Sleep Paralysis as My Way In
A Visit On a Warm Summer’s Night
You’re lying in bed half asleep on a serene and warm summer night. The windows are open, and the drapes flutter softly nearby as a gentle breeze rolls in. There’s a pale yellow moon hanging in the hazy night sky, slightly illuminating the white curtains. Everything is peaceful and quiet.
Seemingly out of nowhere, you become aware of something lurking in the dark of the closet. Its form is vaguely human but made of utter blackness with a pair of red eyes looking in your direction. A surge of fear pours out from that corner of the room and crashes over your awareness. Wave after wave comes as the entity inches closer. The intensity of the fear builds and builds as it draws near.
Slowly, it leans over the bed. Its face hovers merely an inch above yours. The fear is so palpable that it’s literally paralyzing. It takes over your entire perception just staring and filling you with dread. After what feels like eternity, you somehow fall asleep.
It Drips From the Ceiling
A couple weeks after moving into an old Viennese apartment building together, you and your friends reveal that you’re all having trouble sleeping. One night, you’re really restless, and you toss and turn more than normal.
At one point, you wake up sensing a strong and terrifying presence watching you from the ceiling. It moves as a black mass and congeals into a large drop near the window that slowly descends to the ground. Its attention is entirely fixed on you. You become convinced that the apartment is haunted. You wake up again a little later unable to move, paralyzed with fear.
Darkest Dreams
When I started to write this, I thought I’ve had only a handful of these experiences. I have a solid recollection of about four of them. However, I did a quick search for “paralysis” through my journals on my laptop just to get details from some recent occurrences. Doing so made me see that I’ve had a bit more than handful. Maybe closer to ten.
The instance I described above that took place on a warm summer’s night probably happened somewhere around 2012 or 2013, and the ceiling version happened while I was living in Vienna in early 2010.
The first instance that I can remember happened in my late teens or early twenties (sometime in the early 00s), and the entity lurched out of a mirror in the basement of my parents’ house. It followed the same pattern as it emitted waves of fear as it came over to hover mere inches above me.
Most of my sleep paralysis experiences involve the typical, large black entity, but not always. There were a few nights in a row back in an older apartment where it felt like two dark-entity kids were trying to break into my bedroom window right by my head. I was paralyzed, and I think I eventually willed myself awake screaming (and drooling) trying to prevent them from getting in.
Another instance involved one of the entities lying down in bed behind me, so I never actually saw it. I couldn’t turn around to face it, though, as I was paralyzed with fear as usual. I definitely remember its weight in my bed. They always come from the sides or corners of the room, though.
Dreams & Demons Into Magic
These encounters mess with time and memory in weird ways, kind of like a dream. In fact, sometimes they twist and bend into memories with other dreams that make it hard to put everything into words. At first, I just considered them extremely odd and very vivid dreams themselves. Nothing more. That is until I learned about a Netflix documentary on sleep paralysis that premiered a few years ago.
The Nightmare captures exactly what it’s like to experience sleep paralysis with these entities. Watching the trailer sent chills down my spine because the descriptions were so similar to what I knew. I had never read about these kinds of experiences and had never even heard of the term “sleep paralysis” before, and yet these people were talking about the identical thing I experienced. What does it mean that so many different people — without having first heard about about them — were all experiencing the same entity? To me, it means that this isn’t “just” our own internal imaginations (and don’t get me started on the West’s relationship with the idea of the “imagination”). It means that these things must exist separate from us.
This realization was mind-blowing for me. It gave me the impetus to start pursuing magic and interacting with the more-than-human world in purposeful ways.
I’m honestly not sure if I would’ve gotten past my status as an armchair magician merely reading about magic and metaphysics had it not been for these entities confirming for me that spirits are are real. It’s one thing to grow up reading about ghosts and UFOs. It’s quite another to have direct experience with an entity that doesn’t conform to our current understanding of consensus, material reality. And when others have similar experiences that confirm your own.. well, it’s off to the magical races, apparently.
What these entities actually are is a very big question. Before we started calling the experience “sleep paralysis,” they were known as hag attacks in different parts of the West. They also mirror experiences with succubi and incubi. Similarly, the word “nightmare” comes from the Old English and Nordic words for a creature known as mara or mare that would fill people with fear and crush them to death by sitting on their chests while they slept.
Some sleep scientists will tell you that these experiences aren’t real, and that they’re just dreams triggered by a lack of quality sleep. That could be true. But why do so many of us describe the exact same entities with the same physical sensations? This flies in the face of the explanation that these experiences are “made up.”
To Sleep Per Chance for a Different Ending
I had another encounter in September of 2020. Interestingly, it ended quite differently.
It was a sunny afternoon, and I was half asleep on my couch . I heard something fall to the ground in the kitchen and roll away. Next, I felt the familiar waves of fear coming from behind me. This time, I knew what was happening, and I wasn’t about to stand for it. I am a self-sufficient motherfucking wizard now partially thanks to the interference of these entities, and I will not be bullied by some asshole thing disturbing my sleep. So, I started to push back with waves of my own energy and somehow forced it back into the kitchen where it vanished. I fell back asleep. I think it was surprised that I was pushing back and didn’t quite know what to do.
I was able to fight the experience off this time since I have a better understanding of what I’m dealing with. Not to mention that my confidence as a magician has grown exponentially the last few years.
Oddly, most of these visits come with a strange hitch when it comes to my stuff moving around the room where I’m sleeping. When I woke up from the visit in Vienna, my iPod had moved from where I usually kept it to another part of my bedroom. With the most recent visit, my iPad was folded up and placed on a table near me when I had typed on it that morning and didn’t remember folding it back up afterwards.
I haven’t had a visit since, but the most recent one was only a year ago. I can’t see any common threads that may trigger these experiences. However, I can say for sure that they’re not place-based, as they’ve happened in different apartments on different continents. Whatever these visits are, they’re a major part of my magical story. The entities’ interactions with me have led me to where I am today, typing this out in a park in North Carolina. After all, we are meaning-making creatures, and it becomes quite difficult disentangling one sentence of your story from a larger paragraph. This is true even if it involves black spirits with red eyes filling you with fear.