Since I was ten years old, I've been tormented by nightmares. My parents would hear me moaning and sometimes screaming in my sleep almost every night. Every few nights the same dream would appear in my mind: I'm standing in front of a statue of an insanely beautiful woman and suddenly the statue starts decomposing like a dead human body, but it happens in seconds.

About a year ago, when I was fourteen, my mother, a very superstitious person, decided to buy a dream catcher for me. It was a cheap souvenire with plastic beads and black feathers, and she placed it in my room, next to the window. For a few nights no screams nor moans had been heard from my room, and after this time the statue appeared again. This time it didn't decompose - it turned into a real woman with a body made out of stone, smiled at me and said "I will protect you from what comes next". Despite this ominous prophecy nothing else happened in this dream and I woke up happy. Both my parents praised the dream catcher and I was able to continue living, this time without fear.

The statue lady would still appear in my dreams from time to time. She would warn me, give me strange advices and often try to ensure me that she was on my side. It was weird but way better than having non-stop nightmares. Then, one day the nightmares came back; I found myself surrounded by fire that was getting closer and closer. Suddenly, the statue lady came from the sky and took me out of there, saving my life. "I promised" she said, disappearing into mist. The alarm went off about a second later, informing me that it was a time to go to school.

From this moment on, I'd have the strangest nightmares every night and the statue lady would always appear to save me from any horrors I was about to endure. With each next dream she would get more and more colours, slowly turning into a real human body instead of stone. Four days ago her change has been completed. She saved me from a psychotic murderer with a chainsaw and she asked me to call her "mother". I did that and she kissed my forehead. While she was leaning towards my head, I suddenly felt a rotten odour coming from her mouth. The person who leaned back was not my statue lady - it was her heavily decomposed corpse, the one I had been seeing in my older nightmares.

"Noone will take your sanity from me" she said. "You are mine to torment forever".

I woke up screaming and I saw a ghost or a somehow visible energy wave escaping my bed and flying to the window. It crushed the black dream catcher in half and got out, leaving me scared and crying. My mother's gift had been bringing nightmares upon me and my old nightmare had felt threatened, therefore it crushed the catcher. Now I am alone against the statue lady again and since that night I haven't fallen asleep. I feel as if I was slowly loosing my mind and I know that I'll eventually have to get some rest, hopefully before losing my mind. And when I fall asleep, the statue lady will put her rotten hands on me again.