25

I wake to a sudden weight that lands on my chest.

Something has sprung on me and seized me.

In the darkness, I shout and push, feeling immediate resistance. Then I thrust my hands out, flinging whatever’s on me to the floor by the window. I squint and I’m sure I can make out some shadowy form.

More and more, consciousness takes hold. The last tendrils of sleep lose their grip on me. All the typical rationalizations kick in and, as they kick in, whatever I’m seeing fades.

A dream. A dream. A dream.

So cliché, but it’s the easy out, and the simplest way to classify what happened as dismissible.

But I know what I felt – the sudden weight as something landed on me, the pressure of it on me, and the resistance when I threw it from me.

There’s nothing I can see now. I don’t check the time, but it feels like 2.00 or 3.00am.

I remain upright, looking.

Waiting.

Some weeks after my best friend died, I woke to the feeling of a presence in the room, but there was no fear. The bed depressed next to me, as if she’d sat down. I was bizarrely tranquil. I was sure this was a visitation, a check-in, to let me know it was going to be okay.

Some months later, just as I was drifting off, I heard somebody knock inside the bedroom. That frightened me, and I sat upright, just as I was doing now, trying to determine if I’d had a hypnagogic hallucination, or if somebody was inside my bedroom. It was a long time before I slept again.

Now, I’m somewhere in-between, but can’t work out if it’s my initial trepidation ceding to calm, if I feel I should be alarmed because of the time, or if I’ve just become semi-indifferent to these nightly happenings.

I should turn on the lamp and do a proper check, but feel almost as if that’ll give validity to something I shouldn’t give validity to.

While I have certain beliefs about what happens after death, I’m not concrete about them. Mostly, they’re born from the inability to imagine – not accept, but imagine – what it’d be like to not exist anymore. My brain just can’t process it.

But for a while now, I feel closer to something that’s not part of our world as we know it, and if there are logical explanations – such as hypnagogic hallucinations, or sleep paralysis – they’re labels that try to explain, to somehow compartmentalize, something that we just don’t have the knowledge, science, or headspace to reconcile yet.

It feels like I’ve become too aware and something else is opening up, and it sits beyond science – either something otherworldly, or perhaps just something like a mind twisting itself until it’s grown warped and unreliable.

I don’t know.

Not yet, anyway.

I lay back down and again try to find sleep.