Stress Hauntings

So I rally should be working on my finals, but I can’t help but feel the need to document what’s been happening to me (mostly for writing and posterities sake).
Things have been stressful to say the least. Which is always true, but lately it’s been 20 time worse what it normally is.
Most of you who know me know that I have nightmares off and on and always have. As i’ve gotten older I don’t mind the classic nightmares so much, they even occasionally lead to good story ideas.
But the past month I’ve had two separate cases of Sleep Paralysis.
Apparently during REM sleep your brain sends out a message to your body to keep it from moving so that you don’t injure yourself. Sleep paralysis occurs when you wake from REM suddenly but your body is still in full paralysis.
Often times your brain is still dreaming, but your also somehow awake and unable to move.

Seep paralysis is the basis for a lot of ghost, alien, and demon beliefs. Once you’ve gone through it you can understand why. The first time I thought I was dying, literally. I had Mike Doughty’s “Grey Ghost” stuck in my head, which is about Jeff Buckley’s overdose on heroin, and I thought there was someone sitting on the edge of my bed as I died of an overdose. I struggled to scream and I couldn’t.
The second time was just sheer terror at the fact it was happening again. I was so scared for no reason. I could hear people outside my room and I kept trying to roll myself off the bed and crawl out to beg for help. The closest I got was being able to twitch my hand and when I did I could tell that the cat was there, which would calm me down because she wasn’t part of the hallucination so I’d realize I was dreaming and be okay for a few minutes. Sure enough though I would drift back into the hallucination and it would start all over again until I could feel the soft fur of the sleeping cat by my side.
I’m actually having a minor anxiety attack typing this. It’s made sleeping so much more difficult, because I have this added level of anxiety about it happening again.
Sleep paralysis is remarkably common, over the course of a lifetime more people than not will experience it once. It can be due to stress, bipolar phase shifts, excessive drinking, sleeping on your back, etc.
What’s amazing is while I’m totally terrified of having it happen again, I also completely want to capture that feeling in a way in my writing.
Hands down it was the scariest thing that have ever happened to me. Scarier than any nightmare or breaking into a haunted house.
So while 90% of me is terrified it’ll happen again, 10 % is terrified it won’t because being in that in between was like being in the space after you finish an intense round of yoga or meditation. It was like doing too many opiates. It was like touching something that you aren’t supposed to touch and knowing that that space is what all mystics and madmen spend their lives searching for.
I feel like if I could find it again and not be scared, it might be different . . .

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