Well, I had to get rid of that computer I watched the episode on. Even after a complete reformatting, it never worked correctly. I couldn't delete the episode file and it kept opening on its own. I wiped the hard drive clean several times; it wouldn't go away.
The sound control didn't work, either. It was a laptop, but the power never seemed to run out, and I couldn't get it to turn off. I was going to keep the computer just so I'd have a copy of the lost episode, but looking at it was making 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 ten years old. I found a picture of myself at ten and the nightmare was closer to it than my own memory had been. I swear... that picture of myself at ten, dead, started flashing on the computer screen so quickly that I could never be sure. 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 to understand it. I found a few people online who seemed to know about it; apparently, it aired once in a suburb of Portland, Oregon. I have a cousin who lives around there and was watching The Simpsons during the first season, so I asked him if he remembered the episode.
He asked me how I knew about it; it was a nightmare he had that he had only told his parents about, and I was just 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 playing a prank on him, and 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 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 and cheap TV/VCR, since I had a feeling neither would be the same after I watched the episode.
The episode was pretty much the same as 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 it... I don't want to remember them. There were monsters from my dreams I had never told anyone about, news promos about tragedies that hadn't happened yet, surreal computer-generated animation that wouldn't have been possible in the 80's — or now, for that matter.
A former friend watched it with me, but he saw completely different things, with one exception. There was a seemingly live news report from June 6th, 2013. In complete monotone, he recited the details of millions of people dying in their sleep, some of them waking up for a few seconds first, rambling incoherently about something that people could only piece together had something to do with nightmares.
I'm sure you can figure out what date was on the tombstones of the currently alive celebrities at the end of the episode.
There was one other difference, too. The "joke" Homer told was completely clear in this version. When it zooms in on Homer's face, while looking at Bart, he says:
"If only we all were that lucky."
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Credited to KI Simpson
Originally uploaded on October 10th, 2011