In my first memory of having an episode of sleep paralysis I am eight years old, in the left backseat of the car my parents drove at the time, head against the window. My mom is standing outside the door opposite me, asking me why I’m not getting out of the car. My eyes are open, and I can see her standing there, talking to me, but I cannot open my mouth to speak or move any of my limbs. I am, briefly, occupying two distinct realities: my mother’s and my own. I don’t understand what’s happening to me — I will only learn about sleep paralysis much later, in my early twenties — but I decide it will be simpler to just close my eyes until whatever is happening stops happening. Eventually my body wakes to catch up with my mind; I unbuckle my seatbelt and get out of the car. When I’m asked why I wouldn’t get out of the car, I don’t have an answer.
Sleep paralysis is, from what I’ve gathered over the years, a rare but not obscure phenomenon. People who experience it report feeling awake and being able to move their eyes but not the rest of their bodies, usually for dream-like minutes that feel like hours. During that time, most people experience hallucinations, usually of an intruder or otherwise threatening figure.
I’ve had seasons of these episodes, several of them occurring in the space of a few months and then not again for a year or more. Over time, they’ve become more bearable, generally, but sometimes they’re awful.
One such episode happened when I was living in Oakland. I had this big bedroom with two large windows that looked over Shattuck Avenue in North Oakland, across the street from Bushrod Park, and my bed sat parallel to those windows, which were across from the wall with the door into the room. One morning I woke up, except not really, on my stomach, to the presence of a stranger breaking into my room through the door, threatening to kill me, then approaching me with some sort of weapon, then putting their body on me, heavy, and all I could do was stay pinioned to my bed, arms bent and hands above my head in an unchosen surrender, and I knew in my head it wasn’t real, but it didn’t matter because it felt awful, so I shut my eyes really hard and waited until it was over and I could breathe my heart into slowing down.
When I think about my sleep paralysis, that’s the episode that comes to mind most frequently, because it was so intense and so negative, but there have been several since, including one a few days ago.
I was napping on my couch and woke to find myself stuck with my head leaned onto the couch’s arm, looking at someone sitting across the room from me. Someone I know from life who has hurt me had come to do so again. I’m alarmed for a moment, but before I can freak out a sudden feeling of peace washes over me. I relax my head into the couch. My gaze softens. By what feels like a miracle, I can think. I can recognize the intruder as not real, a figment of my hallucinating mind. I’m not here. This isn’t happening. I am again inhabiting two distinct realities, that of my asleep mind and that of my awake mind. I look at F in the chair across the room; I know he isn’t real; I decide it doesn’t matter. What brings me peace isn’t the knowledge that the threat isn’t real. It’s the sureness that it will pass.