Sleep Paralysis — Don’t Move a Muscle
Camp Airy, August ’85, I was eleven years old and spending my first summer away from home. It was a mixed bag to say the least. I wet the bed (twice), made a few friends, got in a couple of fistfights and ate a lot of Slim-Jims. I was not a big hit with the girls (see ‘bed wetting’- also, ‘twice’). I had a dream, moments before waking on the last day of camp in which I was staring at the sun and became acutely aware that I was going to wake up paralyzed. I don’t know how I knew this, but my premonition was correct. I awoke, unable to move, a deafening buzz blasting inside my skull, while my entire body vibrated. I believed I was dying. I told nobody.
Eight years later, I was diagnosed with Narcolepsy at the age of 19 having suffered through a summer where I regularly woke up from terrifying dreams, paralyzed and hallucinating. I spent a night at the New York Presbyterian Hospital Sleep Clinic where I was hooked up to a bevy of hi-tech machinery and monitored by a stereotypically stern Eastern-European woman (“und now vee sleep…”). The diagnosis was not a total surprise. Growing up, I was forever falling asleep at inopportune, not to mention, seemingly impossible, times. I dozed off at a Guns N’ Roses show at Madison Square Garden. Ditto for P-Funk/Funkadelic at the Ritz. I fell asleep standing up while working in a lychee orchard, harvesting the fruit from their trees. In college, I routinely slept through parties in my dorm room. One moment I’d be sitting on my bed or on a couch waiting for people to come over. The next, it was hours later, the room was trashed, everybody was gone and I’d missed the entire thing. I once passed out in the empty basement lounge at Wetlands and woke up to find it throbbing with people, a DJ spinning Drum n’ Bass at full volume. Sometimes I am overtaken by an uncontrollable urge to sleep. If I am able to lie down and shut my eyes, it only takes a short nap to refresh my system.
Unlike some Narcoleptics, I do not experience the phenomenon known as “cataplexy”, which is a sudden loss of muscle tone, causing the person to fall down uncontrollably. I do however, experience sleep paralysis, another common symptom, on a semi-regular basis.
When we dream, our bodies are nearly completely paralyzed. This is known as “REM Atonia”. During the REM (Rapid Eye Movement) stage of sleep, the motor neurons associated with sleep and dreaming are inhibited so that we are unable to physically act out what we are experiencing in dreams. This is seen as the likely reason human beings everywhere report having dreams where they are being chased or in a fight, unable to move their limbs.
Sometimes, I wake up but I am still dreaming. I cannot move, hard as I try, I cannot speak. I feel a loud buzzing in my head while I experience visual and auditory hallucinations. Most commonly of the “there is an intruder in my room” variety. I can hear the sound of doors opening, footsteps in the hallway, indecipherable words. I am aware of a presence and it is not friendly. Never have I awoken in this state to find a cheerful bunny standing over me with bags full of cash. It is always a murderous demon, teeming with bad intentions, threatening my life.
There may well be scientific terminology to describe the way this phenomenon makes me feel. But I’m going to go with fucking horrified. Despite the fact that I’ve been experiencing this for four decades, it is never not so. Doctors have assured me that I am in no danger whatsoever. It doesn’t matter. The hallucinations are so vivid that I believe they’re real every time.
When my wife and I started living together (or having grown-up sleepovers) I developed a technique wherein I would hyperventilate during these episodes. I couldn’t talk or move, but for whatever reason I was able to control my breath. The loud, chaotic breathing would wake her up and she would in turn shake me out of the paralytic-hallucinatory-shit-show. I feel so incredibly vulnerable when this is happening, so it made me feel safer to know that there was somebody there to look after me, to make sure I was OK. She showed genuine concern whenever it happened and would gently rock me back to sleep.
Then, our daughter was born. Her crib was in the bedroom with us. If one of the hairs on her head fell out, it would wake my wife. She was perfectly attuned to our daughter’s state of well-being. Less so to mine. So whenever Murder McDemonhead would arrive to rip the heart out of my terrified, paralyzed chest, my hyperventilating fits next to her in the (double!) bed had absolutely no impact. She has been sleeping through my terrorized episodes for the last five years. In July, she gave birth to our second child. Now we share a bedroom with him. Again, if he grows a freckle in his sleep it will wake her up. Recently, I awoke, paralyzed and, atypically, screaming. I was aware that it was happening, but was powerless to stop it. This woke her up. And she was really pissed off. “What are you doing?” she said, angrily poking me in the ribs. “What? What’s happening? Why are you so mad?” I said, still half-asleep. “You’re going to wake the baby. Stop screaming.” Now, I don’t really fault her. I’m sure I scared her half to death. And, to her point, waking the baby would actually have been worse than being hunted by imaginary monsters. There is perhaps no better descriptor of the honeymoon being over than a wife’s developed immunity to the sound of her husband, believing his life is in danger, hyperventilating a couple of inches away.
Narcolepsy is not curable. There are drugs, which I am not particularly interested in taking. Consistently getting a good night’s sleep is helpful. Sadly, having young children doesn’t create a conducive “restful sleep” environment. There is a part of me that feels fortunate to have access to this sort of inner, imaginary, terror. As long as I can’t be harmed, there is a certain thrill in experiencing fear of this magnitude. It’s akin to suddenly starring in a thirty-second horror film. As soon as the director calls cut, the movie is over, nobody is worse for wear and I get to go back to sleep.
I do worry that my five-year-old daughter is Narcoleptic and am reasonably sure that my dad was too. He and my mom were married for forty-four years. But, if you subtract the amount of time he spent asleep in movie theaters, Broadway theaters, at home in front of the TV or the homes of friends who were entertaining them, it was more like thirty-nine years. My daughter wakes up screaming a couple of times most nights. She is unable to explain why and usually goes right back to sleep. It’s not a stretch to presume she might be hallucinating about demons and is unable to move. At least, if that is the case, when she’s old enough to verbalize what she’s experiencing, I can explain it all to her. Maybe we’ll slay some dragons together. Or, at the very least, hyperventilate loudly in each other’s paralyzed presence.
