The Man with No Face

Ever since I was a boy, I saw him in my dreams.

He was considerably tall and towering over me, dresses in a black suit and matching tie. What his name was I never knew, but the part that puzzled me the most was the distinct lack of facial features. This man, whoever he was, whatever he was, had no face. No eyes to see or nose, nor a mouth, nor ears. He was a faceless phantom that walked the foggy grounds of my slumbering world.

The dream was recurring. This man without a face would stand before me and stare. Just stare. Hours passed, and his gaze remained fixated upon me. I could not move, and I dared not to speak. I was alone with him, and him with me, and together we watched each other in silence until I awoke.

My mother, God rest her soul, used to tell me that he was the Devil himself. She told me he comes into my dreams at night because he wants to scare me into doing bad things. I can't quite tell if the man was scary, or my mother's religious interpretation was scarier. Either way, when you're a kid, you believe your mom when she says Satan is in your head.

When she died in the winter of 1999, I was hit pretty hard by such a range of emotions that it felt like a brick wall falling down on top of me. Even at the age of 15, something sudden and painful like that kind of forces you into maturity. I got a job a lot sooner than I expected I would, as I felt I needed to help out financially with my family. It was just my father, my eight year old sister, and me at the time. However, with mom being the bread-winner on the family, her death further took its toll on us in that way. But my father, a penny pincher, helped cut costs and kept us stable.

Seeing my dad, a now-single father, try to cope with two kids while working two jobs, all the while going through broken relationship after broken relationship, really opened my eyes to reality.

I pretty much took care of Ashley, my sister, by myself

As I grew up, I kept having those dreams. Or maybe they're nightmares, I can't tell. Either way, the man with no face stayed with me for years to come.

When I became a psychiatrist, I mainly saw the monetary potential in the job, but the years of unanswered questions I had about my dreams was the real driving force behind my schooling and subsequent graduation. Although I learned much, I found out so little about the man without a face. All the while, he still plagued me in my sleep.

After a while, my mind started to take on more twisted aspects. I became less apt to sleep, fearing one night I would see him again. That fear became even more of a nightmare than the dreams of the man without a face, as I knew I would eventually wake up from my slumber. But when you're awake, the only thing you have to look forward to is sleep. Yet to sleep could take me back to that haunting realm, back to that terrible "man". No matter what I did, I was tortured, mentally and emotionally drained.

When I met Katrina, things changed. I kept having those dreams, but her beautiful face always overcame it. She is, in many ways, my guardian angel, vanquishing that thing in my dreams.

We got married three years ago, and my son Jacob is already two years old. It still amazes me how a wife and a child changes your life for the better. My son is just like me, it's almost scary. It's like having a miniature version of yourself running around the house. And he's smart as a tack too.

By the time he was born, I stopped having dreams about the man with no face. I never could have guessed it. All the therapy and medication I went through never lifted that burden from me. It was only until my son was born did I never see the faceless man again. Now my dreams are soft and content, filled with lucid, brightly colored images and memories of people I know, or knew. And I still see my mother sometimes, and we briefly talk about different things, just like we used to.

Just tonight I had a dream about having another child, a daughter this time. When I awoke on the middle of the night, I looked over at Katrina, and smiled as I watched her sleep. That's about the time my son came into the room.

"Daddy..." He groaned, still half-asleep. "What's wrong, sweetheart?" I said to him. He opened his arms up and I got out of bed, picking him up, laying him beside me. "I had a nightmare." He sniffled.

"Oh, nightmares aren't real. There's nothing to be afraid of." I told him this, knowing from a life of experience. "What was the nightmare?" He wiped his eyes and looked up at me.

"I saw a scary man, and he didn't have a face."