Seven Oaks Magazine.

You forget how powerful words can be until you wake up one night completely paralysed, unable to control your lungs, and overwhelmingly incapable of calling for help. When I was 16 years old and only mildly under the romantic influence of science fiction shows like The X-Files, and alien abduction movies like Fire In the Sky, I woke up in the middle of the night convinced that I was under the influence of some alien force.

In my bedroom, on my back and under my covers, completely unable to twitch a single muscle, I awoke convinced that I was somehow suffering from a serious illness. But when I tried calling out to my mother, who slept light and would hear my practiced call, I wasn’t able to take the prescribed deep pre-yelling breath. I wasn’t able to even vocalise the tiniest peep.

I knew I wasn’t asleep, and I became vaguely aware that something didn’t ‘feel right’ about my room. That’s when I saw the shapes: At both corners of the far end of my bed, against a blank white wall, there were two fuzzy dark shadows where I was sure there shouldn’t have been any. Maybe one was a sweater, hanging on top of my desk chair, I thought. But no, I could see my desk chair in the corner. I tried yelling for my mom again, and failed.

The harder I tried to inhale, the more helpless I realised I was. My adrenaline-stricken heart started booming, but my breathing rate was painfully steady. I felt the beginnings of suffocation, and the shadows – now two menacing figures – were watching me. I didn’t want to believe that they were aliens who were restraining me with a force-field, but what else could explain what was happening to me? Inside my head, I was screaming. My lungs felt ready to burst, my head was swirling with hurricanes, my heart was pumping hard and fast and then suddenly, after a virtual eternity, the spell was broken.

Through my straining and panicking I jerked upright, gasped, and gulped down the air I’d been lacking. The room brightened up to reveal that there was nothing – and no one – there.

I didn’t dare tell anyone about my ‘close encounter.’ Either my family would dismiss my very real terror, insisting that I must have been dreaming, or they would actually believe that I had been awake through it all – just gone mad as well.

For a long time it didn’t happen again but I was still haunted by the experience. Trying to find another soul whose experience mirrored my own, I would stay up late typing into the early Internet search engines phrases like “unable to breathe and paralysed and presence in room,” but I never found any relevant results. It wasn’t until I came across a television documentary that was attempting to debunk alien abduction accounts that I heard of a phenomenon called “sleep paralysis.” I immediately felt a wave of relief, and knew I had found a word, a vocabulary – a language even – to begin describing what had happened to me.

Sleep paralysis, as it turns out, is a natural state of the body. When we’re in deeper states of sleep, our brain stems engage in processes that block out certain neurotransmitters in order to stop us from physically acting out our dreams. Sometimes people wake up before their brains have completely de-activated the induced paralysis, and experience hallucinations which are thought to be either vestigial dream fragments or attempts by the brain to reconcile the waking state with the otherwise unexplainable muscular paralysis.

On the internet, there is a growing store of new and old anecdotal reporting of sleep paralysis episodes spanning time, geography, and language. The most interesting outcome of this story-sharing is how the sleep paralysis experience seems to manifest itself in culturally-relevant terms and mythologies: For me, in 1995, my sleep paralysis was a visitation by aliens, whereas my grandparents would likely have seen ghosts, and my old English, Russian, Welsh, and Irish ancestors would have witnessed witches or demons, incubus and all.

Assistant professor at University of Waterloo Al Cheyne has studied a number of accounts of sleep paralysis and keeps a comprehensive online resource page, which lists similarities and trends among sufferers – like the tendency for the experiences to begin in teenage years. From his research, it would seem that I’m actually in good company – he reports that up to 40 per cent of the Canadian population may have experienced, as Newfoundlanders might say, a visit from the ‘Old Hag,’ or as you would say in Inuktitut: “agumangia.”

Looking for more ways to describe sleep paralysis, I was incredibly shocked to learn that the English word “nightmare” refers to a suffocating goblin of old lore – the old English “ mære, ” Norse “mara,” or proto-Germanic “maron.” In French, the word for bad dreams is “cauchemar,” or the very same crushing and trampling (“caucher”) spirit.

With words as my weapons, I’ve finally been able to start discussing my recurring experiences of waking sleep paralysis with family and friends: A few times, I’ve been gifted to receive a relieved reply of “that’s happened to me too!” It’s incredibly assuaging for all of us sufferers to know that there is nothing abnormal about “being hagged.” And as for me, I’m not as terrified now that I can put a name – several names, really – to my demon.