I have a fairly common sleep disorder called sleep paralysis. Standford’s Sleep and Dreams website has a fairly good explanation of the science behind it, and is even sensitive enough to throw out words like “terror” and “panic” in its fairly clinical description of the process. It falls short.
Most descriptions and stories I read describing this focus on the hallucinations, but not what it does to you after, so I’ll try to capture that here. I hate starting a piece by commanding a reader to “imagine” anything and generally the use of the second person in essays without a designated reader, but it is currently five AM and I cannot think of an alternative way of setting this up. Maybe later I’ll come back and change it to another perspective, but probably not.
Imagine you are in bed, eyes closed, ready for sleep to come and gently take you. You’re thinking about the day you just had and the day you will have tomorrow. At some point, you fall asleep, but the only indication of this is that your thinking becomes a little fuzzy and unfocused. You’re still aware of everything real: the feel of your pillow as it slowly warms beneath your face; the breathing and shifting of the lover next to you; the TV program turned down low, and though you can no longer really follow the plot, you can recognize the voices of familiar cartoon characters; the ceiling fan blowing on you; the snoring cat making your right foot too warm.
The distress starts benignly enough. You wish that you could shift your head a little to a cooler part of your pillow, or maybe even move your right foot from under the cat and into the cool breeze of the fan. But you can’t; you’re asleep after all and can’t move voluntarily.
Then your cat shifts, walks up your body and lays on your chest, as cats do at inappropriate times. You think that this should have woken you up enough to be able to move, but it doesn’t. Your cat starts to bite your face. You still can’t move. You try as hard as you can to speak, because of all parts of you, your tongue feels the least locked in place. You call to your lover’s name, or say help me, or whimper, or at least you think you do, but you can’t be sure because it doesn’t quite feel the same as real talking. You lover reaches out to comfort you, but what he/she says doesn’t make sense. “Apples or Oranges? Apples or Oranges? Apples or Oranges?” He/she starts to pinch your arm because you can’t answer his/her question. You’re clearly dreaming now, but you can feel your lover pinching you and the cat biting your face as clearly as you can feel real things: the now hot pillow, the fan, the bunched sheet under your arm. You fight to move, to scream. It hurts the way it hurts when you try to lift something far too heavy.
All at once, it happens. It makes a small noise like a rubber band snapping. You pulled yourself awake, and reality becomes a solid thing around you because you can once more move through it, manipulate it. The cat is irritated because you jerked your foot when you woke. Your lover was just barely touching your arm, but shifts away, still asleep because he/she is now used to your spaz -attacks in your sleep.
You get a glass of water because you can. Your arm still hurts where your lover pinched you, you check your face for scratches you can still feel.
You shake it off and go back to bed. It’s been about forty five minutes since you first fell asleep.
The next time, you see your door opening out of the corner of your eye. You think you hear someone crawling in. You’re pretty sure that nothing just crawled into your bedroom in the middle of the night, but you can’t be sure until you turn your goddamned head and look. But you can’t move. And so on. It can happen once or a dozen times a night.
When you panic, you don’t think clearly, so you hyperventilate to get extra oxygen to the brain. While not a truly comfortable sensation, you take for granted how much this really helps. Except you can’t do this when you’re asleep. You breathe like everyone does when asleep—slow and shallow, like nothing at all is wrong. The sensation is like being hugged too tightly from behind. This is the real reason why you can’t let your lover spoon you. You don’t want to dream, twenty minutes later, that he/she is unknowingly squeezing you to death.
Each time you pull yourself out of sleep it gets harder because it’s exhausting. Each time you lay down, forcing yourself to be voluntarily still, you’re more tired that the last. In the early morning you wake your lover because you can’t help it. The next morning you can’t remember which parts of that conversation were real.
The worse part about sleep paralysis is not the nightmare. The worst part is that each time, no matter how many times it happens in a night, you can’t distinguish the real sensations from the dreamed ones. Is something crawling on your hand or not? Once I wasn’t convinced a spider was real until it was still there when I got up to go to the bathroom. The pinching and the scratching are indistinguishable from real sensations because the nerves are actually firing, a side effect of the chemical imbalance that causes the disorder. The subconscious gives shows you an explanation for this sensation with a convincing hallucination. My subconscious is a cruel, but creative, freak.
It’s now 6:45. I think I’m going to go make myself a bacon and egg sandwich. It’s not on my diet, but I’m too exhausted to fight my subconscious anymore and I fucking deserve it.
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