Night Terrors

Leslie Anderson Wells

Word Count 1919

I was eight years old when I watched the 1985 music video for “Don’t Come Around Here No More” by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. I was captivated by the nightmare version of Wonderland, where Tom Petty, as the Mad Hatter, terrorizes Alice in chaotic scenes I couldn't entirely understand. Nothing could have prepared me for the ending of the video, when we see Alice strapped to a table: her limbs remain her own but her torso has been transformed into a giant cake. She helplessly wiggled her hands and feet as I watched with increasing anxiety. The other characters gathered around her, wielding forks and knives, and they proceeded to eat her body with relish, stuffing pieces into their gaping and overflowing mouths. 

As I tried to fall asleep that night, I couldn't stop thinking of Alice. I imagined what it would feel like to be tied down while strange people sliced off bits of me like my body was an ever-diminishing birthday cake. But I already knew something about what it felt like to be terrified and unable to move.

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I wake up and there’s a demon on my chest. My eyes are closed, but I know it’s there. I can feel it weighing me down, the size of a half-grown child. I cannot breathe. I cannot move. I try to make the smallest motion: to twitch an eyebrow, an eyelid, a little toe. I struggle to call out, to scream. My effort is so intense that I feel I must be screaming; I am calling for my mother across the hall. Despite the intensity of my effort, I know that I’m not making any sound at all. My mother cannot hear me, she will not know how much I need her. No one will save me. I am alone, except for the demon on my chest.

I manage to open my eyes. There is no demon. But I feel its weight on my chest and I can hear its breathing and I know it is still there. Even though my body is still paralyzed, I can move my eyes. The light is dim, but I see shadows of the clothes I wore yesterday thrown on the dresser. On the nightstand, I see three half-read books, a half-empty glass of water. Everything is just as it should be, except that something terrifying is in the room with me, something is smothering me, holding me down, and I cannot do anything about it. 

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The first time it happened, I was seven years old. I dreamed that I was walking with my father. I was used to walking with my father in the woods. He was a skilled bowhunter, and once he let me accompany him as he tracked whitetail deer in the woods across the street from our house. He dressed me in a camouflage wool shirt, painted my face with green and brown grease paint, and even sprayed me with something that was supposed to keep the deer from detecting us. It smelled awful, and I loved it. 

Things were different in my dream: there were no trees, and I felt uneasy in the open landscape stretching to the horizon. But I followed my father, like I always did, and we walked until we came to a narrow ditch. My father stepped over it without breaking his stride, and I knew I could skip over it with ease, but as I leapt toward the other side the ditch grew wider and wider, and my stomach told me I was falling in, and as I fell a strange lizard with a gaping mouth and no teeth appeared and bit my calf. The toothless bite didn’t hurt, but it rendered me completely immobile. I tried to call out to my father, who was a few steps away, but I was unable to make a sound. The lizard climbed onto my chest and I was helpless, my father walking away as I lay paralyzed, dying silently in a ditch.

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A doctor explained the sleep cycle to me, drawing diagrams on her prescription pad. She described sleep paralysis, how it happens when a person, either when falling asleep or waking, temporarily experiences an inability to move. She told me it happens when one becomes aware before the deepest part of sleep, the REM cycle, is complete, so the muscles are still in a state of paralysis even though the person is, in fact, awake; the mind and the body are simply out of sync. She told me it is a phenomenon that affects many people at some point in their lives. She told me it is harmless. She told me to remind myself it is only a disruption of the sleep cycle and that the hallucinations are not real. She smiled and said not to worry. I felt like a little girl being told there are no monsters under my bed.

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For most of my life, I fought the urge to sleep. I stayed up late reading. I wrote in my journal. I crawled out of bed to watch B-movies with my father when he got home late from work at the mill. I dyed my hair pink. I went on late-night jogs and early-morning walks. I tried to meditate, and struggled to twist my body into awkward yoga poses. I drank foul-tasting herbal teas. I sat at the window looking out at the headlights of passing cars, wondering where they were going. 

Sometimes, when I still lived in my childhood home, I would take a blanket and a pillow and go out to sleep in the yard. One night I woke up, disoriented, to find a fat green worm crawling across my cheek. Another night I woke up and there was a deer watching me, her black eyes impassive and unforgiving. 

Once, in college, I saw a pack of skinny coyotes trotting down the street behind my dorm in southern California. When I moved to Portland, I liked to walk around downtown in the middle of the night. Maybe I should have been scared, but I never was. A French bakery opened at 5 a.m. and I'd go in and order coffee and one of the first chocolate croissants of the day, still warm and oozing. 

I never told anyone about these late nights and early mornings. The things you see when you are alone and sleepless are yours and yours alone. 

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Someone once asked me what my center was, the thing that held me together, the part of me that indicated when something was going wrong. What was my measure, the gauge? Some people feel their center at their stomach, she said; stress, for them, manifests in nausea or stomach cramps. Others feel it in their heads; they suffer from blinding headaches.

For me, I always knew my center was sleep. If I was having problems or feeling unstable, it would reveal itself in disturbances in my sleep: insomnia, wakeful hours, nightmares, the demon on my chest. 

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In my mid-30s, I began to think about sleep almost all the time. From the moment I woke up, groggy, stumbling toward the coffee pot, I would be thinking about when I could go back to bed. Throughout the day, I calculated the number of hours of sleep I could get. I devised ways of structuring my day so I could take a two-hour, three-hour, four-hour nap. No matter what was happening, I would rather be sleeping. The only thing I looked forward to was the relief of falling into the thick-dark-sticky-soft sweetness of sleep. 

I was greedy. Forget eight hours; ten was not enough. I could sleep for 11 hours and still take a nap in the afternoon. I often got so exhausted by noon that I was physically unable to get through the day without taking a nap. I went to my car to sleep for an hour or two, and took naps on the floor of an unused office at work. 

I craved sleep like an addict. Like drugs or sex. All I could think about was when I would get my next fix. I was ashamed of my longing, but I couldn’t stop it.

Just this one last time, I’d tell myself. I’ll just take this one last nap, and I’ll stop, I swear.

I drank gallons of coffee to try to get through the day.  But still, a veil would come down, like the curtain falling at the end of a play. The world grew dim and hazy, I couldn't concentrate, and I had to sleep. It simply wasn’t an option. The need to sleep was such an intense physical longing that it was a kind of pain. 

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The doctors didn’t appear all that concerned. Yes, we’re all tired, they seemed to be thinking. But some of us don’t complain about it. I was told to eat more raw vegetables. To exercise. To give up coffee. To stop taking naps.

So I sneaked naps like cigarettes, ashamed. I scheduled my days around my naps and my early bedtime. My days were shorter, and I spent almost every hour of them reaching toward sleep.

During this time, I discovered I had superpowers in my dreams. I still had the occasional nightmare, but I learned to take control of it and eliminate anything that frightened me. I could vanquish all evil. With a simple gesture, I gathered the malignancy in a villain and sent it scuttling off like a harmless crab. In my dreams I could make anything happen. Anything at all.

I turned to face the villains and monsters that pursued me. I reasoned with them so eloquently that they yielded to my irrefutable logic. We talked, they apologized, we shook hands or even embraced, and we amicably parted ways.

Once I dreamed a terrible series of events that culminated in the closing scene of a Shakespeare tragedy, everyone dead and crumpled—and then I uttered a few words, and everyone sprang back to life, and nothing bad had ever happened, and everyone broke into song. 

Awake, I did not face the things that frighten me. I did not convince my adversaries to leave me in peace. Those who died did not come back. No one broke into song.

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Eventually I was thinking so much about my dreams that my dream memories seemed just as real as my memories from waking life, perhaps even more real. How would I know otherwise?

And then I began to feel that my dreams were what really mattered, not what was considered waking reality. In dreams, the world shone with a bright gleam of consequence that I didn't experience during the day. The world was so much bigger, and stranger, and more significant while I was dreaming.

Awake, I was weighed down by what I should be doing, and by what I knew I could not do. In dreams, I was weighed down by nothing. I could make things happen. I could bring things into being. I could fashion a horse out of a pebble I found on the shore. I could fly.

Look, I wanted to say to the people in my dreams. Just look at what I can do.

But all too soon I would be pulled from sleep. I'd start counting the hours until I could go back to the place that had become more necessary and beautiful than anything that could ever happen when I was awake.

Sometimes, I admit, I'm still not sure which is more real.

Leslie lives next to a creek on the ancestral homelands of the Watlala people, a Chinookan-speaking tribe, in Gresham, Oregon. She has a B.A. and M.A. in English, and was a 2015-2016 Atheneum Fellow in Nonfiction at the Attic Institute in Portland. She is currently working on a collection of prose poetry and flash nonfiction.