaginings when she closed her eyes.

Then—seemingly immediately—the paralysis took her. It replaced her weary, aching fatigue with a rabid, feverish, and animal
need.
Her body thrilled in madly constrained helplessness; she flushed hot under the weight of gleaming, glinting eyes.

She struggled to breathe: each breath came with effort, stingy, hesitant. A thick winding coil, serpentine, wrapped around her throat, and more twisted around her wrists, pinning them behind her back. Priya wanted to scream, her higher brain waking into a red panic. Deeper inside, though, like a naughty child set loose to misbehave, the primal Priya, the visceral, hungry, and joyous Priya
needed
it, fighting to move if only so she could squirm happily against her restraints.

The fear and the pleasure were hard to separate. The world of the dream flooded her mind, her thoughts and will were tugged down and down, while her body cried out. The shadows of her bedroom swam above her.

A body lay on top of hers, felt more than seen. Those silvery eyes locked with hers, like a hypnotist entrancing her as prey, a python with a bird. That smell of wine and sulfur again. The rush of the oncoming train. Only, it wasn’t a train now, and it wasn’t so loud...it was the slow, quiet slither of serpents. The hiss of tongues flicking out to taste her scent; the tug and subtle passage of smooth scales sliding over satin sheets. They didn’t even
have
satin sheets. She couldn’t tear her thoughts away from her own nakedness, vulnerable and open to the thing pinning her down. As the strange presence caressed her, she remembered she'd
wanted
this. She'd asked Ron to blindfold and bind her, and now she was bound quite tightly, powerless under a demanding malevolence taking everything he hungered for.

Was it "
he"?
Oh, yes, definitely. She felt it, could smell it, could taste it on his mouth when he pressed it on hers. Salt and heat—the wild aromas of sweat and sex. The same wet, smooth, coiling appendage ran itself against the slick, ready folds of her pussy, and she could imagine what shape she’d feel at its end. This thing on top of her was very
definitely
male.

His broad, strong hands pressed cool on her skin, gripping her shoulders to hold her down. Heavy breathing warmed her ear and she panted. She might shatter to pieces. She had no power to form words, but her brain blazed with her desire, and it screamed out of her in the heavy darkness.

Take me.

More serpentine coils wound up and down her body, sliding around her waist to lift her up. They were cool and smooth—her flesh sang where they moved against it. The same pleasant but terrible sensation pressed against her back, and the head of one of the coils nudged between her thighs.

She wondered if Ron had returned. On any other night, even in sleep paralysis she could sense him in bed beside her. What if he woke up to see this? What would he do?

The coil prodded the generous wetness dripping from her. She grew tense—or at least she would have, if she could have broken out of her frozen state—but instead of slipping its sinuous length inside her ready sex, satisfying her curiosity and longing, it pressed against her other, tighter entrance.

"Oh...
no...
" she said, though the sound came out a weak, muffled groan.

I haven't ever...it can't...

Was it her own wetness the organ touched her with? Or did it have its own to share? It wound and nudged, she felt the cold kiss of slick anointment, preparing her for its next move.

Then the sinuous appendage thrust into her hard, heedless of the cry of pain she tried to shout against the coil around her throat. Thick, rigid, it throbbed within her and she felt
every
overwhelming swell. The hands on her shoulders tightened; her captor thrust down, deep against her body, vicious and lustful, sending pain and wickedly enticing pleasure through her all at once. Her brain was full of the riotous
wrongness
of it, but like a sweet drug it only made the whole experience more enticing, more violently satisfying.