This one's reeeeeeeal good, I hope you read the whole thing.
Matt called me and woke me out of a deep sleep. I stumbled out of bed druggedly to answer the phone, and we had a conversation that I can barely remember. I knew it was him before I managed to answer because everyone who calls me has a distinctive ring assigned to them. All I remember saying was how I just woke up and felt like I had taken some kind of sleeping medicine because I was was barely able to stand or think.
I woke up again and realized that the previous conversation was only a dream. I got up and stumbled to the refrigerator in my room, where I had a couple of new CD's I wanted to listen to. Then I realized that you don't put CD's in your refrigerator and I didn't have one in my room anyway.
I woke up again, trying to move and scream, but feeling paralyzed and barely able to. I eventually struggled out of bed, and the difficulty I was having convinced me that someone had drugged me. I stumbled downstairs to tell my parents to call an ambulance...
And I woke up one more time. Again I struggled to move or scream, and this time I noticed a woman in a hooded robe hovering over me in the shadows at the foot of my bed whispering something unintelligible that sounded like a dead language. At first I thought it was my mom, who'd heard me yelling in my sleep and decided to mess with me and have some fun at my expense. My parents have a weird sense of humor like that sometimes, if not any hooded robes.
After the woman probingly raked my foot with a clawed hand, I ruled out that particular theory. I just about shit my pants trying to scream and and wake up. An attempted scream started as a rasping breath, and I eventually yelped out a weak "Grraaarble!..." and sat up. I looked around the room, terrified of the darkened shapes of the various things in my room as if I was 7 years old again. A stack of boxes in the corner of my room by the bookcase particularly looked like someone crouching. I threw a blanket at it and yelled "Dammit mom, that's not funny!" Recalling the anti-monster training of my early childhood, I stood on my bed and leapt to the door, careful to give my ankles a safe distance from the area under everyone's bed where achilles-tendon-slashing villians always lurk. I sprinted downstairs, where I collected myself and realized what had happened.
I just got a visit from "the old hag." I'd seen a documentary on it years ago and always thought it was an interesting phenomenon. Apparently people have long talked about being visited by an old woman in their sleep who messed with them in various ways while they struggled to move. It's real big in the superstitious areas of New England, particularly. Sometimes she sits or presses on their chest, and sometimes its not an old woman but a smallish gremlin. You may have seen old paintings of people sleeping with grinning little demons on their chests, and this is the sort of thing that inspires it. The documentary suggested that this same phenomenon is what causes people to dream about being visited by aliens, too.
Here's some good excerpts from the above link, which happens to be a scientific explanation from what I just noticed is coincidentally a "paranormal" website even though I know better than to think of it as such a thing.
"The medical establishment is quite aware of this phenomenon, but has a less sensational name than "old hag syndrome" for it. They call it "sleep paralysis" or SP (sometimes ISP for "isolated sleep paralysis")."
"...sleep paralysis occurs when the brain is in the transition state between deep, dreaming sleep (known as REM sleep for its rapid eye movement) and waking up...
"Sleep paralysis is often accompanied by vivid hallucinations. There may be a sense someone is in the room, or even hovering over you. At other times, there seems to be pressure on the chest, as though someone or something perched there..."
"...disrupted sleep schedules or circadian rhythm disturbances can produce an episode of sleep paralysis."
I think it's safe enough to say that this is a result of an irregular sleeping pattern. On Thursday I went to bet at 6pm and woke up at midnight and was up all day. Friday I went to bed at midnight and awoke at 9 am. Tonight I went to bed around seven and had this incident at 11. It scared the bejeezus out of my initially, but now I just think it's pretty kickass. Like I said before, I always thought it was an interesting phenomenon and wanted to experience it myself. I'm still kinda pumped up about it. I just wonder when I'm going to be able to sleep again in the near future.
No comments:
Post a Comment