sleep_paralysis kerry i'd heard of this, but only from people who also have night terrors. people whose trauma is more visible and raw than mine, people who i know walk around screaming internally, and the way they talk is puppet-like. they're standing in front of me but they're actually somewhere else. during a REM cycle our body shuts down, turns off our muscles so we don't act out our dreams. usually this atonia subsides before we fully wake up. i imagine being curled up in the darkness of a deep lake where dreams live, then slowly rising towards the surface, where i open my eyes, still seeing the ghosts of those dreams. but sometimes things are a little out of sync. i think i was out of sync for several days--i shoved all my doubts and anxieties and anger and fear and impatience down inside me, packing it tight, like the desperate act of stuffing rumpled clothes into a suitcase that's too small. i was pinned to the bed, on my back, and a man dressed in black stood beside my bed. he was tall, and he watched me struggle for breath. i thought i was suffocating. i thought i'd die right there. then he finally drifted away, i took a deep breath, inhaling the silence of my childhood bedroom. i forced myself to stay awake for a few moments--perhaps he hadn't really left, perhaps he was crouching on the floor or just outside my room, waiting for me to slide back into unconsciousness. taking quick shallow breaths, straining to hear any sound--a scared rabbit. once i felt sure the man was gone i sank back into the mattress, exhausted. 240111 ... raze as long as i can remember, i've always been a stomach or side sleeper. i was only ever able to fall asleep on my back twice. one morning, after slipping out of a dream about an old metal chair and a guitar with spun metal cones sewn into its stomach, i heard something that sounded like a demonic voice. i could sense it was trying to tell me something, but whatever language it was speaking wouldn't come into focus. a few days after that, i tore my mind from a nightmare in which every garden hose i saw was a snake. what i heard then was closer to pure noise. more like a chainsaw than anything slouching toward speech. both times, i couldn't move. the more i struggled, the louder the sound grew, until i was sure it would devour me. not being able to see anything that explained what i was hearing made it worse somehow. i made sure never to sleep on my back again after that. 240111 ... epitome of incomprehensibility I used to get this for a while one summer when I was a teenager, especially when I slept in too long: I'd feel frozen and when I opened my eyes, or thought I did, I couldn't keep them open long enough to move my focus. They would close again and the afterimage of light would stay - still, fading. The first time or couple of times this frightened me. Then it frustrated me, all the waiting to be able to move. I imagined I could get out of it sooner by making an effort to open my eyes, bright still images and all. When the experience faded, I still associated it with sleeping in and the light of summer morning. Did it stop me from sleeping in on summer mornings? No, but it remained as a vague warning against inactivity: "You want to stay put? I'll give you staying put!" ...though at times staying put and waiting is the best thing to do in waking life too. 240111 ... e_o_i (reading your experiences, it seems I got off lightly - no assaults of visual or auditory nightmare, just being stuck between sleeping and waking) 240111 ... kerry (e_o_i, i’ve now heard of people who get sleep paralysis but don’t find it distressing! i think that’s a good thing. hopefully if it ever happens again i’ll remember what’s going on—a disruption in sleep cycle! maybe it’ll even be an interesting experience.) 240112 ... e_o_i (It WAS scary at first, but less so than it could have been because there were no nightmares attached. That part just seems super creepy. As for creepy sensations, I still get this thing sometimes that isn't sleep paralysis but another disconcerting nerve illusion: waking up and feeling like something is creepy-crawling across my back. And it *has* to happen in the middle of the night, apparently.) 240113 ... e_o_i edit: "a" disconcerting nerve illusion, not "another" 240113 what's it to you? who go blather from