Sleep Paralysis

Sometimes do you feel like you have been roaming around in this completely different world of myth and fact? A feeling that you have been hanging on to the dividing line between the realm of the present and the past? Well, I don’t really know about you but I sure have experienced something like that in my life.

So, I am the kind of person who has been living alone in a quite lonely environment since I was little child. Yes, I did have house workers around but they were usually busy working. Till I was thirteen, I had a few of them living with me in the house at night and my grand ma used to be around too for a long time. After a few months, however, my mother said that I did not need anyone to stay at home at night with me since I was grown up enough to sleep alone in the house. Firstly, I was alright with the fact because it really did not make a big difference whether they were around or not and secondly, I had become quite used to my parents’ strictness.

The first few days of living alone at night, it felt lonelier than before but it was quite okay because by now, I had experienced different levels of loneliness and this was just an advancement in those levels. Although, nothing was wrong in the house, something still was. I still don’t know how to explain the feeling. Now, my house was no palace with a hundred rooms in it but it was decently big of a bungalow.

This one night, after reading a book about Roman History, I went to the bathroom to get ready to sleep. The moment I lifted my face up after washing it, I started to feel extremely dizzy and it felt like someone had just pricked my index finger with a fine needle. That night, I hadn’t even smoked so it was very strange to feel this dizzy. Although my finger was absolutely numb at this point and I was having the worst migraine of my life, I shoved everything off by telling myself that I was just very tired and that I needed to sleep.

The same night, I woke up with this strange feeling, or not. Honestly, I wasn’t even sure if I was awake or in my sleep. Whatever it was, I woke up and you wouldn’t believe it but I saw the most horrible creature I had ever seen. Going back, I opened my eyes to someone or something sitting on top my chest. Yes, SOMEONE SITTING OVER MY CHEST. I was terrified. I tried to remove my blanket from over my body but I couldn’t. I couldn’t fucking move my body! My entire body felt like someone had tied it up and it was so stuck up, I couldn’t even feel it. The only thing I could do was move my neck and eyes. The bravest thing I was doing was trying to not look at whatever that thing was. I took advantage of what I was capable of doing and I check the clock beside my bed. It was around two in the morning. I looked back and my eyes met with that creature and I couldn’t take them off of her gaze once they fixated on her. I had never ever in my life been so afraid of anything this bad.

The creature, it was a woman. She was wearing a pale-yellow dress which matched with her skin colour. She did and did not look like the ghosts from movies. Her hair was thick and open which were covering her weirdly beautiful hazel coloured eye on the left. They weren’t in a creepy way, it felt like naturally falling locks. Her face seemed like that of a person who was beautiful at one point of time but had some kind of a sickness which made her look frail and brittle, the kind with sharp undereye bags and sucked in cheeks. Her hands which I could feel on my chest felt extremely cold and I could make out by its contrast, a huge cut on her forearm. When I looked back at her, I saw her smiling at me, her eyes not even moving or blinking once. She remained in the same position for as long as I could remember. She held that smile and her body was frozen, in absolutely the same way as before. I was incapable of doing anything, I couldn’t move or think or see clearly so I just decided to close my eyes and think of it as a horrible, horrible dream.

The next morning when I opened my eyes, the first thing I saw was my now empty chest and the fact that I could apparently move and get out of bed relieved me on so many levels. I still felt a little dizzy but the numbness of my finger had gone away. I checked the clock, it was six in the morning, so I hadn’t overslept. I was so shaken and scared by the events of last night that I couldn’t get myself up to go to school. At the same time, I couldn’t get out the image of the woman from inside my head. It was fucking stuck. So, I decided that I’d go anyway cause it was better to be around people than in this house.

I still get goosebumps as I write this. I met her a couple of times afterwards too but I believe by then she had become a regular guest or “ghost”, whatever you’d like to call it. And every single time, she made my entire body numb and held the exact same smile and stare at me. I never in my life can forget her scary, yet brooding eyes. I felt like I sympathised with her silence and dejectedness, but who was I to believe? The dream or the reality? I sure as hell knew that it wasn’t a dream since as far  my memory goes, I never dreamt even as a little child. Yes, sometimes I had violent dreams, but other than that I never had dreams about princesses or fairies or birds. The only time I could have a dream, it was about a creepy woman sitting on top of me. Sucking in every ounce of sanity I had. Also, you don’t dream the same dream twice, do you?

That was the time from when I stopped sleeping. I don’t really know if she caused me any harm, but she did take my sleep away with her, she showered a bit of her misery on me. Her remembrance still haunts me till the core. Now I worship the night and the darkness, I made them my shield in life, so that there’s no next time for her to come and take away a piece of me.

Call it whatever you want to call it, just a bad dream, just a recurring hallucination, a ghost; I like to call it my sleep paralysis.