As all sleep paralysis or night terror sufferers will tell you, there’s nothing more real than their nightmares…

 

From Buzzfeed, an excellent piece on the mystery and the terror:

 

Can You Die From A Nightmare?

by Doree Shafrir

 

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“It is the middle of the night, and there is something very wrong in my apartment. I leap up from my bed and rush to the closet and crouch down and throw aside my shoes, which are arranged on a rack on the floor. I know I must work quickly; I am breathing fast and hard. There?—?there, behind the shoes, I see it: I don’t know what it is, but it needs to come out, or I am going to die. I pull and pull and finally get it out.

 

But something is still wrong. I am now completely panicked, and I jump back onto my bed and lean over the half-wall that my bed is up against, overlooking the hallway. There, I see what’s causing all the problems, and I push it downward and off the wall with all my might. It shatters loudly, glass flying everywhere.

 

Then, finally, I wake up. My two dogs are cowering in the corner, and I put on shoes to sweep up the glass. I am confused and embarrassed, though there is no one besides the dogs there to see that I just pushed a framed poster off a wall and broke it. I clean up the glass and go back to sleep, and it is not until the morning, when I see my shoes scattered everywhere, that I look into the closet and realize that I have also ripped the TV cable completely out of the back wall of my closet.

 

These brief but incredibly vivid nightmares happen for years: they’re never quite so violent as that first one, which happened around 2003, but almost always as scary. I don’t know what to call them, but they become a familiar part of bedtime, and there are times when I am afraid to go to bed because I know that just as I start to fall asleep, I will be jolted aware in a state of sheer terror. Then, just as suddenly as they start, they ebb for a time, and I wonder if I’ve gotten better. But they always come back.

 

Here are some other things I’ve believed in the middle of the night:

They are monitoring my breathing. If I don’t hold my breath and stay completely still, I am going to die. I am not allowed to move at all, or they will know, and they will kill me…”

 

For the rest, click here.

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