14

I wake and can’t move.

I’m just twelve. My brother sleeps in his bed, his snoring rhythmic. I can’t call to him, can’t tell him I can’t breathe, can’t tell him I can’t move, can’t cry out to him that I need help.

I am incapable of everything but the awareness that I am awake and paralyzed.

Earlier in the evening, I watched a TV show that talked about sleep paralysis. They described just this, and said that the inability to breathe was due to a ghost, or entity, sitting on the victim’s chest, sucking the air out of their lungs.

I don’t see anything.

But the terror fills me until it’s seething.

It was a mistake to watch something like that so close to bed – those things always stay with me. Nights are always guaranteed to be sleepless. My imagination, overloaded with fear, is prejudiced to feel something, to sense something, to conjure possibilities.

Sometimes, though, those possibilities present themselves regardless.

Like some mornings, when I’m making breakfast before school, out of the corner of my eye I catch a shadow sitting in one of the living room chairs. I can just make out that it’s human in shape, waiting patiently as it watches me. I get a sense it’s old. Patient. Curious.

I read once such encounters are meant to be spirits, but when you turn to see them you startle them so they flitter away. Who knows who determined this, how they worked it out, and how any of it’s provable.

If it’s a spirit, it can’t be anybody I know. Nobody close to me has died recently. It can’t be like somebody looking in, checking on me.

But I see this shadow repeatedly, and while there’d be logical explanations – like seeing floaters (flecks of gel coating from the eye that fragment and drift into vision), or pareidolia (the mind forming patterns of images in random stimulus) – I wonder.

Another series of episodes I had was when I used to play handball in the driveway against the house; I would see a shadow leaning over the balustrade of the front veranda, watching me. This didn’t feel like it was the same as the living room one. I would try to dismiss it but kept feeling its presence, feel its inquisitiveness, feel some level of condescension.

I would try to rationalize it as simply something I was catching out of the corner of my eye that my imagination would then contort into something else, but that’s all it was: a rationalization.

On one occasion, this particular shadow seemed especially persistent and noticeable. Every time I resumed playing, I could see it leaning further and further over the balustrade to get a better look at me. Its face was semi deformed – a hook nose, and a bulbous head, like it might’ve been wearing a mask.  I gave up what I was doing and ran from the driveway and went back into the house.

I never questioned these encounters, instead only accepting them as inexplicable. And that was enough at that age: inexplicable. Maybe it was nothing. Maybe it was something. But, during the day, I had no conclusive judgement. Daylight minimizes, if not trivializes, all possibilities of the supernatural.

And night exaggerates them.

Or perhaps opens the awareness to them.

So now as I lay awoke but frozen I can only think there has to be something more to this, and that while I can’t see anything, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.

When I was younger, my cousins and I would talk about the supernatural. Those nights, I’d struggle to sleep, sure that faces loitered around me. All I had to do was open my eyes and acknowledge them, and then I’d see them. My acknowledgement would be an invitation to cross some barrier that otherwise separated us.

That’s what I feel now, but of course I don’t want to acknowledge whatever it is. Of course I don’t want anything to do with it. I just want this done. I want to sleep, want to wake up to a day that washes away all the fears and possibilities until they seem nothing but the silly misfirings of an overactive imagination.

The only salvation is that I know these experiences are finite, and that I just have to bear through them.

I close my eyes. It’s so simple a defense, so farcical, but it’s all I have. Closing my eyes shuts out everything, shuts out every possibility, and now I only need to contend with my fear.

Inevitably, I find sleep again.