severe sleep paralysis is emotionally and physically exhausting. i find the experience too complex and intimate to verbalise still, even after so long with it. trapped in a hallucinatory space between conscious and unconscious, psychotically unaware of whether i am real or a figment of a violent imagination. it takes an eternity to escape from, and leaves me empty and frightened.
sleep paralysis has been documented for at least 300 years - Extract from a 1664 case report from Dutch physician Isbrand Van Diemerbroeck ‘Of the Nightmare:'
"in the night time, when she was composing herself to sleep, sometimes she believed the devil lay upon her and held her down, sometimes that she was choked by a great dog or thief lying upon her breast, so that she could hardly speak or breath and when she endeavoured to throw off the burthen, she was not able to stir her members.”
I know dem feels.