A Writer’s Book of Days (01/08) – What I Do In The Middle Of The Night

The middle of the night is slightly more unusual for me than it is for most people. I get something called sleep paralysis. In a nutshell, my conscious awakes, but my body is still in a sleeping state. Many people experience it at least once in their lifetime – you feel like you’re awake, but you’re frozen and can’t breathe (even though you’re really still breathing). Sometimes it comes with hallucinations, perhaps feeling a presence in the room with you (which partly explains incubus and succubus folklore), and often times a feeling of flying or body detachment.

I first started getting sleep paralysis when I was 12. I was home sick with a fever, napping on the living room couch. Suddenly, it felt like there was a vise on my head. I couldn’t breath or move. I struggled to scream out, but nothing was coming out of my mouth. Suddenly, I awoke. Grandma and Mom were in the room with me, but not reacting to what just happened to me. They couldn’t see from the outside what I had been feeling in the inside and dismissed it as a bad dream.

It would then happen once in a while – sometimes I’d feel like someone was in the room with me, but I couldn’t scream out to anyone to come and help me. When I finally snapped out of the state, it was obvious that no one had been in my room. As my teenage years progressed, they began happening on a more usual basis – sometimes as much as every other day. It worried Mom to the point I was shuffled to a neurologist. He suggested an MRI and sleep study since he couldn’t immediately pinpoint what I was feeling.

It was 1999, and we had finally just got our first computer and a subscription to America Online. So I started to Google (which wasn’t called Googling back then) to see if this new-fangled Internet had anything to say. Continue reading →