Sleep Paralysis
03 July 2002 2:11 AM
I suffered from the worst instance of sleep paralysis yesterday evening while waking up from a horrifying dream.
I’ve forgotten most of the details of that dream, other than its setting which looked like a future (I shan’t say “the”): flying vehicles circling round a reddish planet (possibly Mars?); surreal food canteens invaded by a rust-coloured fog. The dream also involved some grotesque murders that took place chain-letter style. Something to the likes of “if I don’t do this to you I will be killed”. During the most terrible part of the dream, I suddenly woke up. But I didn’t wake to the warm sunlight drenched room I was familiar with. It was the void that I had visited only several times in my life.
For those moments, the only thing that existed in that darkness was my mind which was desperately telling myself not to panic. Sleep paralysis was something I had experienced several times from the year that I entered college till now.
During my first experience with sleep paralysis, I must have been free falling in the dream as I felt completely weightless. Suddenly I stopped falling and instead felt this pressure on my body that somehow paralysed me. I was completely shaken that first time and woke up screaming. The second time was a little more surreal as I was imagining myself to be in the room I was in even though I was asleep. I was lying on my bed when I ‘heard’ the sound of footsteps of something dashing towards me. That thing pressed me down so I couldn’t move. I wanted to scream and in my mind I opened my mouth to do so yet not a word came out. Like any normal person, I felt as though I was suffering from spirit oppression. As I talked to my mother about this, I was shocked to find out that she also suffered from the same thing as a teenager. I wanted to find out more so I checked out the Internet search engines, typing the words “sleep” and “paralysis”. It turned out that it was actually a medical condition and one of its causes was sleep deprivation, something not unfamiliar to me. So I learned to overcome my fear of sleep paralysis. Each time it overwhelmed me, I kept calm while forcing my body to awaken from its paralysed state. And I would always wake up within a minute or so.
Yesterday, however, was different. In my dream I failed to fulfil that chain-letter system so I was running away from whatever would kill me. In those last moments, I was very close to being attacked. All of a sudden, everything became dark and I couldn’t move. This lasted five minutes, longer than anything I had experienced. As I began to panic, my head began to weigh like lead. The darkness became a kaleidoscope of colours and there was a storm of demonic laughters. I was crying in my mind, praying that I would wake up. Unexpectedly, and to my relief, the madness stopped and I awoke. My body still felt a little numb and my feet had this light tingle one normally experiences when falling asleep. I scrambled out of bed as soon as I could, not wanting to, by accident, descend into that nightmare again.
