What is the strangest thing you've ever experienced?, page 36

It's been awhile since I posted on ATS, though I have been lurking and keeping up with the various topics that interest me. I keep coming back to this post, and I've finally decided to add my two cents (or three, since that's the number of stories I have for you guys).

The first incident I want to talk about began when I was much younger and only just became truly strange within the last week.

When I was younger, I experienced regular night terrors that persist to this day, though they happen much less often.

I was about six or seven on the night in question. My bedroom was situated so that the bed was against the wall and directly across from the closet, which was next to the door. I was lying in bed asleep and woke to see that my closet door was completely open. That in itself wasn't strange.

It was what was standing in the closet staring at me that made me start screaming.

In the middle of the closet, standing completely still, was an enormous light brown dog with black eyes. It didn't move at all - it just kept looking at me even though I was shrieking hysterically.

My parents, apparently, didn't hear me, since I lay there screaming for what felt like hours (though in reality was probably less than a minute) and I heard absolutely no response from them. I eventually vaulted out of the bed, bolted past the closet and out my bedroom door and made a beeline for the kitchen, where I grabbed the biggest knife I could find.

The next thing I remember is waking up in my bed the next morning. I wrote the experience off as another bad nightmare (again, I had a ton of them when I was younger) until I heard my parents talking in the living room. They were trying to figure out who left the bread knife on the couch the night before.

Here is where the story really gets strange.

Ever since that experience, I have always made it a point to make sure the closet door is completely closed before I go to sleep. My husband teases me about it, saying that I'm a little old to be afraid of the bogeyman, but I'm still very adamant about it.

About a week ago I arrived home in the wee hours of the morning. A recent combination of several family emergencies, work, and trying to finish my last semester of college has me arriving home much later than normal, and by the time I do get home I'm so exhausted that I just fall into bed. My husband, who works in a town an hour away, had to work the morning shift so he had stayed the night with a friend who lives near his job.

And, of course, the one night I forgot to check the closet door was the one night it was left open.

After about an hour of sleep, I woke suddenly and, without knowing exactly why, I looked toward the open closet.

Staring at me from inside was the same tawny, black-eyed dog.

Instead of freaking out, though, I felt a wave of relief and bemusement. The dog looking back at me was my two-year-old Great Dane, Duke. Duke is fawn-colored, with sandy brown fur and very distinct black markings around his eyes. These markings make his eyes, which are actually a very dark shade of brown, look black. Duke is a creature of habit and I had folded his favorite blanket and put it in the bottom of the closet earlier that day. Apparently he was having trouble sleeping and was hunting down his blanket.

I don't have an explanation for why a dog so similar to Duke was the subject of my night terror roughly fifteen years ago. I might just be imagining the similarities between Duke and my terror-dog; it's just very, very strange.

I'm almost out of space, so I'll talk about the others in another post.