You know that feeling when you jolt awake from a nightmare? Your body floods with a blend of fear and relief. Perhaps your dream felt real enough that you reach over to your partner just to feel his chest rise, or you sneak into your child’s room to quietly kiss her cheek.
Nightmares are strange and unsettling and spooky. But at least we can feel reassured that when we wake, it’s over, and we can utter those same familiar words we tell our kids.
“It was just a dream.”
When I was 22, I awoke one night from a dreamless sleep. It was dark outside, but light from the moon allowed me to take in the shapes and shadows of my room. It only took a moment for me to realize something wasn’t right. The only thing I could do was see. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t scream. My body was paralyzed in the supine position.
The sensation of paralysis was upsetting enough, but what happened next was what truly terrified me. As I shifted my gaze toward the end of my bed, three figures, tall as men but without absolute shape or substance stood looming. They looked like shadows, but they weren’t. They took up space and stole the light. Within a second of me glancing in their direction they moved, not away, but towards me. I could feel the pressure on my mattress as they quickly crawled {creeped, slinked, slithered} up my bed toward my face. They stopped and towered over me, one at each shoulder and one sitting squarely on my chest.
At this point, I was screaming, except I couldn’t really. What came out of me was closer to a raspy, gasping groan. There was no volume, there was no alerting anyone to the silent shadowed offenders in my room. It was me versus three, the physical versus the supernatural. So, I did exactly what my mother taught me when I was a little girl; I started quoting scripture.
“The Lord is my Shephard. I shall not want. He makes me lie down in green pastures. He leads me beside still waters. He restores my soul. He guides me in paths of righteousness for His name sake. Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil…”
It was during that final statement, “I fear no evil”, that my voice returned and I regained movement and I sat up squarely in bed, still awake, but now in an empty room, entirely alone. The figures were gone and I ran to my door, flipped on the light and cried. The whole ordeal lasted just over a minute, but it was truly the most terrifying minute of my life.
I wish I could say that was the end of the story, but it wasn’t. The rest of the night I spent awake, lights on. For whatever reason, I couldn’t quite bring myself to look up the words “sleep paralysis” while it was still dark out. But in the light of the day, I mustered the courage to dig a little deeper into what exactly had happened.
I typed the words “sleep paralysis” into Google and the search populated several articles and one particular image that haunted me {FYI – I would not recommend looking up sleepy paralysis images if you are easily spooked}. It was an oil painting from 1781 aptly titled “The Nightmare” by Johann Heinrich Fussli, and its subject was a sleeping woman with none other than a demonic creature sitting on her chest.
I couldn’t read about sleep paralysis after that, at least not for several days. It really unsettled me that the first image I saw was a 200+ year old painting of some woman experiencing something nearly identical to what I had just experienced the night before. And as it turns out, hundreds, possibly even thousands of people have.
It’s common for people who experience sleep paralysis to report “visitations” from shadowy figures. It’s common to experience the pressure of someone {or something} sitting on your chest. It’s common to hear footsteps, to be choked, or to be subjected to any number of horrifying experiences. Scientific studies call these visions “hypnogogic hallucinations” and believe that it’s a sort of “waking dream” during which the mind wakes from the REM cycle, but the body lags behind. During REM, our bodies experience some level of paralysis so we don’t find ourselves acting out our dreams. It’s a safety mechanism. But what happens when we wake up and our bodies don’t? Sleep paralysis.
Luckily, there are ways to discourage this from happening. First and foremost – get healthy amounts of sleep. Statistically, people with disturbed waking/sleep cycles or with other sleeping disorders are more at risk of experiencing sleep paralysis. It also happens almost exclusively to people who sleep on their backs {which I don’t, anymore}, and people in their teens and 20s {which I’m not anymore}.
Science says the hallucination isn’t real. And, hey, I’m a logical person. I like science. So over time, I’ve convinced myself with those same 5 words I tell my children.
“It was just a dream”.
Except, I can’t help but wonder…what if it wasn’t?
