Slenderman

 Recently I was introduced to a paranormal creature known as Slenderman. You can learn more about him here, as well as download a small and simple yet frightening game called SLENDER: The Eight Pages, in which you explore a forest at night, with only a flashlight, collecting eight pages of lore on Slenderman, while each page you collect brings him closer to getting you. The site has this to say about him:

The Slender Man was created at the Something Awful Forums in a thread entitled "Create Paranormal Images." He is described as wearing a black suit strikingly similar to the visage of the notorious Men In Black, and as the name suggests, appears very thin and able to stretch his limbs and torso to inhuman lengths in order to induce fear and ensnare his prey. Once his arms are outstretched, his victims are put into something of a hypnotized state, where they are utterly helpless to stop themselves from walking into them. 

 Slendy, as my friends fondly refer to him, is not as scary as he might seem at first. I myself would consider him "fear incarnate" in the sense that you are only afraid of things that you already fear, and the thought of Slendy chasing me through a forest at night, me with only a flashlight, doesn't actually make me fear him, so much as it brings to mind anything and everything else I might be afraid of. The other reason I consider him this way is because of the dream I had last night, of which I am about to tell you.

I had to give some background on the creature before getting into the details of the dream, so that I wouldn't have to explain it as I go (and also as a reference to myself later when I look back on this).

The dream itself wasn't very long, but it pulled a strong sense of emotion from me, one that stayed with me for hours after waking. I felt true fear... and in that fear rose true courage.

It began in a mansion. I was in a room with a few other people. Though it doesn't make much sense to me, the people in the room were the guys from "The Big Bang Theory" TV show. Perhaps I'm afraid of looking childish and ignorant in the eyes of more knowledgeable people? We were looking through a bookshelf, and somehow the topic came to video games that we had yet to beat. I was the one who brought up SLENDER, and brought them to a computer to show them. The game somehow altered such that the area we were trying to run through was the same mansion we were currently in!

I knew where quite a few pages would be, and led them to the ones I could locate. But then we heard something in the other room, and an eerie silence fell. We were all listening and waiting for what we knew was behind the door... Slenderman. We started rushing through the mansion, discussing our plan of action along the way. The only way to escape was in a sense to bring him closer to us... to locate all Eight Pages. We somehow knew those pages would be hidden around the mansion and the grounds surrounding it. Oddly enough, I even knew exactly where a few of those pages would be. We began splitting up into groups, aiming to retrieve certain pages each, and to search certain sections and rooms to cover more ground quickly.

I'm not sure how I knew, but shortly after separating, the other two groups had already fallen to Slendy. I was terrified, and wanted nothing more than to curl up in a chair in the corner and stay there until it was all over... but I knew I had to get those pages if I wanted to live, and if I wanted to save the others. While coming across the first page, Slendy surprised me and the guy I was looking with (Leonard) and nearly grabbed the guy as he reached for the page. With all the courage I could muster, I jumped on Slendy's back and wrapped my arms around his neck, wrestling with him so Leonard could grab the page and escape. The whole ordeal seemed to fly by, and before I knew it I was letting go of Slendy, dropping to the floor, and running after Leonard into an adjacent room, locking the door behind us. Leonard and I separated at that point, him going into an area that I didn't have clearance to enter, in which we knew a page would be located. He never returned.

The next few parts of the dream were me going across the grounds and throughout the mansion, collecting the pages I knew of and checking a few places I suspected. My intuition was almost always right, leading me almost directly from page to page. I was still dodging Slendy though, every few turns I would glimpse him behind me, or out a window, or coming around a corner. Sometimes he would appear just on the other side of a door I opened, and those close calls showed me that no matter how scared I was, I still had the potential to be even more afraid. I kept on though, until before I knew it I had collected six pages.

To find the seventh page, I had to use a special viewer that was on the very edge of the property, that zoomed in and showed me the page, up against the back wall of a standalone building. I climbed down and made my way to the building, Slendy not in sight. But once I reached the doorway, it seemed like a showdown. I approached the doorway from the left of the building, Slendy from the right. We came face to face at the door, the page in view through the open doorway. I knew this was the end of it; if I went into that room, I would never come out. But if I never went into the room, it would never end. I would live in fear my entire life.

I'll be honest; I have no idea how this dream ended. I think I went into the room... I hope I went into the room. There is no way to know if I would have ever found that eighth page anyways; if it really was under secret clearance, then I would have had a hard time getting to it. All I know is that this dream signified all the fear I have, of everything I have ever been afraid of. Knowing where some of the pages were makes me think of the fears that I have rationalized and come to understand, actually collecting the pages makes me think of fears I have overcome. My jumping right on the back of Slendy at one point I think signifies a HUGE breakthrough in which I stepped up and faced my fear, and won. The seventh page seems to have a lot of significance, perhaps hinting at taking a step back and needing a third party's point of view to really see this particular fear for what it is; getting so close and having that confrontation has a lot of symbolism to it, something I have a feeling I need to do some deep thinking about. That eighth page, being locked up out of my reach, tells me there is something else I am afraid of that either I am not allowing myself to consider, or that I don't know how to rationalize just yet. A lot of deep meaning in what would otherwise be considered a nightmare.