I had just been
dumped by Her Whose Name We Don't Pronounce and considered myself a failure of
epic proportions. I hated my life, I hated her even more, and figured hell
couldn't be much worse. Not that I actually believed there was such a thing as
hell. But did that stop me from writing about the hottest place in town, a
place so hot it made Venus seem like a popsicle in your favorite butthole? No,
it didn't, and pardon my Swedish. I must be temporarily possessed. I'm positive
I was back then. All I did was write angry poetry and thumbtack each poetic
outburst to the walls of my pathetic little room. The place was like a shrine
devoted to the emptiness of nothing. Deep down inside I knew one of the reasons
why She Whose Name We Don't Pronounce had left me was her deep-seated hatred
for my unrelenting blues. I sighed. I cursed. I felt hollow. I fell asleep.
I woke up.
It was three A.M. My ceiling looked great. So peaceful and white. Life... was
great. Life... And then it hit me. She is gone. Everything
you thought you had you have no more. Life is different now. That ceiling
looks... and then it happened. I felt a presence in my room. (I feel
my eyes tear up just typing this.) I felt the hairs on my body stand up. I kept
staring at the ceiling. I had no choice. I couldn't move. There was somebody.
Somebody was looking at me. I tried to move my head so I could see. I couldn't.
I tried to scream. I couldn't. I tried to whisper, 'Mama, there is someone in
my room,' but nothing happened. I was paralyzed. The thing just stood there,
looking down on me. It was big and ugly. It seemed to feed on my despair. It
was black and white and grey just standing there on the left side of my bed,
challenging my peripheral vision as if knowing exactly how much I could and
couldn't see. I was cold. I was terrified, tears rolling down my cheeks, and it
kept looking at me, staring at me, up close. I felt small and meaningless. I
tried to make a sound. I could move my eyes but not my body. My legs were dead.
My arms, they weighed a ton. My hands were there — I could feel them. I had to
do something. I had to find a way to make a sound and wake the others. Is
this me? Am I the deer that's caught in the headlights? Except there
was no light. The thing was so big I had a hard time believing it could be
standing there and not hit the ceiling. It just looked at me and looked at me
and looked at me. If only I could move my right hand or maybe just a finger and
touch the radiator and make a sound that everyone would hear. I gathered all my
strength. I concentrated on my index finger. It was hard. It was surreal. How
hard could it be to move that finger? Any finger? Forget he's there.
Concentrate. Move that finger. Move that finger. Move it, damn it! CLANG!
And poof... it was gone, never to return. I could move again. I could speak
again, and whoever I told this story of course didn't believe me.
I wiped my eyes. I tried to rationalize what I had witnessed. I knew it wasn't
a dream. I just knew. That same day I called Dorothy, a friend of mine, and
told her what had happened. Dorothy I knew was a spiritual woman. She was the
most spiritual woman in town. Unlike me, she believed in God and angels and had
told me more often than I had cared to listen that hell was very real indeed.
She knew every religious song in the book and prayed on a regular basis. She
was a Christian woman. Yes, sir, if there was anyone who would believe my
story, it had to be Dorothy. But she didn't believe me. She assumed it had all
been a dream. A nightmare. She reasoned away the likelihood of my alleged
encounter and told me to forget about it. Well, more or less. I thought that
was very ironic. The most religious person in town did not believe I'd been
visited by an evil... something. Isn't it ironic? I said, 'You all believe in
the devil, but when I of all people tell you he was standing right next to me,
it had to have been a dream. That's just great.' That week I went to church,
the first time in years. I cried so many tears you'd have thought I'd soon be
running out of them, which, frankly, I did.
Seven years down the line I watched the movie Contact (1997)
starring Jodie Foster. Toward the end of the movie, the character she played —
a scientist who refused to believe in God unless there was proof — tried to
convince everyone around her she had experienced something extraordinary,
something she, a scientist, could not explain, something she would have
consigned to the realm of fantasy and dreams had anyone told her the exact same
story. She said, 'I had... an experience. I can't prove it. I can't even
explain it. All I can tell you is that everything I know as a human being,
everything I am — tells me that it was real.' I could relate.
Fast forward to August 2015. I realize there are more people who have been
through the same thing. There's even a name for it. Sleep paralysis. I've read
the scientific explanation. 'Sleep paralysis is a parasomnia resulting from
dysfunctional overlap of the REM and waking stages of sleep.' That makes
perfect sense to me. When we're asleep our muscles relax and when there's a
problem you may end up being awake, mentally, when your body isn't yet. What it
doesn't explain is the shadow man leaning
over our collective bed. It doesn't tell me why everyone is seeing an evil
being that stares them in the face. What if these scientists are wrong? What if
all the clues are there but I'm too blind to see? I don't want to rush toward
the end of my life realizing I've lived my life like a blind man playing with
his stick. What makes me sick is that I smugly feel the experience has made me
special in some way, but at the same time it's terrifying to relive that night
all over again and to suspect there was more to it than what scientists are
trying to make me believe.
This much I do know: fear should not be a reason to believe. Am I wrong?
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