Archive MT-407 · Epistolary horror

I Have Decided Not to Sleep

Every night at 3:14 a.m., something happens while he sleeps.

Published 30 October 2026

Every night at 3:14 a.m., something happens while he sleeps.

It begins with a dream.

The same bedroom. The same staircase. The same kitchen cupboard, standing four inches open.

Every night, he closes it.

Every morning, he wakes.

Until one morning, the cupboard is open in real life.

At first, the explanation seems obvious. Sleepwalking. Stress. An overactive imagination. But when he installs cameras to find out what he's doing at night, the recordings reveal something he cannot explain.

He isn't walking in his sleep.

He's still in bed.

And someone who looks exactly like him is moving around the house.

As the nights pass, the evidence becomes harder to dismiss. Footsteps in empty rooms. Messages written in his own handwriting. Recordings that contradict his memories. And something waiting in the darkness beneath his bed.

Desperate for answers, he begins keeping a diary, documenting every missing minute, every impossible recording, and every increasingly frantic attempt to stay awake.

Because he's beginning to understand something terrible.

When he falls asleep, something else gets up.

And when morning comes, there's no way of knowing which one went back to bed.

I Have Decided Not to Sleep is a slow-burning psychological horror novel told through increasingly disturbing diary entries, blending sleep deprivation, found-footage terror, doppelgänger horror, and the creeping uncertainty of an unreliable narrator.

Perfect for readers who love unsettling found-document fiction, domestic horror, and stories that make the familiar feel terrifying.

You have to sleep eventually.

The question is who wakes up.