Since it's the season for creepy tales, I thought I'd share one about the time I experienced what I'm pretty certain was sleep paralysis. It happened when I lived in Alaska in the yurt and worked nights on the slope. I was sleep deprived, working nights and with the weird hours of sunlight and darkness messing with my sleep schedule even further. Apparantly that makes you more prone to it. I think it was set off that day because I was alone watching The Fourth Kind before I fell asleep on the couch in the loft. The Fourth Kind is a creepy movie about alien abductions in Alaska if you aren't familiar with it.
So I started to drift off. I felt that sleep heaviness where you can't lift your eyelids and you start to lose track of your body and you feel so relaxed. But then it changed. I started to feel tingly, sort of numb and dizzy almost. I could feel my whole body, I was aware of everything, how my hands felt and where my toes were, but I couldn't move anything. Then it felt like my head was this stationary point and everything else was orbiting around it. My head felt still but my body felt like it was continually spinning around and around, faster and faster, making sharp changes in direction and speed. My head was the pivot point. It wasn't scary yet, just disorienting and uncomfortable. Then that feeling slowed and I could feel where I was laying. It felt like my body floated back down to the couch. And I could see again. I knew my eyes were closed, but I also knew I could see my living room again, the real room, not a dream space.
Then this little pinprick of light started to appear to the left of the tv. Right above the corner. I can still picture it. It started to grow slowly. It was silver and shiny and as it started to grow, I could see it spinning, like a mini little galaxy. At first it didn't make me feel anything but curious. But then it started to make this noise I've never heard before or since. It sounded metallic. That's the only way I can describe it, it sounded like metal tastes. A completely foreign thing. And that's when I knew it wasn't benign.
And then something told me that there was a thing in there. A think that wanted out. I don't know if it was a thought I had or an actual voice, but I knew it was true. Something was trying to get through that little spinning metallic hole in the air. I started to try and move but I couldn't. I tried to roll, shake my head, twitch my fingers so I would wake myself up. I was aware I was sleeping. But also I felt like whatever was happening was real. That if I didn't wake up before whatever was in there got out, it would be out in the real world for real, not just a hallucination or whatever.
I just kept thinking to myself, "You can't see what's in there. You CAN'T." Not, "I don't want to see," but "I can't see. Can't, can't, CAN'T. " Just this feeling of dread that if I see it...the worst will happen. It was a sense of wrongness. Whatever was in there wasn't supposed to exist. The whole time this is running through my head, that metallic noise is still there. The spot is turning and turning and throbbing with this pulsing light. I'm starting to panic more and more. I've had some lucid dreams before, but this is different. In those dreams I can't feel my real body and I can control my dream body and fly around, do whatever I want and make anything scary disappear. This was the worst nightmare I've ever had, this wasn't in my control.
When trying to move my body didn't work, I tried to make noise. I started trying to say something. I started to say, "No, stop, help, wake up." But it wasn't working. So I gave up on words and started trying to scream. I could feel my body laying there and I was just watching that spot hoping nothing would crawl out before I could wake up. But I also know it's getting closer somehow. The noise is getting louder and louder, the spot is growing and the light is pulsing faster and brighter. It's right there, just out of sight. If I see it, I will never unsee it, and I know instinctively that it's something my mind can't handle looking at.
So I'm just screaming silently in my head when it finally works. I make the tiniest whimper, a real out loud, not in my head whimper that I meant to be a full on scream. All the feeling comes back to my body and the spot vanishes as I open my eyes. And that was it. It was so eerie that my surroundings, minus the mysterious hole in the air, had stayed the same the entire time. I know my eyes were closed, but nothing ever took on that dreamlike unreal quality.
I didn't go back to sleep that day. I've never seen anything as terrifying in my sleep since, but I still think about it. I'm waiting for it to happen again. For that hole in the air to come back. And dreading what happens if I can't wake up quick enough the next time. I don't want to see what's in there, I don't want to let it get out.
