The indescribable feeling of fear overwhelmed me in the darkness surrounding my bed. My mind leapt out of its state of sleep as the most unpleasant sensation climbed rapidly from my toes to my head, it felt cold. I could see the blurry images of my furniture from the window light and there she sat on my chair, a dreadful terror. She wasn’t welcomed, but I had expected her arrival tonight, I had sensed it before tucking myself in. Whenever she let me feel that she would come by, she never failed to show up.
Sleep paralysis is what the experts have used to term this lady, Maxine described her as “the Sitting Ghost,” but I call her no name. I do know that she takes joy in frightening the very soul out of my body. It is easy to imagine the lips of her pale, ghostly face menacingly curl into a smirk to see me frozen in a pool of fear. This lady usually visits me when I sleep late at night, anywhere from 2am to 3am. My mother says I become an easy target during these silent hours, my spirit weak from fatigue.
This mean-spirited lady doesn’t even let me whisper for help nor does she allow me to move a finger, yet she cleverly allows my eyes to freely look at the room around me and heighten my fear when I see her vague figure sitting on a chair near my bed. Oh, how heavy my body becomes when she shows herself. I am filled with sand; it’s almost impossible move myself. I struggle to break free.
Sleep paralysis is experienced in the R.E.M. sleep stage, where the mind is as active as its awakened state; this is the type of sleep that we dream in. In R.E.M. stage, motor neurons, the neurons responsible for movement, are stilled. It is believed that the brain does this in order to stop one from acting out their dream and this is also what the experts say is the reason why I can’t move whenever the miserable lady comes around. In sleep paralysis, the mind becomes awakened in R.E.M. stage before motor neurons have become active, explaining how I can feel fear and think yet cannot move.
So here I am tonight, scared of her once again. This lady has commitment; she’ll come more than once a night when she does show herself. She’ll wake me once and announce her presence. She’ll wake me twice to let me know she wants to have her fun. She’ll wake me a third and let me see her in a blurry imagination, unclear, but so believable. I’d spend a night battling her, falling asleep instantly from strong fatigue after feeling a jolt of horror run through my numbed mind and repeating this for anywhere from three to ten times in a single night.
She has haunted me since I was a toddler, how can I just make her leave me for good? The lady that has always hidden herself in the back of my mind and loosened free through a crack of my closet or revealed her form in the midst of my darkened room, so how can I make her disappear? In a way, she is a part of me. I have grown up with her: she is my version of the childhood monster in the closet and she continues into my adolescence. My feelings of terror toward her have never changed. But it’s time it did.
I am so familiar to her, I have her figured out and I know what to predict from her. I’ve even done a major science project with the inspiration to know as much I can about her or what experts call it, sleep paralysis. How she looks, what she does to me, when she will come, I know everything I need to know about her. Yet, I still fear her for the amazing sensation of terror I experience she marks me with.
Is this all that I despise her for, for the feeling of fear? Fear is an emotion like no other; it lasts the longest and leaves its impression the strongest. But the truth is that my source of horror, this lady, isn’t “real.” She has no body, no voice, no breath, she is just the trick my mind plays on me. Armed with this obvious knowledge that I never fully grasped to my advantage until now, I must confront her like how Maxine had confronted “the Sitting Ghost.”
“Lady,” I will think as I look at her dim form. “You are not so scary after all, now that I’ve thought about it. You’re not even real, you are merely a pigment of my very playful imagination with the combination of sleepy hallucination and my room’s lack of illumination.”
All she could do in reply is send more chills up my spine and make me feel heavier. But the fact that she’s not real would keep my going with my insults, hurling them like stones at her in a conversation of the minds where no words are spoken, but only understood. My fear would dissolve as I mock her failure to be real. She would panic as I start to gain control over the game that always used to be in her hands.
“Choke me and keep me frozen in my bed as long as you want,” I’d think. “This doesn’t scare me anymore. I’m much too tired to deal with this. I have school tomorrow and friends to see. Lady, I’ll leave you to your attempts to frighten me, because it doesn’t bother me at anymore and you’re wasting my sleeping time.”
Without even bothering to struggle to break free from the paralysis, I would fall back asleep as though all that had awakened me was nothing but the sound of a passing car. She would attempt to wake me up one more time, pressing harder than usual. But by that time, I would be so unafraid of her that at this point, I’d be rather annoyed by this lady’s behavior.
“Go away, will you? You’re really getting on my nerves tonight, do you understand?” I would scold.
And just like that, she would flee from my room and out of the back of my mind that she had occupied for years of my life, never to frighten me ever again.
