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The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/StrangeAccounts on 2024-10-31 23:11:23+00:00.
I know this sounds strange, maybe even ridiculous to some of you. But I’m desperate for an answer, so bear with me. Has anyone here, at any point in their lives, ever dreamed of something… or someone… called the Inside-Out Man? If that name triggers anything, even a faint sense of déjà vu, I need to know.
For years, I thought the nightmares I had as a kid were just that—nightmares. My mind's way of twisting childhood fears into something grotesque, something awful, something somewhat tangible. But every fall, when Halloween passes and the air grows colder, he slips back into my mind.
I thought I was the only one who remembered him for a while. He was only around for a few weeks in the fall nearly two decades ago. And my inner rationality kept reassuring me that I had made him up since no one ever spoke about him after middle-school. But that got crushed a few days ago when my friend from seventh grade, Melissa, reached out to me. Her message was short, just a single line: "Do you still think about him?"
She didn’t need to say who. November is here. It’s his month.
So, because of that, I have to ask, has anyone ever dreamed about the Inside-Out Man?
Everything started back in 2005. I was in seventh grade and it was moving into the late-fall season. November 1st.
I walked into school that day to find something off about the place. It was subtle at first, an undercurrent that rippled through the halls. I noticed it in the eyes of my classmates, a strange look of exhaustion I hadn’t seen before, as if they hadn’t slept. Their faces were pale, their movements were slow, lethargic and heavy. And there was something else too. Fear.
In our homeroom, I sat next to Melissa. Usually, she’d be chatting up a storm about her costume, her plans for next year's Halloween season, and the extent of her candy haul. But that morning, she was silent, her hands folded on her desk, her eyes fixed on the floor. When I nudged her, she flinched, and I saw that her knuckles were bone-white. They were clenched so tightly her hands shook.
“Hey,” I whispered, leaning over towards her. “Are you alright?”
Melissa didn’t look at me, she just nodded vaguely in an empty motion. Her gaze was distant, somewhere else, as though she was watching something play out behind her eyes. I could tell that the words she needed to say were hidden just past her lips but her teeth were clenched so hard her jaw wouldn’t let her speak.
By lunchtime, I started noticing it wasn’t just Melissa and a few others. The broken kids were everywhere—the same kids who had come in laughing the day before, vibrant and excited, were slumped against their seats, staring blankly at their food, flinching at sudden sounds. A handful of them looked like they’d been crying. I remember feeling awkward, I was just a kid like them. So even though I knew something was wrong, I just didn’t know what to do.
Eventually, when the lunch-bell rang, I made the choice to pull Melissa aside. She didn’t resist, just followed me wordlessly deeper into the hallway. I looked at her face, really looked at it. There was this shimmer in her eyes, a certain wetness. I asked her again if she was okay, but this time, I pressed harder. I didn’t let her shake it off. After a long, tense silence, she spoke, her voice so soft it almost came out as just an exhale.
“You ever have a dream that doesn’t feel like a dream?” she asked, her eyes finally meeting mine. Her pupils were huge, swallowing the color of her irises. She looked like a wounded deer about to give up on life.
“Yeah,” I said, though I wasn’t sure I really understood. But I still wanted to know. The more I looked at her, the more I sensed that whatever she was about to tell me was something that I didn’t want to hear. Or maybe, something I shouldn't hear.
“It… it wasn’t just a nightmare,” she said, her voice trembling. “He was there. In my room. And I know it was a dream, but it was… it was like he was real.”
“Who was?”
She swallowed hard, and in a voice barely above a murmur, she said, “The Inside-Out Man.”
The name sent a jolt of nervousness through me, though I didn’t know why. I had no memory of anything like it, yet it felt familiar, as if something deep within me had always known that name. I asked her who he was, and her eyes went unfocused, as though she were slipping back into her dreams. It was the same look she had at her desk a few hours earlier.
“He… he crawls,” she whispered. “He drags himself into the room, all wet and… and wrong. Like he’s inside out. You can see everything—the muscles, the bones moving under them, his veins. There’s no skin, just… rawness.” She hugged herself tightly, shivering. “And he moves like… like he doesn’t have bones, or he can take them out if he wants. I saw him crawl through the crack under my door, just squeeze himself in.”
She paused, her breath coming in shallow gasps. I wanted to tell her to stop, to say it was just a dream, but something inside me kept me quiet. I needed to hear it all, I needed to know what she had seen.
“His tongue is the worst,” she said finally. “It’s… it’s long, too long. It comes out of his mouth like a rope. It’s wet and thick, like it could wrap around you a hundred times, and he uses it to reach you, to pull you toward him.”
I watched her relive it, watched her arms wrap around her torso as though trying to shield herself from the memory. Her face had gone pale, her breathing shallow. And as much as I wanted to look away, I couldn’t. I was frozen, captivated by the horror of it.
“He likes it when you’re scared,” she continued. “He just… watches you. Watches you squirm. Last night, he was… he crawled under my bed. I could feel him, just inches away. His tongue wrapped around my leg, and he pulled, but… but I woke up.”
The last words left her lips in a broken whisper, and she began to cry, silent tears sliding down her cheeks. I felt paralyzed, unable to comfort her, unable to make any of this make sense.
“It’s okay Melissa. It was just a bad dream.” I said to her.
“No it wasn’t, Alex. My ankle was wet when I woke up. I know he was there.”
I didn’t know what else to say. I kept her company for the rest of the school day and eventually went back home.
But something was off that night. I laid in bed, eyes glued to the dark ceiling, replaying Melissa’s story over and over in my head. Her story had lodged itself somewhere deep in my mind, like a splinter that wouldn't come out.
I kept gazing at my bedroom door. The Inside-Out Man had crawled into her room by pulling himself through that tiny little crack under her door. It was a visual I kept replaying in my head. It paired well with the memory of her face when she told me about it, I had never seen her that terrified before, her eyes were huge and panicked, like she was staring at something only she could see. And now, lying in the dark, I couldn't shake the feeling that she’d handed me some sort of invitation, that by hearing her story, I’d be able to see the monsters too.
Eventually, the exhaustion of the day had finally pulled me under. I was only 12 after all, I couldn’t hang on forever. Eventually I had to slip into sleep.
When I opened my eyes, I was no longer laying down on my bed. I was laying down on the floor of somewhere else, a place that felt twisted, wrong, familiar yet distorted in every way.
The walls around me reminded me of my Grandma’s house. They were eggshell white with high ceilings. They seemed to breathe. All four walls expanded and contracted just enough to be noticeable, like the whole room was alive.
It was then that I noticed the shadows strewn about from old furniture that had clung to the corners of the room. The shadows were thick and sticky, as if they’d been painted on with tar. The air had a sour, metallic stench that filled my nostrils. It was sickly sweet and dense, like rotting meat. I covered my mouth, trying not to gag, but the smell only grew stronger, coating my tongue, clinging to my throat.
I tried to sit up, but my body felt heavy, as if invisible hands were pressing down on my legs and chest. I struggled, trying to stand, to get my bearings but the only things I could move were my arms and my head. I felt my heart begin to quicken as a certain awful feeling began to come over me.
That was when I heard it—the wet, dragging sound, like something heavy being pulled across a damp floor. It came from somewhere behind me, slow and deliberate, and with each sickening scrape, I felt my already throbbing pulse quicken.
I didn’t want to turn around. Every instinct screamed at me to stay still, to pretend I didn’t hear it, to make myself small and invisible. But slowly, against my better judgment, I craned my neck towards the noise.
At first, I thought the shape was just a shadow, something my mind had conjured up in the dim light of the room. But as my eyes adjusted, I began to piece the shape together. It was crouched low, it's body sprawled across the floor like it was prostrating. The skinless form glistened in the faint light. Muscles and tendons were exposed, raw and pulsating, veins throbbing in sync with some horrible, unnatural heartbeat. It's bones jutted out at odd angles, as if his joints had been twisted and broken, and it was dragging itself toward me on limbs that should have been rendered useless.
He was smiling—or at least, I think he was trying to. His mouth stretched too wide, his lips nonexist...
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