The rain spewed down in angry bursts all day. I've been feeling lethargic for biological reasons beyond my control, so I was in bed most of the day with a book and a journal. I made tea spasmodically. Pretty soon I was dozing off and in the midst of REM sleep (as research tells me this is when it is supposed to occur), I had an episode. Sleep paralysis, for those who are not familiar, is a state of atonia in which one loses ability to perform voluntary movement usually at the onset of sleep or upon awakening. It is often associated with narcolepsy, and while symptoms vary according to the individual some suffer from hypnagogic hallucinations or dream-like mentation. Many describe it as an experience akin to having someone (or, more accurately, something) sit on top of your chest and hold you down. My mother has it too and I've read before that sleep paralysis can be genetic. Hers, however, come with an illusion of a large raven perched atop her toes whereas mine have never been so phantasmagoric.
Today for instance, I woke up with the familiar tingling sensation that you get when your foot falls asleep all along my limbs. I could not move, and speech was all but impossible. I had my first episode in my early teens, and though the first ones scared me now they have become a matter of mere physical discomfort. I have no choice but to be still and wait for it to pass. Irrepressible anger comes over me sometimes, and I try to thrash around in vain, gritting my teeth in the process. Since I've escaped having any hallucinations so far, perhaps I am afraid to find out in what form or shape my deepest fear will be embodied and on which part of my body it will descend to roost.
But as it always is the case, what the period of sleep paralysis does to me is to remind me of my mother. I lie paralyzed in bed and recall her telling me about the raven and I feel strangely reconnected, and I do not know if I am being tied down so much as being anchored.
