The Waking Nightmare of Sleep Paralysis

By Published on October 13, 2015

But it’s the hallucinatory aspect of sleep paralysis that is its most petrifying feature. As a boy, I would experience a frightening sound, somewhere between white noise and insect buzzing, while feeling a dark presence in the room. Sometimes I’d feel that I was leaving my body, but my journey out beyond my bedroom door was accompanied by sickening Hitchcockian lurches of perspective. Most commonly – and The Nightmare re-enacts this surprisingly common experience in a variety of disturbing ways – I’d feel that there was someone in the room, a dark presence slowly edging towards my prostrate body. Occasionally it would get to me, and would squat on my chest. I would fight to wake up, concentrating all my energy on getting one finger to twitch, as that would release my body from its prison. Eventually, that release would come and I’d sit up in bed, sweating, hyperventilating, the “shadow man” nowhere to be seen.

Many people with sleep paralysis suffer in silence. Around 30% of people questioned in a recent study reported experiencing it at least once, though a more conservative estimate suggests around 10% of the population get it frequently. Some worry it is a sign of mental illness, while others rationalise it in a variety of ways: one may see it as part of brain activity, deriving from the same complex part of our subconscious as dreams. Another may see it as an actual supernatural experience. The Nightmare found eight people to share their own experiences, from Manchester to New York. There’s Connie, a former atheist who found religion when she drove away her unwanted sleep visitors by invoking the name of Jesus, and Forrest, who made Halloween masks of the faces he saw.

Read the article “The Waking Nightmare of Sleep Paralysis” on theguardian.com.

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