Sometimes I suffer from sleep paralysis. Sometimes I can sense it coming on. That's how it was last night. Before it happened I was already having nightmares. Strange and unsettling dreams swam in the deep of my skull. Repeatedly I woke and felt there had been some intrusion through the window, but each time I turned to it everything appeared fine. I found it shut, unbroken, undisturbed. Tossing and turning in my bed, sweating, an unrelenting heartburn slowly cooking my esophagus, I could almost feel myself talking in my sleep. Around 1:00 I got up and crept to the bathroom. I left the light off and pissed in the dark, like a bat, because I didn't want to ruin my chances of returning to sleep by depriving my body of melatonin. When I got back in bed I couldn't get comfortable. From the apartment downstairs I heard a faint conversation, an old man mumbling. Outside it was quiet. Maybe a car passed. Soon sleep started to take me and for a second I thought I heard footsteps on the roof. Then my body was sinking into my mattress. Into that infinite ocean of rip-tide unconsciousness. This time though, something happened and made the transition incomplete. I was sleeping with one eye open. I could see my window.
Thoughts came to me, of someone lowering themselves down the metal fire escape, of staring at me through the glass while I slept, of trying to get in. My shadowy eyes looked toward the window and all I saw was fog. A sensation of loosening and I was back in a dream. Then there was blackness. I sensed something moving in my kitchen. Could someone have come through the side door? Did I leave it unlocked? No, I hadn't even opened it. My body turned away from the window, toward the kitchen, but it did so sleepily, slowly, with tremendous exertion. Just as my periphery caught the edge of my doorframe I saw a man moving in the darkness. A rushing shadow came at me and I tried to yell out but my sleeping body was still. It leapt onto me and pressed me down. I tried to wrestle against it but it was useless. My muscles wouldn't move. I felt like the soul of a mute scream; raw fear and fury, a howl without a mouth; game pheasant caught in the teeth of a ghost hound.
I don't know how long I struggled to break free and wake, but eventually I did. Every time it happens it's difficult to fall asleep after. The sweat on my skin feels haunted. The whole room hums with an eerie paranormal residue.
I don't think they yet understand sleep paralysis. They don't even fully understand sleep, or the brain. So how could they understand this? What I hate most is the abject helplessness and the terror of it all. How it hits you like lightning. That's not true actually; the terror rolls in like approaching thunder, not lightning. Thunder is scarier - because you can't see it. Thunder gives you time to think about the lightning, and of what it could do. It extorts your imagination, browbeats your bravery. Yeah, the helplessness is lightning. It makes your body rigid and immobile, a conduit for the fits of frightened electricity leaping down your spine out into your nerves.
Nightmare. What a word. You can hear it galloping toward you in the dark. The approaching spectre of an unexpected enemy cavalry. Unkillable and inescapable; something which cannot be overcome. A bad dream.
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