… there were ghostlike kids playing and pets flying over the lake. I was terrified. “Am I dead?” I asked myself. “It can´t be. I can’t be dead. I was just lying on the green grass and there was nothing that hurt me, I guess… but I don´t know.” I heard a voice: “Don’t be scared darling, you’re gonna be OK”. “But where am I?” I asked. “You just arrived at your inner home. In this place you can see everything from your past life. Everyone wants to see their past, don’t they?”

The calming feminine voice told me to lay down again and close my eyes. So, I lay down on the green grass again and made myself comfortable. I heard kids’ voices, laughing and then, a little film began to start playing in front of my closed eyes. The film had 2 chapters called “childhood” and “teenage years”.

In the first chapter I saw my younger self playing in the woods, laughing and exploring the world. “How carefree I was…”, I thought. It seemed like everything was perfect in my past life, but then we arrived at the second chapter “teenage years” where everything started to go wrong.

I saw my grandmother dying in front of my eyes and the funeral. I began to cry. “Please stop the film, I don’t want to have to go through this again.”

Then I saw my 15th birthday. The day when our house burnt down. I heard my mother’s scream as she was trying to rescue our dog. She couldn’t make it out of the fire.

Cut.

I heard my mother screaming: “Ella! Wake up! You are fine. You are lying in your bed in our home. Nobody died and you are not at the lake.” My hands were shaking as I woke up and now, I realized, I had a horrible sleep paralysis. I threw my arms around my mother. I was never so happy to be at home, alive and in reality.

The end.

Sara Gschwandtner

“… right in the woods next to the lake, a gigantic, about three meters tall figure had appeared. Thunder. All of a sudden, everything blacked out for just a second. As I came to again, the creepy unknown figure was nowhere to be found. I breathed heavily, looking for what I had just seen. Then, about ten meters behind me, it appeared again. I tried to scream but one of his huge arms, which the creature dragged on the floor, because they were so long, grabbed me. There was no way to escape its tight squeeze. The figure picked me up and dumped me in the lake. I saw my whole life come to an end. And then I woke up here in the hospital.”

John closes the newspaper from which he just read the creepy report.

“That person has to be completely crazy!”

“Well, dad, if you don’t believe it, we should go and see for ourselves.”, his daughter suggests.

John and his daughter go to the lake and sit down. Suddenly, they hear thunder. The girl is scared and wants to go home, because that’s exactly what happened to the person in the newspapers. But then a huge, gigantic creature runs towards them on all fours in a dog-like way. Both want to run but they are paralyzed. There is no way to escape.

Father and daughter are never seen again. The person in the newspapers is diagnosed with schizophrenia and taken to a mental hospital. After searching for the missing family as well as the described creature for more than five years, the police give up.

Emily Haidenberger