I awoke into a sentient… corpse.
That’s what I was. Still capable of feeling – but totally cold. Paralyzed. Dread flooded my essense – and for good reason. Because when I opened my eyes, a vast, shadowy creature with ebony eyes, an impossibly massive maw packed with stalactite teeth, and a face like an alien cat… was mere millimeters from my own. Staring into my soul. I felt its breath.
Slowly, it grinned at me.
And it unhinged its jaw like a snake. And it breathed this indescribable blast of heat straight from hell into my essence that stilled the breath in my lungs, all logic in my brain, and I’m pretty sure – my life, for at least a moment.
I’ve never forgotten that night.
And, no, this terrible but true anecdote isn’t a documentation of me slowly losing my mind (I failed to journal the day I went insane #sorryboutit). And, no, it’s not an excerpt from the Valium Withdrawal Diaries. It’s also not a scene I’m writing for the next installment of “Jeepers Creepers”. It’s something real that I had the misfortune of enduring a few years ago – and that many others do too – called “Sleep Paralysis”. Though at the time I was pretty sure I’d just had my soul eaten by a manservant to the fuhrer of the Fireworld beneath our feet, I’d come to be comforted the same way I do when anything ever ails me: by self-diagnosing myself via Dr. Google.
Granted, self-diagnosis generally induces more worry than calm, but in this case it helped a great deal.
Especially when I kept seeing other folk from eras past to present painting my same experience in vivid detail:
So, what is this mysterious horror that potentially awaits you each night?
Basically, sleep paralysis is this thing that sometimes happens as you’re falling asleep (hypnagogic) or waking up (hypnapompic) and your body’s muscles are still in that no-move mode you get while snoozing. But because you’ve managed to slip into that rare state where you’re aware but immobile, you A.) can’t move and B.) are more likely to experience hallucinations since you’re between awake and dream worlds. In fact, I’ve heard of people accidentally happening onto this while trying to lucid dream – which keeps me from trying to pack my pillowcase luggage for an astral travel trip too much anymore. You try having one of those gargoyles from above alight on your xyphoid process, steal all your oxygen, and then tell me you’re not at least a bit apprehensive.
Actually (and this isn’t a stab at the artists – because I’m pretty sure they’d agree), trying to render the experience on a canvas does the abject petrification of the actual experience a terrible injustice. And that’s because of things like logic and reality and how they clash with what’s happening during SP. Freddy Krueger and Jason HockeyMask are all fun, fine, and dandy for what reason? Because they’re not real. You can eat popcorn while you watch them decimate a camp full of promiscuous teens because it’s not happening to you and you know there’s a portly boom operator with a serious case of plumber crack and Cheeto stains just out of frame. So let’s try a thought experiment to give you a better appreciation. I want you to imagine yourself laying in bed. What’s your bed look like? How does it feel? So, there you are in the same bed you always sleep in, breathing through your face holes and waiting for sleep to consume you. You’re looking at that lamp you borrowed from your parents’ house (because you javelined yours across the wall while on a hold line- yours broke). You’re seeing the blue glow of your laptop in your peripheral vision (which is definitely real because you always forget to turn it off). This is no dream. This is fleshy, actual you in bed, on earth, floating in infinity. Then, all the sudden, your breathing goes shallow. You can’t move. The world has a filter across it. As your eyes adjust to this new view, you make the terrible realization that something is hovering over you. Then it slowly descends, pinning you to the sheets, and you feel its weight around you on the bed. Your breath is gone. You feel its heat before you see it. Then, when you do see it, you don’t even have the wherewithal to say “this can’t be real – these are things that visit Sigourney Weaver as she floats around the black abyss in a martian riddled craft – not me!” Because each five or your senses are loudly confirming otherwise. Have you ever experienced the combination of complete horror and hopelessness at the same time? Because now that’s the only thing you can feel. And you’re pretty sure it’ll be the last living emotion you ever have. Launching you into panic mode. It’s over. This is the way you die. With your spirit serving as dental floss for Legion.
Except that probably won’t, ya know, happen. At all.
Hopefully (shortly before or after your story turns into how mine at the start of this did), you wake out of this lucid nightmare, gasping – but still alive. The good news? That you probably, almost certainly, most likely will survive this unpleasant event, totally intact, and just a bit convinced that mayhaps you’ve had a close encounter of the four-hundredth kind. The exception? If you freak out to the level where you give yourself a heart attack. (But what a shizzy way to go – especially if you didn’t realize it was fake.)
“Actually, Pete, I’m sorta surprised I’m here since dude from the basement sent his henchman to eat my soul and all.”
“Hah! Hypna-GOT you! That’s our little joke here. Come inside. There’s free cookies. And hookers.”
So, what do you do to fix it?
You guessed it. Make an appointment with your primary doc and be ready for him to either prescribe you some kinda drug that’ll help put more dough in his drawz. Or (if you’ve got a good one), mayhaps he’ll send you to one of those sleep specialists who can actually fix the underlying issue instead of addressing the symptoms of it. However, you could avoid all of that. The issue might be so simple you’re overlooking it. For example, if you know you’re not doing all the proper sleep prep stuff you’re meant to be doing (seven hours a night, avoiding caffeine or blue light after dark, railing amphetamines between evening prayers… ya know, the usual), then fix that first. Sometimes when we’re super-stuck on a habit, it’s easy to deceive ourselves into thinking what we’re doing wrong can’t possibly be the problem. And for me personally, that intrinsic demon’s almost scarier than being awoken by an external soul eating one. Almost.
On that note: Sweet dreams!
Hopefully one’s that don’t culminate in you being some succubus’ supper.