The closest I have come to meeting this fear was once in a dream. In a typical childhood fear-dream, I was laying in bed in my room at the top of the stairs and someone, some dark form, was coming, sneaking, up the stairs toward me. Paralyzed with fear I could do nothing but wait as this unknown form slowly came closer, closer... up the stairs it came. All I knew was that something with bad intent had me as it's goal.

However, that fear was nothing. It disappeared. Or rather, got trumped, overridden, forgotten. For something else was coming. Something else, beyond form, beyond human, was coming. Coming from above, from outside. More terrifying than anything ever I had experienced before or since, this unknown thing was coming from outside my dream.

Suddenly I was aware I was dreaming. The fear on the stairs evaporated as if it were nothing. The ceiling of the room I was dreaming in began to morph. From the ceiling emerged a tunnel out of the netherworld, and out of it something was entering my dream. Something was entering my dream! And the fear of this was overwhelming. This fear was... exquisitely painful.

This fear was of an unknown fear. I woke up screaming. Luckily, I woke up screaming.

I had had a similar dream--nightmare--years before, but then, all I remember was waking up in a scream. My childhood dreams was fraught with dark, scary visions, of shadows of people watching and whispering...

But this unknown fear overshadows all--and I never know when it may return.

I feel that people must see it on me, or in me, my fear of this fear. Do they notice that I am always looking over my shoulder? Looking up at the ceiling? Do they notice that I am always jumpy? Jumping at shadows and quick movements? Is that why people look at me so strangely?

It's a feeling that I just can't shake. I just can't shake it.