Last night I suffered the worst sequence of sleep paralysis episodes in my life. As I noted in some other of my personal entries, I have suffered from sleep paralysis intermittently ever since my adolescence. The first attack occurred when I was fifteen years old, in Valladolid, Spain. The malady came to stay.
In my case, sleep paralysis most frequently comes when, awakened during a regular night of sleep, I try to fall asleep again. The so-called evil presence hallucination is the most frequent one, which manifests itself very vaguely in most cases, though not lacking from time to time an image as concrete as terrifying. Auditory hallucinations are the most common ones; tactile hallucinations, the rarest.
I have so much experience with this horrific phenomenon that I am capable of staying calm and preserve my temper until I am released from its grip. However, the episode often manifests itself in a never-ending loop: I have sleep paralysis, I suffer, I awaken. Then I try to sleep again, I have paralysis, I suffer, I awaken. And so on. This often continues until my will falters and I desist from sleeping again. Perhaps for this reason, however calmly I endure the suffering, the phenomenon causes a great physical and psychological fatigue.
Last night, for the first time in years, my defenses were absolutely broken. A series of extremely bizarre episodes assaulted me, during most of which I was unable to keep my cool. The worst one, by far, went more or less like this.
As I try to fall sleep, the episode ensues. There is a rapid, frantic clatter of claws on the floor—like a swarm of dogs prowling close by. Every sinew of my being is oppressed by the unbearable feeling of being observed by something. My mind speaks: «The devil came». The clattering becomes more loud but now it is not the sound of claws but a duller, more muffled sound, like steps taken by the naked feet of invisible people walking franticly. Then the parade comes: Naked men and women walk like dogs: quadruped, four-footed, insane. I cannot see their faces. Some climb to my bed and move around it, pressing on my legs, abdomen and chest. Though their bodies are anatomically identical to a human's, there is something inhumane about them that goes well beyond the fact that they walk quadrupedally. A spiritual property. They are devilish and it is clear they came from hell. It feels like an eternity but eventually I wake up.
Now, an insensible reader might dismiss these images as fantasies. Yet, he must recall that the individual hallucinating perceives his vision as truly, as concretely, as undeniably as he is perceiving this screen, that sheet of paper, the light and color of the table or sit he occupies, the subtle sensation of his shirt pressed against his sin or the inexplicable whiteness of the moon. There is nothing vague in a vision, at least not during the vision, and whatever vagueness it has is distinguished only afterwards by the examination of the sane mind—just like during a dream the rarest of things are totally natural, and only the vigil's mind deems them fantastic—.
The fact that I was unable to oppose my character to the terrors is not, however, the only remarkable thing about last night's episodes. For the first time, and perhaps due to the many number of episodes and their severe intensity, I was haunted by a strange sense of irreality during the first hours of the waking day. This feeling probably gained its strength from the fact that, repeatedly during the night, as I tried to sleep again, I was not immediately captured by sleep paralysis. Usually, because I would go to sleep dreading the following attack, I would briefly dream before an episode ensued that the day had begun, that I got out of bed and brushed my teeth or made coffee. I felt such relief during these dreams, feeling that the night was over... Only then paralysis came and everything began again. How could I have not felt then, after actually awakening, that I should be assaulted once more, that the concrete matter which surrounded me was of the fabric of dreams?
This was truly a powerful and intense sensation which only goes to show the fragile state of mind I was left with after so many paralyses and strange hallucinations. It made me think of how hard it must be for people who suffer from hallucinations due to psychiatric illness.