My Sleep Paralysis Experience
For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms. — Ephesians 6:12
Ghost stories and all things paranormal are usually reserved for summer campfires and Halloween parties. According to Lindsay Lohan’s character, Cady Heron, from the film Mean Girls: “Halloween is the one night of the year where girls can dress up like a total slut and no other girl can say anything about it.” The same can be said for talking, or in my case writing, about paranormal experiences. There’s a small window when it’s apropos, but outside that window you run the risk of clearing a room — or worse, being stigmatized as a hallucinating nutter, or some kind of tin-foil-hat-wearing, internet Reddit conspiracist.
Maybe being a highly sensitive person makes one more vulnerable to paranormal activity. This is just one theory that’s explored in the 2005 film The Exorcism of Emily Rose, based on the true, horrifying story of a young German woman named Anneliese Michel, who claimed to be possessed by six demons. In the film, the beautiful actress Shohreh Aghdashloo plays a professor of anthropology and psychiatry at Northwestern, who believes the reason why Emily Rose is “invaded” a.k.a. possessed is because Emily Rose is a hypersensitive person who has an unusual connection to what she called a “separate reality.”
“Hypersensitives,” she says, “are born different.” This is the same person, I believe, who can walk into a room and feel the room’s frequency, be it high, or low. This person, and I write “this person” because writing “this person” instead of “I” allows for a quasi third wall, a safe space if you will, is usually a bleeding heart empath, prone to bring home a myriad of strays including emotional vampires, or that cute couch-surfing drummer in a band they can’t remember. There’s a poem entitled “Missionary” by poet Rebecca McClanahan that sums up the highly sensitive person, albeit a codependent one, perfectly when she writes:
Not the position you take with a man
but the real calling you first hear
over ocean waters or sitting in church
and before you know it you’re bringing home strays.
At five, Alice LaConte from the apartments,
her lice hitchhiking in your hair. All night
your mother scrubs, muttering, Your friends, honey,
your friends, but the zeal is just beginning……
In high school, it’s you he loves, Bo Pederson
with the stuttering eye reflecting the ghosts
of the parents he stabbed…
so of course in college it’s the broken one you want,
the hood who has slept six nights
in his jacket…..
The film Doctor Sleep, the sequel to Kubrick’s classic The Shining, understands the energy transfer between high and low frequency, specifically in the conversation between the protective ghost of Dick Hallorann and young Danny Torrance, who both share the same gift of shining:
“Some things, dark things, the shining’s like food. They’re mosquitoes landing for blood. But I didn’t shine like you. Nobody shines like you so in that damn hotel you was like a million-watt battery all plugged in. And it ate it up. You made it real.”
“You got to hear this. World’s a hungry place and the darkest things are the hungriest, and they’ll eat what shines.”
One of my first paranormal experiences happened on March 26, 2006, in the early morning hours. I was home, alone, asleep in my bed when I’d awake to a strong feeling that I was being watched. A small, low voltage desk lamp that sat atop a small table in the hallway gave off enough light that I was able to make out the familiar contents of my room such as a large dresser, a side table, a small desk, and could even see into the bathroom, which was located right across the hall from my bedroom. That was when I saw it, a thick shadow-like mist that had oozed down from one of the side slits in the ceiling, where the attic’s pull-down ladder was located. I remained calm until I saw it walk into my room and stand at the foot of my bed. However, the mist was gone, and in its place was a large, black, human-like hooded mass but I couldn’t make out any distinctive features from my periphery.
Another thing I noticed was the sharp shift in temperature. It was so cold I could’ve sworn that I’d seen my own breath just like Regan MacNeil in The Exorcist, even though it was a balmy night near the end of March. I told myself to keep my eyes closed even though I knew this thing was still standing at the foot of my bed, staring down at me. I’d remember having the presence of mind to be aware of my heart condition, and how being too tired, dehydrated, stressed-out, or even a bad dream could throw my heart into a Supraventricular Tachycardia (SVT) episode, which had since been corrected by two cardiac ablations, spanning seven years apart. This was the precise reason why I wouldn’t look at the black-hooded, ominous presence head-on, for fear the very sight of it would cause me to go into shock, or maybe kill me with fright, right on the spot.
Here’s a link to an essay about my 25 year history with SVT: https://medium.com/p/15f5f6d1017d
I could perceive the hooded black mass had moved and was now standing right next to me, on the left side of my bed. With my eyes still tightly closed, I pretended to be sleeping. Just then, I felt a palpable wave of pure hatred and negativity radiating off of this thing, and within seconds, I felt a crushing, painful pressure atop my chest and at the same time a loud whooshing noise in my ears. The only way I could adequately describe the pressure sensation I’d felt on my chest and whole body was in that exact moment when a skydiver jumps out of an airplane, and how the serious air pressure causes their cheeks to flap back and forth in an almost comical way.
I tried to say the name of Jesus at that moment as my mother had instructed me from a small child but I couldn’t get His name out of my mouth. In that moment, I could feel myself being pushed down into the bed with so much force that I felt like I was being flattened by one of those ice skating rink resurfacing machines — a Zamboni, and had this keen awareness that I’d be losing consciousness soon, a similar feeling to being put under anesthesia; you know, those last few seconds of cognizance before passing out — cold.
The strangest thing was the next morning. I awoke at 11am that Sunday feeling like I hadn’t slept or dreamt at all. It had the same eery vibe as A Nightmare on Elm Street, specifically the last scene in the film when Nancy walks outside after turning her back on Freddy, and telling him “I take back every bit of energy I gave you. You’re nothing. You’re sh — ,” then sees her previously murdered friends waiting for her, alive again, inside the blood-red colored 1958 Cadillac before Freddy reappears and does a wrestling move called “The Cradle” on Nancy’s alcoholic mother, and her whole body gets sucked through that tiny, decorative vortex-window on their front door while a creepy nursery-like rhyme ushers the credit roll.
So next I did what anyone would do at that moment — turned to Google instead of God. After typing “pressure on chest,” “waking nightmare,” and other search-specific words explaining my scary experience, the term “sleep paralysis” would pop up on the first page of the Google search results. I’d never heard of sleep paralysis before 2006 but that was the closest description of what I’d encountered. According to the Web MD’s website, “Sleep paralysis is a feeling of being conscious but unable to move. It occurs when a person passes between stages of wakefulness and sleep. During these transitions, you may be unable to move or speak for a few seconds up to a few minutes. Some people may also feel pressure or a sense of choking.”
Then there’s a phenomenon called the “Old Hag,” or “Night Hag,” that has been reported across various cultures and goes by various names such as Jinn, Arabic origin. Other names include “Hat Man” and “Shadow People / Shadow Beings.”
According to Wikipedia:
“The night hag or old hag is the name given to a supernatural creature, commonly associated with the phenomenon of sleep paralysis. It is a phenomenon during which a person feels a presence of a supernatural malevolent being which immobilizes the person as if sitting on their chest or the foot of their bed. The word “night-mare” or “nightmare” was used to describe this phenomenon before the word received its modern, more general meaning. Various cultures have various names for this phenomenon and/or supernatural character.”
I’ve wondered if the old hag in The Shining, who seduces Jack Nicholson’s character in the bathtub in Room 237 at the Overlook Hotel, is Kubrick’s nod to the documented sleep paralysis phenomenon.
Through the years, I would Google sleep paralysis from time-to-time to see if there was more information. That was when I learned about a 2015 documentary called The Nightmare, directed by Rodney Ascher, where people recount their frightening experiences with sleep paralysis through reenactments with one terrifying story after another. It premiered at the 2015 Sundance film festival, and has a 67% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Of course, I had to watch it.
Through the decades, something strange would pop up every now and again so much that I began to write about it for documentation purposes, or for pinpointing a particular pattern. The last eerie experience happened in August 2020. My family and I had just returned to our Brooklyn apartment after spending five months with family when the first wave of the COVID pandemic hit New York so for five months our apartment sat vacant. The first thing I noticed, upon our arrival, was my senior cat acting strangely. Libby was perched on a chair and her eyes were razor-focused on a particular area of our living room for an abnormally long time.
Out of curiosity, I’d snap a random photo with my iPhone and later saw an ominous presence appear. If you look closely at the photo, allowing your eyes to focus on the dark image — you may have to brighten your screen, you should be able to make out eyes, a nose, lips, and a full mouth of sharp teeth. We moved out of that apartment a year later.
A poem from my second book Coupling:
Compartmentalize
You got to hear this. World’s a hungry place.
And the darkest things are the hungriest,
and they’ll eat what shines.
— Stephen King, Doctor Sleep
I wish I could
compartmentalize
like the REDRUM boy
in Kubrick’s film,
The Shining,
who can lock away
his monsters
in all kinds
of impenetrable,
mental boxes
like the old hag
in Room 237.
Once I imagined you
locked away
in a soundproof room
still squawking
like some mute,
animated chicken:
head bobbing,
wing-arms flapping.
I laughed
but it was
a nervous laugh.
When the therapist
mentioned enmeshment,
I’d envisioned
a spider web —
intricate as a lace doily
covering the entrance
of a doorway,
waiting for a hapless,
blissful bug
to buzz through
to its inevitable
entrapment:
its iridescent wings
frantically flailing
until the end.
