Steven King's Dark Man (from The Stand)

I've recently been reading The Stand by Steven King. In it, the evil forces are led by a character known as the Dark Man, who appears in the dreams of the survivors of the plague. He appears as a faceless dark figure that follows and intends to harm the survivors. After several days of extensively reading this book, he made an appearance in my own dreams.

In the dream, myself and one of my best friends were in some old barns that felt abandoned, but at the same time, there was a street right outside that looked like the downtown area of a city. In one of the buildings, we became aware of the Dark Man, but only knew there was someone after us. We were terrified but had no proof that someone was actually after us or that there was even anyone there.

We went to a kitchen area and took out two large knives that might as well have been daggers. Then, we went into the barn-like room where we believed the Dark Man to be. For some reason, I hung my backpack in a small room to one side and then set my knife on top of it so I would know where it was. She also set her knife somewhere, and then we went back to the other building we had been in.

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Realizing that we had left not one but two knives in an area where we believed there to have been a dangerous killer, we had to go back without any weapons. Sure enough, both knives had vanished in the very short time we had been out of the barn. I'm not sure where she went, but I began to walk toward the back of the barn.

To get there, I had to walk past an area that reminded me of a jewelry kiosk at a mall. There were the glass display cases set in a square with a space open for someone to walk into. As I approached it, I saw the Dark Man crouching behind it, ready to grab me as I passed the opening to the kiosk. Somehow, I was certain that being caught was inevitable and wondered if I should just allow him to catch me and see how it all ended.

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Then I became lucid. I realized that this whole thing was a dream and I could escape. But before I woke myself up, I also realized that I didn't want it to end like this, with my fate in the balance. I froze in that moment of lucidity for a long moment, deciding how I wanted this to end.

I asked my friend to call the police, and vowed to remain there in the spot until they arrived. And since the street was right there beyond the big barn doors, if the Dark Man tried anything, I would run out onto the street and be safe, because I knew the street was close enough to get to before he got to me. Only once I had played out both scenarios and knew I would be safe was I able to wake up from the dream and easily slip back to sleep, knowing that logic had won the day.