Sleep Paralysis

‘Wake up, wake up,’ John Miller heard the psychologist attempt to pull him out of the dark in a dominating, yet cautious whisper. 

Even if he had wanted to, John knew he wouldn’t budge a millimeter unless one counted muscles being drawn tighter and tighter as moving. He heard the doctor’s voice, he knew what it wanted of him, but he knew it could have been the voice of the ten to fifteen psychologists with whom he had met before and who all endured the same non-physical response.

They had to accept: John Miller was frozen. He was frozen deep in the throes of sleep paralysis. His arms were locked, his leg muscles taut and unflinching, and although his back arched, elevating upwards, it was a pained involuntary movement, as if that slight movement, one of the very few he could control, would remove the heavy, oppressing weight that was now pressing heavily down on his chest. 

John Miller heard his mouth begging, pleading, wanting to let out a deafening cry. But instead of that anguished yell he needed to allow to get out, all he heard himself muster out was a weak, panting, gargling, noise rising and falling from his own pulsating chest.

The psychologist gently rocked him, his voice still stern, yet now repeating, ‘John, John,’ and then one final time in what seemed like desperation, ‘John?’

With a deep inhale that one usually associated with a drowning victim being pulled out of the  sea seconds before death, John pulled himself up and inhaled air desperately. 

He took an embarrassed glance at the doctor who had guided him from the horrors that John Miller had called ‘sleep’ his whole life, and, feeling safe, or, at the least ‘safer’ in seeing the doctor’s presence, immediately turned his head and studied the corner of the room where he had last seen the still unidentified man coming at him. 

The tall, thin man. The ghostly looking, sickly, hunched over man. John could probably identify the man before he could his own mother. Although, unlike his mother, this man had not changed with age. He had and always would look exactly the same and do exactly the same thing: rapidly approach no matter what time of day and on what he was sleeping, be it the bed in his own room or be it the seat back position of an airplane. He knew many things about the man who stalked him nightly. The man used precise, seemingly timed to perfection steps. He had an evil toothy grin that covered the lower half of his face. And even though he tried to see it a few times in his youth, he knew that the upper half of the face was nearly unidentifiable under his brimmed hat. And John shook off a chill mentally acknowledging the smile that widened as John tried desperately and failed horribly at the simple task of waking himself up.  

John took an intuitive swipe at his eyes and confirmed that he had been crying. He pulled his knees up to his chest and rested his head on his them, catching his breath, before once again confirming that the man was not in the darkened corner of the room. He knew internally that if the man were in the corner of the room, John wouldn’t be able to see him, it, after all, being night. But it was a relief all the same that the man who had been approaching him, the man who stalked him nightly, and who had driven him to the point of madness, had, at the least, retreated to the shadows.

‘Did you hear the sounds again?’ It was the psychologist speaking. He was right next to him, a clipboard on his lap capturing whatever light it could from a non-invasive, clipped to the bedpost reading lamp. The psychologist’s pen scribbled ceaselessly on the paper, the doctor seemingly taking copious notes on John’s awakening process. 

John knew that the ‘thing’ he saw, the ‘shadow man,’ ‘the entity,’ ‘the dark man,’ had stormed out of a corner of the room on the opposite side of the room from the observing, note-taking doctor, just as the ‘thing’ he saw had done for a much younger him when his mother would lay in the bed next to him, his father, and as he grew older, the women he had managed to get to stay over his place. And, even though they had been forewarned of what John saw nightly, he even telling them the reason that his mother had told him and all the doctors he had seen when he was younger; that his terrors started around the time a young woman was killed in his hometown, they had all  underestimated the fear they would hear elicited from John, none ever taking the opportunity to experience a second evening of their lover’s night terrors.

John Miller again checked the shadows. As if the man who had crept out of corners to scare the bejesus out of him nightly and John had had a secret pact that these nightly moments were moments shared between them and them alone and not some outsider with a degree on his wall and a book contract with Oxford University Press’ Psychology Department exploring John and others like his fragile mind post the events of sleep paralysis. 

‘There was the buzzing, yes,’ he said, giving the psychologist the answer he knew he wanted.  

Was he psychologist number ten, number twelve, number fifteen? John once again pondered this to himself, searching his memory for a name for the man removing suction devices from John’s chest and the sides of John’s head, the machine they were connected to casting a soft glow on John’s body. 

‘Yes,’ John repeated, the name still not coming to him no matter how deep he reached. When a name did not occur, John continued with a disinterested, ‘yes, there was a buzzing sound, like flies. Like flies entering a room en masse.’

This psychologist was exploring auditory reasons for sleep paralysis. Other psychologists had explored sleep positions, diet before sleep, sexuality, and there was even one incompetent professor studying sleep paralysis who wished to somehow connect the mobile phone and the nightmare inducing paralysis which he was keenly observing, the dullard not having researched enough to know that the disorder had been traced back centuries, even garnering mention by Ebeneezer Scrooge in Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol and having been visualized in the infamous Henry Fuseli painting, The Nightmare.

And that was the irony. Centuries and centuries of religious leaders, doctors, scientists and psychologists had been researching and studying sleep paralysis and there was still no answer. There was no way to prevent this nightmare from occurring again and again!

‘And the voice?’ The psychologist asked, concerned. ‘Did he,’ the doctor paused, ‘did it speak Latin again?

John Miller felt like he could crawl back up and inside of himself. Anxiously, he studied the corner of the room, waiting for the tall, thin, man in black to start his evenly paced strut towards him, but there was no one, or better yet, nothing there. Just a darkened corner, suffocated from any of the light that the desk lamp the psychologist was sitting next to and his fancy machines provided.

‘I must say,’ the psychologist interjected, making John Miller feel like the psychologist really wanted him to collect his thoughts and get a move on. That his wife was making a pot roast and that John Miller was going to cause the gravy to dry up, leaving a dry and tasteless piece of meat for dinner. ‘Of all the patients I have seen, you are the only one to say you know the voice, or better yet, to whom the voice belongs.’

‘I don’t know that,’ John interjected, countering any take that the psychologist might have been constructing. ‘I mean, seriously. The voice speaks Latin! Latin! How many people still speak Latin? How often would I, as a child growing up in the seventies and eighties on Long Island, New York have been exposed to Latin? A few demon possession horror films where the devil speaks the same language as the once mighty and now languished Roman Empire, and some terms chiseled into some arcane American monument we visited in high school where our nation’s founders thought they were creating a new Roman Empire here in the States. That’s it! So I assume it’s the language, but as to knowing who owns it, I haven’t exactly sat down with a whole host of Latin speakers . . .’

‘Right. Of course,’ the psychologist responded, concerned. 

It was obvious that the psychologist was very focused on some belief that John knew the man in the night terror, the Latin speaker who repeated the same thing every time he pushed himself out of his corner hide-y hole and made his way to John’s bed where he presented to crush the air out of John.

‘And you’ve never google-translated the voice?’

‘No?’ John paused, considering it, then remembering that he knew absolutely no Latin at all. Furthermore, even if he did try and see what was being said, he wouldn’t know if the words or even the sounds that he was writing out were the correct ones.

‘And have you recorded the message; you know, with a phone or some such recording device?’

‘No? Why would I?’ John begged, suddenly wondering, then rejecting the notion that the psychologist thought the man was real. ‘I see him only when I’m sleeping,’ John heard his voice start out booming before lowering so that he could confirm that there was no one hiding in the shadows. 

There wasn’t.

‘Well, while there are oddities and abnormalities to your sleep paralysis, and while it’s not unusual for someone to hear a voice while in the throes of encountering the nightmarish creature, you seem to be the one person I’ve encountered whose ‘entity’ speaks a relatively dead language,’ he paused. ‘A relatively dead language that they seem to think you’d understand . . .’

John pulled himself out of bed. He was still in a hospital gown and for a second he thought he should double check himself to make sure nothing was exposed. But the bed was now feeling really hot. ‘Maybe it’s not Latin,’ John heard himself argue. ‘I mean, how could I know if it’s Latin? Maybe it’s late period Greek, Etruscan, or maybe even not even European. Maybe it’s some form of Native American? How would I know? Like most of the guys I knew, I took a few Spanish classes at school, passed them and never used Spanish again.’

The psychologist wrote that information down as if there were a clue there as to whatever ails his mind when it was supposed to be in the throes of sleep.

‘I only speak English,’ John heard himself confirm, in case the psychologist was making a mistake in his note taking.

The psychologist studied John for a long minute. ‘Why don’t you lie down and go to sleep,’ the doctor said, studying his notes in case he missed something while speaking.

‘Sleep? I told you at the prerequisite session that I can never get back to sleep after seeing,’ he heard himself gasp, as if the entity was on his chest again. ‘That, I mean,’ he corrected, as if there had been a proper agreed upon term to use with the doctor for the man who appeared in his sleep. ‘That thin man . . .’

‘Lie down,’ the psychologist suggested, and John realized it really was a suggestion. Of course several of the psychologists had tried to hypnotize John before, and of those quite a few tried it more than once.

John did as commanded. The bed was no longer encased in that insufferable heat and he laid his head on the pillows. The pillows he remembered from the beginning of the experiment as having been coarse, starchy, not the type that one would have at home or for comfort. But now they felt welcoming, soft, he even pondered for a second if the psychologist had switched the pillows, exchanging the hospital pillows for a set of down, fluffy pillows. 

He heard a distant voice say, ‘go back. Go way back to where you first saw Latin . . .’

It came back in such an immediate flash that John half-believed his mind was creating something simply to appease the psychologist. But as soon as he started to speak, John knew it was real. 

‘I was young. The church. It had a carnival. Dad was gambling and I had to pee,’ John knew he was speaking aloud about what he was seeing, but he couldn’t stop himself. It was like he had really had a desire to answer the psychologist. ‘I really had to pee. God it hurt!’ 

John realized that he really was now feeling that desperate desire to go to the toilet. That it really was hurting. That he was physically and mentally becoming that boy again.

‘Dad, I have to pee,’ John said in a child-like voice, he suddenly became that boy again.

‘Dad had a hot hand,’ John heard himself explain to the doctor in his much older, middle aged voice. ‘He would tell me later it was a full house,’ John continued.

‘But where,’ the child-like voice asked shrilly, John remembering that his dad had told him to go find a toilet and that from the voice, John knew it came from an age where going to a public toilet required the parental escort that his father was not going to provide, not with that hand of cards.

‘My dad told me to go to the toilet inside,’ the adult John Miller reported to the psychologist, ‘and so I went into the church.’ 

‘Yes. Yes,’ the doctor responded. Doctor Mattoni, John’s internal voice wanted to cry out; it suddenly remembering the doctor’s name. ‘A church! A church!’ The psychologist went on. ‘That might be where you first saw Latin! That could be it!’

John thought he knew where the church toilet was and he walked up to the altar. On one side was the statue of Saint Joseph, and on the other was the Blessed Virgin Mary. The toilet entry was next to Mary. John pushed open the heavy wooden door. There were two doors, one to the left and one straight ahead. ‘The door straight ahead says,’ John sounded it out in that child-like voice, ‘thou shall not enter here. Thou shall not enter here!’ John repeated.

‘Thou is not Latin,’ the psychologist’s voice sternly corrected. ‘It’s arcane Germanic English for ‘you’ plural.’

‘But the other door says,’ John’s normal voice pointed out before converting to childish, ‘laboratory,’ John re-read the word, but slowly, ‘laboratory!’

‘Lavatory,’ the doctor corrected. ‘That is actually Latin for washing up room, although in America we usually associate it with toilets  . . . ‘

‘I didn’t know!’ John screamed aloud, the doctor’s voice no longer trailing off, but instead coming to a complete halt. He felt the presence before he saw him. He was in the corner again. The ‘shadow man,’ ‘the entity,’ ‘the dark man,’ he was awakening now. 

‘John?’ The doctor asked.

‘He’s back,’ John whispered, still in a state of hypnosis, yet, simultaneously, feeling completely disconnected from the tranceline state. 

John, beyond desperate to go to the bathroom, pushed open the other door. The door with the sign, ‘Thou shall not enter here,’ but John was no longer narrating. Instead he walked cautiously into the room, it being a sacristy with an altar and a gold encased bureau for sacred church objects. 

‘John,’ the doctor pleaded, the one of fifteen psychologist’s names once again forgotten. ‘This is very dangerous. You need to tell me what is happening.’

‘He’s coming out of the corner,’ John said, seeing the man in real time and in dream time. 

‘John? Who is coming out of the corner? John, describe him? You seem to know him. Ask him, have we ever met before? Have we met before?’

The entity in the church sacristy had not seen John, not yet anyway. But John knew what was going to occur. His bladder, both his adult and childhood bladder, unleashed, and John let out a yelp. The man, knife covered in blood, paused halfway through his action and turned to John. 

The childlike voice returned, both to adult John in the bed looking up at the entity from the corner and to the younger John looking up at the killer. ‘I needed to use the bathroom,’ John pleaded in a childlike whimper.

The body on the sacristy altar, perhaps no longer held in place by its killer’s hand, fell off the altar and hit the floor with a thud. The killer turned to see what the source of the sound was, and seeing his opportunity, the young John turned and ran, pulling the door heavily behind him. 

In the small alcove, John saw someone else entering the laboratory, although John could now make out what was surely a bathroom sink and which a younger him would have probably assumed was a laboratory scrub down area for disinfection, the absurdity of a younger him assuming that a church would have a laboratory only hitting him all these years later.

The shadow man climbed on his chest. His weight pressing down. And John suddenly realized, all these years and he could have described the killer to the police.  

‘John,’ the psychologist cried out. ‘Speak to me! John!’

The doctor, Doctor Mattoni, John once again remembered, tried to gently rock John awake. But John knew there was no point. No amount of shaking would get the being off John’s chest now.

John Miller closed his eyes and let the darkness embrace him . . .