Author: KI Simpson
Year: Unknown
Well, I had to get rid of that computer I watched the episode on. Even after a complete reformat, it never worked quite right again. The episode couldn't be deleted from it, and it kept opening on its own. I wiped the hard drive clean several times, but the episode wouldn't go away. The sound control stopped working and even though it was a laptop, the power never seemed to run out and the shut down command never did anything. I was going to kep the computer just so I'd have a copy of the episode, but looking at it made me nervous. I had a recurring nightmare several nights in a row: the episode was playing, but instead of the photo-realistic Bart corpse, it was myself at 10 years old. I found a picture of myself at 10 and the nightmare was closer to it than my own memory had been. I swear...that picture of myself at 10, dead, started flashing on the computer screen so quickly that I could never be sure if it was real. After that, I destroyed the computer.
I haven't been able to get the episode out of my head, though, and decided to do more research to try and understand it. I found a few people online who seemed to know about it. Apparently, the episode aired once in a suburb of Portland, Oregon. I have a cousin who was watching the Simpsons during the first season and lived around there at the time, so I asked him if he remembered the episode. He asked me how I knew about it, and told me it was a nightmare he had that he had only told his parents about (I was only a few years old at the time). I told him about the episode I saw and the people online who remembered it. He thought I was just playing a prank on him. When I got him to look at the online posts about it, he screamed and hung up. He hasn't responded to any attempts I've made to contact him since.
Determined to get to the bottom of this, I kept searching online. I found someone who said they had a tape of it they would sell to me. I was nervous, but determined to find out the truth about this and end the matter. I bought the tape as well as a really old, cheap TV/VCR, since I had a feeling neither would be the same after I watched the episode on it.
The episode was pretty much identical to the file I downloaded. I don't want to say anymore. This wasn't worth it and I'd give anything to go back to how I felt when I had the computer with the file scaring me. I destroyed the tape, but it didn't help. The commercials on the tape...I don't want to remember them. There were monsters from my dreams I never told anyone about, news promos about tragedies that hadn't happened, even urreal computer generated animations that wouldn't have been possible in the 80s (or now, for that matter). A former friend watched it with me, but saw completely different things, with one exception. There was a seemingly live news report from June 6, 2013. In complete monotone, he recited the details of millions of people having died in their sleep, some of them waking for a few seconds first and rambling incoherently about something people could only piece together had something to do with nightmares. I'm....pretty sure you can figure out now what date was on the tombstones in that episode. There was one difference in the episode itself, though. The "joke" Homer told was completely audible and clear in this version. When it zooms in on Homer's face, while he's looking at Bart, he says:
"If only we all were that lucky."
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