Night Terrors, Ma'am

I woke up with a racing heart and a fear so real around 4 this morning that I thought I was going to have a panic attack.

I had the worst dream EVER.

Here goes:

The boyfriend and I are sitting in "my room" in a house that I have never seen before. The bed has a white down comforter and is backed up against a wall with a beautiful floor to ceiling window at the head of the bed. The window has white squares and a rounded top.

The boyfriend is mindlessly telling me about his day and I am daydreaming while staring out the window. The lot next door is vacant and full of tall prairie grass. The sky is overcast and it makes the prairie grass neon yellow.

A family of five (a mom, a dad, a son and two daughters) are setting up camp with a tent and a grill. I wave although I don't know them. They look up and wave back and I instantly feel as though they have been there for a few days and it is a long weekend... some sort of a holiday.

Flash forward. It is the middle of the night and we are sleeping when I wake up with a start. The house is dark except for the moonlight streaming through the windows making large squares and rectangle shapes on the hardwood floors. I get up and move toward the door. The boyfriend continues to sleep.

I open the door to find the youngest girl from the camping family standing there in a white nightgown. She is covered in blood. I look past her down the dark hallway and the floor is a trail of blood and what looks like chunks of meat about the size of fillet mignon.

I panic. What is going on? Where is the rest of the family?

I run down the hallway with the little girl's hand grasped firmly in mine hoping that I will find her parents and siblings safe on the other end.

Moonlight streams through the front door. No one is there. I panic again and ask her where her family is and what happened. She is mute.

I realize that she has no tongue when all of a sudden her mother comes from out of the shadows. She kneels in front of her daughter and hugs her. The father and other daughter are standing behind and the son is missing.

The mother begins to weep and tells her daughter that she is so sorry. I ask what is going on and tell her that it looks as though someone has vomited blood and meat chunks up and down the hallway. She looks up at me with terror in her eyes and tells me that it is all her fault. That they were once in a cult and that they had been brainwashed to eat people's tongues. They escaped, but sometimes the she couldn't help herself.

She said that she had eaten too many that night and had thrown them up in the hallway. The father realizes what she is saying and becomes irate. He screams furiously at her and asks if this is why his son has no tongue.

I realize that the reason the blood trail ran down the hallway was because she had come to my door. I was next.

That's when I woke up. I had mini dreams for the rest of the night of her standing over my bed and opening her mouth to reveal the jagged remains of her tongue. Her face was stark white and her eyes red.