In The Book of Nightmares, helplessness must often appear--how terrifying to be aware and immobilized, lying entombed below ground as the earth thuds on your wooden coffin roof, unable to speak or scream. Or to live in the diving bell where the world around you is all ocean and movement, but you cannot join in: shiny slips of fish quicksilvering past as sharks bare sharp teeth jagged as bright coral reefs beside the long undulations of seaweed. Or you are a hapless passenger in the plane falling fast as white terror through the sky, gray sliding through blue like a stone thrown into a well by an implacable god making a wish, and there’s nothing you can do to stop your long descent through that blue chute of water.
Sleep paralysis, which I developed in my mid-twenties, triggers the same kind of fears--enforced stasis amidst danger. Mine first arrived on the heels of a particularly devastating breakup. I ached for my ex-boyfriend. In his absence I felt both raw and empty, as if some inexplicably cruel stranger had sliced me open, reached a hand in, and yanked out my insides. I tried to win him back and failed. He no longer loved me and there was nothing I could do to change that. The life I wanted (to wake up every morning safe in the nest of his arms, marriage, children) had disappeared; my imagined future was like a tiny blue car I watched drive over the horizon, my ex-boyfriend laughing, some other woman in the shotgun seat where I used to ride, singing along to road trip music as she rolled down the window to let the cool wind tangle her hair.
I could not fall asleep most nights until 3 or 4, the nauseous nadir of the early morning. When I woke only hours later, it was frequently to the sight of a figure standing near the foot of my bed, a blur of shadows solidified into a form. It’s hard to describe how powerless I felt, or how distant from my own body. It felt like my self, the person I really am, was a lab mouse flinging itself against the plastic box it lived in. Even my vocal cords were stone-still: I couldn’t make a sound. The presence never did anything--it didn’t move or speak. Instead, it just watched me struggle. Eventually, my eyes would blink out of focus and then back in, and the figure would dissolve into the room’s regular shadows. My body would again begin to obey my commands and I’d get up and pad barefoot to the kitchen to brew coffee as if it were any ordinary morning.
Read more The Dark Thing Beside You: Night Hags and Sleep Paralysis at The Toast.
