(Heads up. I’m describing intense sleep paralysis and seizures. I understand if you struggle with these and don’t want to read. Any information would be helpful.)
For the past few years, maybe five, I’ve been having episodes of sleep paralysis. They started part way through my last relationship, the one before my boyfriend now. The relationship began well enough. I met him through a friend that we both lived with for a short time. We mutually benefited from having the company of another person, one that could understand our struggles, but when we started living together on our own, it became toxic. I was entering the core classes for my degree, and between that and watching my boyfriend having constant existential crises, and often taking it out on me, my imagination became aggressive. My dreams became more vivid and frequent. I had a lot about being chased and being too slow to get away or weak to fight. I’d had these kinds of dreams before, and I know everyone does, but by “frequent” and “a lot,” I mean every night, and it was always the same thing chasing me.
I can never see it in the dream, but it makes the same huffing sound, like a horse through its nose, as it bounds or sometimes swims toward me, and I can hear multiple limbs trampling the ground or slicing the water. I’m too busy stumbling through the woods, or caves, or too busy swimming or struggling through a boggy marsh to look behind me. It always catches me and is about to tear me open, and then I’ll notice I’m not where I think I am. I’m in a familiar place, laying in my bed, but I can still hear a deep huffing, this time almost a wheezing as if it’s breathing through its mouth now, and I notice that it’s hard for me to breath myself, like it’s sucking the oxygen from my lungs. I can’t move. I can’t even open my eyes. I bring it back with me and it crouches on my chest. Its gigantic feet crush my breasts and stomach until they hurt, and I can feel something like claws scrapping against my neck. If I try hard enough, sometimes I can get my eyes to flutter open for an instant and get a glimpse of the tall shadow looking down on me with its pupil-less eyes, only white sclera, and then the weight of my eyelids will be too heavy to overcome the chemicals in my brain shutting off my muscles.
Eventually, I’ll regain some part of me deep inside that remembers that I can fight and struggle. I’ll try to force myself up, tensing every part of my body, willing it to move. Just as I realize it’s futile and I convince myself that this is my life now, as I’m about to reside to the insanity of the situation, the weight is lifted. I jerk up, screaming and crying, and if I’m with someone, this wakes them up and I get some consolation. I know these types of experiences aren’t uncommon, and there are reasonable explanations for these experiences, but please keep reading.
I realized I needed to make a change and ended my toxic relationship. I decided to start seeing a psychiatrist and took a year off from dating to try to reconnect with myself. The sleep paralysis got better but never went away. In a good week, I would only have it happen once, but in a bad, it would be every night again, except not having anyone next to me made me that much more fearful. I have pets, and this had helped some, but it wasn’t the same. After a year, I met a guy online, my boyfriend now. I was leery at first, especially as I found out that he had a similar background as my ex, severe childhood abuse and bullying, but he has a way of viewing the world that I identified with, and he has a way of listening that makes me feel more heard than I’ve ever felt. It might have been dumb, but we moved in together after only a year of seeing each other, and regardless of what you might want to think, things have been great! My dreams even stopped for a while. He does struggles in similar ways to my ex, just some lethargy and the occasional gripe, but he takes responsibility for his emotions and actions and doesn’t take his struggles out on me, which is good enough for me, for now anyway.
He did have a major setback, part way through the pandemic. He had childhood epilepsy that he’d been told he grew out of, but I think the isolation from Covid made his struggles worse. He is already a bit of a recluse. He grew up around a lot of toxic people that he’s had to separate himself from, so the only social interaction he really got was from his work, but when everything shut down, his job became strictly online, so no face-to-face interaction except with me and the odd stranger when we had to go out for something. On Easter, we were having a delectable meal, meaty hunks of salmon, mashed garlic potatoes, and buttery asparagus, and before we could really dig in, he stopped and starred straight forward at me with a puzzled yet distant look on his face. Then he turned around in his chair and looked up, at the point where the wall meets the ceiling, and screamed, but strained like his oxygen was being siphoned from him. Then he sat back in his chair and looked down at his chest, almost in bewilderment, like something was emerging from it, and as he did this, his whole body became stiff. His heels dragged on the floor, his butt lifted from the seat, and his arms came out to a 45-degree angle from his chest. Next came a bunch of distinct popping sounds from his arm, like the sound of a knee popping, or cracking, but much deeper and louder. I don’t know what bone-on-bone sounds like, but I would guess this is what I was hearing, and later I would be even more sure this is what I heard.
I helped him to the ground. I was confused and it took me a second to gather myself. I called the ambulance and kept talking to him, calling his name, hoping he would come to. He didn’t. His eyes rolled back in his head, and he continued to jerk until the ambulance came, and they got him on the gurney and put him in the back of the ambulance. He’d had a grand mal seizure and broke the ball of his shoulder bone diagonally, right through the middle. The doctors weren’t sure how it happened, but they figured his shoulder bone had pushed against another of his bones and broken from the force of his muscles tightening.
He wasn’t the same after. At the hospital he couldn’t remember anything, who he’d just seen, what the doctors were telling him. I don’t know why they kept trying to give him instructions when it was clear that he was not comprehending or remembering anything. Over the next few months, we began the healing and repair process. He began to be able to comprehend things again, and his memory started to come back. He had to go to the doctor often, then physical therapy.
Progress was being made, but then he had another seizure and keeps having them still. They aren’t as intense as the first one; he doesn’t break any bones, and only has minor injuries. But every time, he’ll freeze, get a distant look on his face, turn his gaze upward, scream, and then go completely stiff before shaking and hyperventilating. After, he won’t remember anything, and his comprehension and memory will be off for a week or two. We’ve been to the neurologist many times, and the meds work to some degree or another, but without fail, these incidents keep happening. I won’t burden you with the details of the financial stress all this puts on us. I started having more intense sleep paralysis, though now when I wake up, my boyfriend is often too disoriented to console me, and recently, when he finally was coherent, I almost wish he hadn’t been.
Two weeks ago, he had a seizure almost on schedule for his monthly. I completely broke down after about 2 years of this now. That night, I had a dream about being in a large cave. I could tell from my echo, or lack thereof, that it was massive. It was like screaming with noise canceling headphones. I could only hear the muffled sounds of my voice, like my head was under water. I stumbled for an amount of time I can’t quantify until I felt part of the cave wall. I tried to find my way out with no light, just from sliding my hands against the jagged, moist inside, and then I heard huffing. I ran, but almost instantly, the walls narrowed. I have always had a severe fear of cramped places. I struggle to breath listening to any story involving someone stuck in a confined space. I was desperately trying to work my body through an ever-tightening crevice until the huffing, and the pawing noises on the ground got so close, and I was so restricted, that I gave up, froze, closed my eyes, and just hoped the thing didn’t take long in ripping me apart.
Then I was in my bed, catatonic. This time, though, my eyes were wide open. The thing sat heavy on my chest, taking deep breaths. I now knew that it was in fact taking air from my lungs. It breathed deep and heavily, and my breaths became shallower. I could feel the air being pulled from me. The thing was completely black. It wasn’t a shadow. That was its skin, like leather with tar spread over it. It was dripping, oozing black liquid, and the areas that weren’t looked as hard and as jagged as obsidian. I could see its claws at my neck and the tops of its paws on my chest, though I could tell its feet were much bigger as its heels dug into the stomach area near my bellybutton. It was long, gangly, and it investigated me with its pupil-less eyes. But what scared me the most, terrifies me to think about, was that revealing its dagger-like teeth was the most delighted smile I’ve ever seen. It was even squinting, the kind of squinting you see in pictures on social media when someone has caught a moment pure bliss. Sometimes, I think the smiles on social media are a bit forced, an attempt to psychologically trick ourselves into believing we are what our faces convey, trying to really feel the full of it before life goes back to normal, but on this creature, I could tell that this delight was not in the slightest forced. He was happy to watch my torment. I tried everything I could force myself into movement, like I always did, but I was becoming lightheaded. This was it for me. It was over.
And then I was screaming and shaking in bed, crying, rocking back and forth, ready to give up and reside to a permanent state of negative emotion until I had a heart attack from stress. Then I heard my boyfriend’s clear-minded and soothing voice ask me what was wrong and rock with me as he held me. I was shocked as first as he’s usually too confused to console me, too out of it to listen. It took me a while, but eventually I told him the dream and the experience, but part way through my trauma-filled heart spilling, I felt his arms slip from around me, and he leaned back a little. I looked over at him and he had that distant look again, and I was ready for him to have another seizure. Next came the terror, but this time he didn’t scream, didn’t go rigid or convulse. He just said “I remember everything.”
He said he remembers what happens to him when he has a seizure, every time. He is doing something, and then he hears a huffing sound, usually somewhere behind him, and he turns to look, and something is there, sometimes stand hunched over, sometimes hanging from the wall or ceiling, a black, gangly creature with no pupils, just sclera with tiny black veins running through at the edges of its lids. It has large feet, shaped like a bird’s, with talons, skinny arms that he is sure are going to reach out and grab him at any moment. And the most delighted smile, like his fear is the most joyous thing in the universe to the thing. Then it grabs him, he goes rigid, and it sits on his chest while it sucks the air from his lungs.
I work in a field of science. My boyfriend teaches research and has cautioned his students from drawing unfalsifiable conclusions, but I know there are others out there who have a lot of the same experiences, and the symptoms and situations seem too similar: people being paralyzed in their bed with a demon on their chest, not being able to breath, people having seizures in which they stare off into space, then start screaming, going stiff, and convulsing. I’ve read and listen to hours, days of the anecdotes at this point. I get the impression that they are becoming more frequent. Maybe they aren’t, and maybe I’m only finding more of what I’m looking for, but I am scared and don’t know what else to do but to write this out. We’ve been to therapists, doctors, and tried a slew of things at this point, and we are exhausted; we are both tired of fighting life and what feels like the inevitable. I still have the nightmares, and my boyfriend is acting as if he is due for another seizure any day now. So if you’ve had anything similar happen, especially if you’ve seen what we’ve seen, please reach out and give us any information you have because we are desperate and I can’t get the image of the thing smiling from my head.