18

I wake to malevolence.

The room is peculiarly sepia. I can only guess that the time is early morning. There’s no rationality now. Panic attacks produce fear, but that’s internalized. This exists everywhere – I am immersed in a terror that is absolute.

I can’t move.

I can’t breathe.

I can’t escape.

Strangely, when the Aropax was instigating parasomnia episodes, it was driving me out of the bed. Now I’m locked in here.

It’s ten years ago. I haven’t had a sleep paralysis episode for over thirty years. Right now, I can’t even reconcile that’s what’s happening.

Then a greater truth presents itself.

There’s somebody to my right.

Somebody cold but gleefully amused at my predicament, somebody preying on my horror, somebody that’s not human or anything that I can conceptualize in my limited imagination.

Something.

Because although I’m sure I always knew or sensed or felt that whatever’s watching me wasn’t another person, I’m sure now if I could turn and see this thing, the scope of what it is would so far exceed the parameters of my understanding that it would cripple every facet of my mind.

It takes delight in this connection, in something that’s naked because, right now, there are no filters between us – none of the skepticism of a conscious mind, none of the distractions of the everyday world, not even the light of day diluting the dread into something seemingly inconsequential.

All it takes, all it wants, is this one final connection for me to look, to see it, and then this escalates to another realm I just can’t imagine, so I’m thankful I can’t move, although I wonder if it’s the sleep paralysis, or if the fear’s made me catatonic.

I close my eyes, clench them shut until they hurt, and then it’s just sleep – I don’t know how; I can only guess it’s some self-defense mechanism that some part of my subconscious mind activates.

Maybe we all have it – this inbuilt protection that shields us from the things that we’re not meant to see or know, and people who experience anything preternatural, anything psychic, get to peek fleetingly behind the veil.

When I wake in the morning, the episode has left an unease which transforms into incredulity, and then I scoff at the absurdity of it all. It’s just like the way nightmares seem stupid during the day.

But there remains an anchor here, a warning of some sort, that this isn’t, and nor should it be, so obliviously dismissed, and that a caution remains – in the early morning hours, when all the pragmatism of the mind has shut down to recharge, some things are possible, and just awaiting their opportunity.

The night invites a new reality.