Just to give you some context, I have a health condition called AS (if you know, you know) that causes a lot of lower back pain while I sleep. I often wake up in pain, sometimes with sore legs like I’ve been walking all night. It usually takes me about ten minutes and a hot shower to start feeling better. My case is fortunately pretty mild, but one unexpected side effect is that I get bad dreams a lot, sometimes full-on nightmares, as my brain tries to process the pain.

Last night the pain was pretty bad. It woke me up around 5 am. I got up, moved around a bit, and tried desperately to fall back asleep, even though I knew from experience that it would probably trigger bad dreams. Sure enough, I had a nightmare.

At first it was nothing special, just me walking around in a dark space. Then I saw the back of someone I thought was a friend who had died young from cancer. I reached out to touch his shoulder and immediately realized it wasn’t him.

The creature spun around violently and wrapped its arms around me. I could feel its hands turning into something like the sharp front legs of an insect, trying to stab me in the back as I struggled to break free. The overwhelming fear was that it was trying to infect me with some kind of virus or pathogens. Just as I was pulling away, I woke up. I noticed when I woke up that I was sleeping on my belly and my chest was pressing down on my right hand.

This nightmare has bothered me the whole day. I am just hoping I can somehow make piece with it by visualizing it in AI.

I use AI to create a video to represent the short nightmare I had last night