PANDORA
10.21.20
i fear you’ve seen me un-done
Sleep paralysis is rooted in problems with REM sleep. There are two categories of sleep one experiences throughout the night: rapid eye movement (REM) and non-REM sleep.
i read somewhere that the reasons we don’t sleep at night, are the same reasons we don’t truly live during the day. i try not to think too much about what that means for people like me.
During REM, however, a person’s eyes will dart back and forth, but voluntary muscles are paralyzed (think your legs, not your heart). Kushida says this stage is when about 90% of dreams occur. Brain activity is similar to when a person is awake.
like your bed, or mine – all wrinkles and un-made sheets. Or the tealights on your dresser, or how the clothes i never folded in the starlight still kiss your floor good morning.
It’s coming out of REM sleep, when a person’s voluntary muscles are still paralyzed, that a person could experience an episode of sleep paralysis.
it terrifies me.
About 75% of the time, those experiencing sleep paralysis will hallucinate. “Most of the time, we’ll hear that it’s something frightening,” Kushida says.
to see you watch me frantically picking up pieces of well ironed habits. the things that fall apart shine a light on my ever so fucking precarious relationship with panic. i loose grasp of my anatomy the more time i spend in those in-betweens, watch cognizance slip from daylights, sense me crawl deeper into daydreams empty of structure or meaning. At some point they’re just open eyes making colors out of objects, a headache that doesn’t know where to hurt anymore, routine speech patterns slurred by sheer automation. in my comforts, i like to think myself disciplined enough to flip through pages of subtext. To place bets on arm wrestles between me and my imagination.
In fact, the hallucinations typical of sleep paralysis are frequently influenced by a person’s culture and described in terms of “paranormal activity.” There are descriptions from Newfoundland of an “Old Hag,” or witch sitting on the person’s body. In Japanese folklore, the same phenomenon is called kanashibari, which means “bound in metal.” Some researchers think sleep paralysis is to blame for reports of alien abductions.
that all means nothing. not when the aftershocks of grappling night fantasies leave you fog-irresponsive to mornings’ basic questions. im scared you saw me prism, and now you know me puzzle. not the pretty kind, either; pieces barbarically shoved into each-other to hold together the semblance of human. there’s remarkable shame in showing belly. i wanted so badly to make-belief i’d made habits out of power crafted substance; imagine the mortification when they’re exposed as nothing more than survival tactics. After all, what kind of person needs to make a bed?
This prevalence across cultures makes sense in light of Pennsylvania researchers’ systematic review of scientific studies across a 50-year period. The review estimates that 8% of the general population has one episode of sleep paralysis in the course of their lifetime. The study found that this number is variable within populations. For example, more than 30% of psychiatric patients had an episode of sleep paralysis, and the disorder is most common in adolescents.
im scared of the things you know now. the differences between you and i. you give up control, because you had control to give. i play hostage to my own brain, it holds me down at night. shows me faceless figures, cuts my lungs in half. it gags silent desperate hysterics while holding down wrists and ankles. the type that would make even the bravest person alive panic at shutting their eyes.
“Researchers are hoping to one day locate the genetic markers for the disorder, which has been shown to run in families.”
what scares me the most, however – is your collarbone. how it cradled my head in the throws of (what i hoped was) my country’s invisible (no one wants to see that shit) battlefield (i wish i could unsee it). chest-cavities turned pillows humming heartbeat lullabies in my ears. steady, repetitive, constant. it turns war-zone landscapes to sheep fields, and there’s no wolf here. Instead, the bruise i left on your shoulder levels with eyes choosing to see past aberrations– it skips, giddy joyous into sprinkler water as if saying “today you can’t, so ill soak it in for us both.”
“As of now, there is no cure.”
“For there is nothing quite so terror-inducing as the loss of sleep. It creates phantoms and doubts, causes one to questions one’s own abilities and judgement, and, over time, dismantles, from within, the body.”
― Charlie Huston, Sleepless