Lockjaw

Last night I met with sleep paralysis again. It was inevitable, but I didn't know it was going to happen until I actually went to sleep. Silly me, I went to bed around 3:30 in the morning. Come to think of it, I wonder if it'll happen again tonight, because I'm up late and I took a nap earlier today (how do I manage to forget about triggers?)......


I talk about lockjaw in this post, but for the record, it's not the medically-defined tetanus kind of lockjaw that I have in mind (so if you're Googling it right now -- it's not that).
I do get lockjaw sometimes, but it hasn't happened in a couple of years. Basically, if I open my mouth too wide when I yawn, my jaw gets dislocated (I guess that's what happens), and I can't close my mouth (it hurts to try, and I can feel the strain on my muscles and bones). I panic every time that happens, but years of dealing with this problem has taught me that it can be fixed by shoving my thumbs in my mouth and actually positioning the lower jaw back in place. Gross, right? 
Sounds painful -- and it can be if you don't do it right, but I try to tell myself it's like chiropractics
(which doesn't actually help much, because that makes me just as nervous)....


sleep paralysis + lockjaw = nightmare




Me: you should sleep. are you sleepy?

Me: OMG btw i had sleep paralysis again last night

Matt: not really

Matt: tell me about it

Me: i slept on my side so that i WOULDN'T get it

Me: but it was so strong and unavoidable that it happened anyway

Me: i could feel it coming

Me: so when i was falling asleep, i got that tingly and panicked feeling

Me: so i tried to control it, but i couldn't; i fell into a dream

Me: i dreamt that i had lockjaw with my mouth open, and someone was forcing it shut

Me: so i thought i was going to break my jaw

Me: that's not the first time i've had that feeling during sleep paralysis

Me: i closed my mouth, and dreamt that i cracked my jaw

Me: but once my mouth was closed, it was still locked. this time, it was locked shut

Me: and i was clenching my teeth so strongly that i could feel all of my nerves in my mouth
        starting to ache

Me: so i got out of bed and went over to the mirror in anjel's room

Me: i got out of the lockjaw and opened my mouth to look at my teeth

Me: and they were all broken and ground down to the nerves

Me: i could see the pulp in the hollow parts, and they were all bleeding

Me: i could even taste the blood, it was so painful

Me: but i went back to bed and tried to go back to sleep to wake myself up, because i knew it
        wasn't real

Matt: you seriously have the worst fucking dreams!

Me: as i was trying to wake myself up, whatever was forcing my mouth shut in the beginning
       came back

Me: and started shaking my shoulder violently

Me: i had to wrench myself out of sleep paralysis at that point

Me: and when i did, i actually turned around on my back and started gasping for air

Me: i was about to scream, but i didn't because anjel was asleep

Me: my dreams are awesome, and they make for good stories.. but it's such a pain when
         they're so REAL

Matt:   :-\ 

Me: because then i feel stuff like that

Me: and it's not fun

Me: for someone who's never been clawed by monsters or had her teeth ground down to the
         pulp, i find it frighteningly intriguing that my mind can simulate those sensations

Matt: your mind is insane :-P

Me: it is, isn't it?

Matt: i love it

Me: i have this notion that my mind is timeless

Me: that my imagination was mature for me when i was younger

Me: now it's more my age

Me: and when i'm old, my dreams at night will still be young

Me: but i also think it's like that for everyone

Headless and Hunched

I must have taken four or five naps yesterday.... BAD. IDEA.

At night, I lay in bed for a few minutes, getting myself settled in and comfortable. Then I closed my eyes and tried to remain lucid. For some reason, it didn't occur to me that I would be hit by sleep paralysis -- all I was concerned with was being able to trigger lucid dreaming and take advantage of it. So yes, this entire story is my own doing.

So there I was in bed, forming my own dream. I decided to go back to DC.

Everything was dark.

I could see my friends in the distance, but as I walked closer to them, I could make out their faces and sensed something was off (it's strange, how I can do all this in my head and yet forget that I'm doing it... I was lucid this entire time, consciously making decisions to go here or there, to bring this person into the dream or make them leave, but I forgot that it was all because I was asleep).

Their faces were different. Only slightly, but just enough that I felt odd. And the air was too perfect. I could feel my whole body tingling with the preface of sleep paralysis and thought, "Uh-oh............"

I spent what felt like the next few hours going around campus and hanging out with friends. At one point, I made them carry me on their shoulders through the halls of random dorms....

When I climbed back down from their shoulders, the scene changed without my willing it. I was alone in the dark hallways, and heard people's voices behind closed doors. The tingling sensation grew more intense, and I could hear the buzzing of electricity becoming louder and louder. Paralysis was coming.

So I walked along, telling myself I could do whatever I wanted. But I was having trouble holding on to my control.

I opened a door and found two of my guy friends in the room playing video games. So I sat down beside one of them and put my hand on his back to let him know I was there.
"Hey!" he said as he turned around to face me. His features were stretched apart just a little too much. Or his eyes were tilted half a degree more than they should have been.

Who was I looking at, again?

At any rate, I talked to him a bit and let him continue his game. I still had my hand on his shoulder, so I rubbed it up and down a couple of times and was about to say, "It's good to see you again,"

but then I was hit with the most unusual observation.

That was the realest thing I'd sensed in the dream so far.

I could feel every fiber of his shirt beneath my fingers as my hand moved across it. For a while, I couldn't define what it was, but it hit me hard. So hard that I was paralyzed by it. So hard that as I stared at the game on the screen, I could feel my world fading around me and saw something completely different.

I was in bed.

But I was still sitting on the couch next to my friend....still with my hand on his back, trying to figure out what I was touching.

What was I really touching?

My hand was lifted up; I could feel gravity. As I was dreaming, I was doing the same motions in bed. So what was I touching in real life?

I managed to open my eyes enough to see something by my legs.

Something was sitting on me, hunched over and facing the window beside the bed. It was a man wearing a dress shirt. As I continued to feel the shirt with my hand, my vision became clearer.

It was Matt.

My vision became clearer.

He was hunched over and dead. Headless.

My hand was still on his back.

My hand was still on my friend's back, and we were playing video games.

My hand was still on Matt's back....

My hand was still on this dead man's back.....

I tried to pull it back and move away as far as I could, but was frozen.

I'm not awake. Oh God, I'm not awake, I can't be.

I wasn't. As I struggled to open my eyes, I saw him doubly. First as a headless man. Simultaneously, as a naked monster with pale skin. Pale as the shirt on his body that disappeared.

Struggling to move, I managed to scream. My voice was muffled, though, and I wasn't sure if it was in my head or in real life. Either way, I screamed as loud as I could. If I was really screaming, I hoped that someone would hear me and wake me up. But no one came. Was I simply whimpering?

The headless monster lifted its long, bony arms and reached for my shoulders. It scratched me with dirty claws. It scratched me, and I felt it. That's what really terrified me and caused me to scream some more.

But I finally managed to move my legs. I kicked and kicked to get it off of me, but that only made it angry....

I finally gained enough control to defend myself, frantically fall out of bed, and pull my body over to Anjel's side of the room.

I'm awake. I have to be awake.

Didn't want to turn around. I crawled over to Anjel, who was still sleeping, and whispered to her to wake her up. But she growled, and when she turned around, her face was not hers.

Closed doors are the most terrifying thing when you're trapped with two monsters in a sleep paralysis dream.....

I screamed as loud as I could, again, hoping my voice was heard somewhere. After fumbling with the lock and handle, I stumbled into the hallway to find Shiel, Mom, and Dad working on something. All of them had their backs turned to me, so I couldn't see their faces.

I ran downstairs before they reacted... reached the door, and fought with the locks again.

Why am I even doing this? I'm asleep! I can be outside without opening doors!!

But I couldn't will it..... So I pried the door open just in time to run outside and head towards Matt's house.

(For every time I've had to run away from my own overwhelming imagination, I ran to his house....

I never make it all the way. I always wake up just as I'm around the corner.)

Anyway, I woke up in bed once again. This time it was real, because I could feel everything. I could smell. I had to breathe. My ears picked up on the deafening silence around me. My throat didn't burn from screaming so much (so it never happened). My heart was racing. My body was tired. Nothing happened in real life, but I felt like I had scratches on me from the headless monster.

I never even moved. I was only asleep for 10-15 minutes total.

I refused to make any sudden movements or to even look over at Anjel, who was sleeping in the same position that I dreamt about. Instead, I texted Matt and Jess in an attempt to reassure myself that I was, in fact, awake.....and that nothing was going to happen anymore....

That's what I get for pushing the limits. Every time I decide I can handle experimenting with lucid dreams and sleep paralysis, something goes terribly wrong....

When will I ever learn? One night, this might prove to be too much for me.

Because I know I'm going to do this again. Perhaps even tonight.

the tide

This week sucks.

That's really all I need to say about my life; it's otherwise unimportant to dream updates.

So.....

I dreamt of a tidal wave. I thought of it as being about 40 feet high, but it was probably closer to twice that. It rose and fell at a safe enough distance that none of the buildings were obliterated, but it cause a major spike in the water level coming in to shore...somehow.

I was on the boardwalk (made of perfectly clean glass), talking with a friend's late father, when I got distracted by the rising tide. I left him, swung my legs over the glass wall, and climbed up onto a taller glass wall that extended high above the boardwalk, as if it was a barrier between the land and sea... I sat on top of it and panicked as the water rose and rose and rose.... until it reached the brim and overflowed.

"Run," I yelled at everyone. I ran, too.

I ran into another dream when I found a friend. I tried to tell her about the tidal wave that I imagined, but she wasn't listening very well.

not happy

I miss my strange, messed-up dreams. These nights as of late have been...... tame (for me), to say the least.

During the school year, is it the stress that sets them off? Is it over-stimulation of my imagination throughout the day, in studio?

And during the summer, is it the lack of a real social life and all the free time to over-stimulate my imagination that gets me going?

Whatever it is, I'm in a "happy place" right now -- a steady work mode, a steady day. A steady week. And a pretty regular sleep schedule. Full 8 hours every night so far.

It's boring.

Numbers and colors

It's been a while since my last post.

I've been dreaming, but none have been interesting enough for me to share with you. Mostly, I've been having strange flashback dreams of Rome (a street performer appeared in my dream at some point last night, and I questioned him about why he was here instead of in Italy).

The strangest dreams have been these:

1. W141 was inscribed on a key to a room. I was with a group of people outside a hotel/apartment/hostel, and we were getting ready to go on a trip. Matt gave me the key when I told him I forgot something in the room. While everyone waited for me, I ran back inside, slid on the slippery floors, and ended up going in circles around the core of the building (the hallways formed a square in plan, and the room I was looking for was on the east side). Every time I managed to fall, I get up and find myself in a hallway surrounded by mirror walls and frosted glass doors. But when I made my way around the corner, it was back to normal.

I found the room, picked up another set of keys on a table, and ran back outside. Nobody was there anymore. I went off on my own to find a tow truck and spy on someone.... I felt very uncomfortable and uneasy... and woke up with a start when a thunderclap sounded outside my bedroom. I don't know what scared me so much, because it's not a creepy dream, but I didn't want to fall back asleep.

2. I was at a wedding. I was the only one wearing a red gown. Everyone was playing a game during the reception in a beautiful garden (vines and trees everywhere, dark green grass, fancy tables and chairs scattered around on the different terrace levels). I passed the ball to the bride and groom, knocking them over, and ran away. I went to the bathroom (which turned out to be a couple of stalls still somewhat out in the open but in a secluded, tucked-away area) and stood on top of the toilet when I saw a strange man (also wearing red) trying to peek underneath the door.

What just happened?!

Right after uploading the previous post, I went to sleep. As I kept my laptop and turned off the lights, I had a feeling that I'd get sleep paralysis. It was already starting, and I knew that no matter what I did, it would happen. Which meant it would be pretty bad.
Still, I wondered, Should I listen to music? Usually that helps a little.

But no. Before I could even make up my mind, I was immobilized.
This time it was different.

Instead of having the feeling of someone watching me, sitting on my bed, or looming over me, I felt that there was something on the floor behind me (I sleep on my side and face the wall because I don't want to open my eyes and see something in front of me, trapping me in a corner). This, I've experienced before.
But last night I moved -- not on my own.

I swear something moved me.
And I don't just mean I twitched.

Precisely as paralyzation set in, my legs were being pulled apart a little bit so that I looked like I was in a running position; I wasn't sure what to think at that point. Of course I knew it was just my imagination, because I could also feel that my legs hadn't moved at all. Still, I felt like I was being separated from my body.
This is new.... but it should stop soon.


Then they began to slide off the bed...backwards, as if my mattress was being lifted.
Nothing else moved around me.
I moved at a slow and perfectly steady pace, as if some machine was doing it. Or, you know, something paranormal. And it continued until my legs were off the bed and on some extra blankets on the floor. The rest of my body was following. I felt like I was being taken.
By now, I was so freaked out that I couldn't even fall asleep. I couldn't wrench myself out of paralysis even if I tried. So my last attempt to get out of this was so force myself to stay awake,
endure it,
and then bolt.


Again and again, I tried to pick myself up. It was only right before my shoulders reached the edge of the bed that I was out of paralysis enough to sit up, run across the room without looking,
fumble with the lock on my door,
run down the steps and through the house,
throw open the front door (and close it behind me),

and run.


I was outside.
I was running.
And whatever did that, I hoped would go away. Or at least follow me and not torment the rest of my family. I didn't even know where I was going. I didn't even know if I was awake.
After running blindly down the street and around the corner, I decided to try to make it to Matt's house. Don't know why. What the hell would I do when I got there? Say, "Hi, I had a bad dream, can I stay with you?"

There were a few people I ran into on the way, and I tried to see if they noticed me.
A few looked my way when I ran past them. When I stopped in the road to stare at a man in his truck with the windows rolled down, I figured that would give him reason to acknowledge my presence. But I got nothing.
....................Whatever.
I kept walking, but my legs became heavy after a while. Then I sensed that I wasn't there. My eyes flickered open, and I saw the shadowed wall in front of me. I tried to hold on to what little control I had left, but it was out of reach and I was back in bed.

I never moved. I was in the exact same position I fell asleep in. My legs were the same, my blankets never moved, and I quickly turned around to see that my door was never opened.


That was the scariest thing ever.

And I mean EVER.
When I got up in the morning, I stood up to find that my ankle hurt a lot.

An Old Record

I've always wondered what it would be like to dream during surgery in which you had to be anesthetized. Would it be just like a regular dream? Would the sounds and dialogue in the operating room have some effect? Or would you be so knocked out that nothing even happens?

I guess it depends on how doped up you are....

So I guess I was really sedated last week.

I don't remember dreaming anything (although I woke up in the recovery room feeling like I did). It was the most relaxing sleep I'd ever had, not counting all the times I went into a coma-like state after staying up for days and nights during school. What's kind of weird is that I didn't feel like I slept. I was tired and groggy, but it felt more like I just blinked for a really long time.

After I went home, however, I lay on the couch and slept off the rest of the medication, dozing in and out all day. That's when things got interesting.

Mom and Anjel went off to buy some school stuff and I was left to rest in peace (not die). The only reason I was asleep at all was because of the remaining anesthesia, so I was as active in my thoughts as I would be on a regular afternoon.

The result?

My best friend, sleep paralysis!

I spoke with my sister that evening about my version of fever dreams:

I will be lying down on a bed or a couch, and I suddenly become very aware of what's around me. Astonishingly so; it's as if my senses are heightened. I don't move, I just stare at what's in front of me. And if it's a wall on the other side of the room, that's what I look at.

Maybe that's when I fall asleep. What I "dream of" is all of the details of that wall as if it was a mere two inches away from my nose. The texture becomes clear and elaborate. I look for patterns or pictures based on shadows, and I feel as if I can hear all that's going on around me.

At the same time, I am fully aware that I'm lying down on the other side of the room. I am completely calm and quiet on the outside, just staring...but in my head I think I'm screaming in the midst the humming of electricity. I feel myself moving slowly, but everything I perceive seems to be moving at a quick pace.

What the hell is that?? Sounds like a bad trip!

It's also what I experienced when I was all alone on the couch in the big living room.

Simultaneously with sleep paralysis (it was like a bonus).

I didn't have a fever at all. But I was having trouble with a few things in those couple of hours that afternoon. Just to name a few:

• keeping my eyes open
• being able to tell if they were really open at all or if I was dreaming (for all I know, they were wide open and my eyes were bulging out of my head while I was asleep trying to wake myself up)
• making sense of what I was hearing and seeing
• identifying who was in my house (nobody)

I kept seeing Mom walking around, coming in and out of the living room,

sitting down and turning on the TV to listen to the news,

reading a magazine,

telling Anjel to start cooking something,

talking to me and asking how I was feeling.....

For the majority, I was aware when I was dreaming because I would try to move, only to find out that I could barely shift over. Also, I listened very, very, very carefully to what was being said on the news in the TV, what Mom was saying when she spoke, and what I was reading on the paper suddenly in my hands.

It was all gibberish.

The red paper said, "Stephn visit nice will Visit."

...Yeah, that's not right, I told myself.

Truth be told, I was pretty proud when I gained enough control to comprehend that it was incomprehensible.

The most confusing of those paralysis dreams was when I felt a breeze. Mom came over with a magazine and started fanning me with it, and I felt it on my face. There was nothing strange or different about it, it was just a breeze. Before then, I'd already told myself I was asleep. But when I felt that, I forgot what I thought and started wondering if I was awake.

I tried to pry my eyelids open to see Mom as she turned and walked out of the room. I couldn't open them more than halfway, but I could feel her footsteps vibrating throughout the room as she left. I saw enough to see her shadow go, which was reason to doubt. But I could never see more than that of anyone. Shadows. Figments.

Come back.... Are you here? Hello?...... Mom? ...............

"Mom?" I accidentally said out loud to an empty house. I was awake.

Similar episodes played, repeated themselves, and mixed with each other until I gave up trying to decide which was real and which was fake. I just went with it. Before long, they were back home from running errands.

It led me to thinking:

What was it that made it possible for me to tell the difference? One of the easy answers was the quality of sound.

The sounds in my head were clearer.

How absurd of me to suggest that there's a clearer sound than reality.

But if you think about the fact that the laws of science don't necessarily have to apply to the imagination, and that sound doesn't travel in my head because it doesn't go anywhere to begin with..... then it makes some sense that voices seem just a little bit sharper when I'm sleeping.

Life is muffled. It's as if you've been watching everything in HD for a long time and then went back to a regular television screen. The quality's fine, but once you know a better version, you can pinpoint the needed fine-tuning.

The sound quality of being awake is like that of an old record player.

Actually, that's the impression I'm faced with for a split-second when I wake up to the sound of air. I forget it because I don't say it or even fully think it. But that's the best way I can put it into words.

And I've had a dream of an old record playing. Even that was clearer than a real one.

But old records sound beautiful with all their imperfections and weathering.

Channeling

Last night, I texted Matt in my sleep.

Me: Does H113 or H1-13 mean anything?

Matt: Not that I know of. Why?

Me: *no reply because I was asleep*

Matt: Babe?

Me: *sleeping*

I remember losing consciousness and suddenly my mind was filled with my voice repeating, "H one thirteen, H one thirteen, one thirteen, 113, H113 ---"

Does H113 or H1-13 mean anything...?

Evidently, I grabbed my phone and sent out a message just before 1 am.

Well, I did a little research after that; barely any was needed.

Ever heard of Strong's Concordance? Me neither, until tonight.

It was created by -- you guessed it -- a man by that name, James Strong. He basically traced every word in the King James Bible back to its original text and language. So if you're reading the Bible and need/want to know a specific word, find your way to another phrase, understand how it was translated a certain way in a passage, and so on.... you use that as a reference. It's pretty much a thesaurus.

It's actually called Strong's Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible. And it is quite exhaustive, as there are 8674 entries in the Hebrew version and 5624 in Greek (according to this website). That's right, guys, he did it twice in different languages.

This is what people did for fun in those days.

(But it's really quite interesting, I'd like to look at it more.)

Well....can you guess where I'm going with this?

H = Hebrew

113 = the number in Strong's Hebrew Lexicon.

H113 - 'adown

1. reference to men

- lord, master, king

2. reference to God

- Adonai (Yahweh)

Do you think it's a stretch?

I don't know, but it's the second result that came up in Google. And, strikingly, it's at the top of the list when I search with the hyphen included.

I once had a dream a few years ago whose details are now all muddled up and lost in my memory. All I remember was that I was speaking some strange language that flowed naturally. There were a lot of guttural pronunciations and not enough r's, and the only word I woke up remembering was Adonai. At that time, I was just barely in high school and didn't know the word (or maybe I did and it just didn't stick). So I did the same thing that I did this time: spelled out what I heard, and did some homework. And my mind was blown. Adonai's a real word? And it's spelled that way? It was like that time in sixth grade when I thought I made up the name Zagari only to find out it's real and from Persia or somewhere like that. I wrote an entry about the dream in my Xanga (back when that was super cool and I wrote all the time)... but I can't seem to find it.

Apparently I can speak Hebrew and channel something while I'm dreaming.

And I can text about Strong's Concordance in my sleep.

What can you do?

Praying Up Dreams

Since that last post, I haven't been able to trigger sleep paralysis again. Does anybody out there have any suggestions?

I know you can do it by setting your alarm clock in the early morning for a few days to get used to waking up. And my sister says that if she takes a nap in the middle of the day, she will most likely get sleep paralysis later that night.

I need to know how to turn it on and off. I can't get anywhere if I can get anywhere.

I actually thought that it might happen last night. I spent the majority of yesterday in the city and came back home kind of late. Fell asleep for a while, then woke up. Sadly, I couldn't fall asleep again until after 6 am, and then the most that happened was I had a weird dream and woke up thinking there was a man hanging on my door.

Pssh.

This doesn't usually happen, but when 5:30 rolled around, I thought of praying the rosary. So I took it off of my shelf and began. It helped me fall asleep (actually, I started dozing off halfway through, but wanted to finish it). Throughout the decades, my mind started making up words and rhymes, as if starting a dream. Some of my silent prayers came out like this:

Hail Mary, full of grace,

27, 28, 29.

What? No.

Hail Mary, full of grace,

The Lord is with the man in the race.

Something's wrong there. Too many words....

Holy Mary, Mother of God,

Prey: fortune singer's

mouse in the owl's mouth of the dog....

It took a lot of effort to think the right words without moving my lips.

When I finally fell asleep,

I sat up in bed and went to the other room. An other room. There were kids playing in the street of my old house, mostly girls but with a guy or two. They didn't seem older than freshmen in high school, and it was late outside. One of the girls let out what sounded like a genuine cry for help, so I ran down the stairs of my new house and went to the door.

I'd just barely touched the deadbolt when I heard the sound of scraping metal on the other side.

A key? Not just any key. But also not the one for this lock.

Voices outside broke the silence of a moment as the children whispered to each other. I started to back away from the door and meant to run up the steps like a ninja when I heard,
"Hahaha, hey! Psst!"

I stopped on the second step.

Tap-tap-tap. "Hey, I see you! Come over here...."

I heard that smile in her voice and knew I shouldn't turn around, but I did anyway. A girl was staring at me through the old glass window that wasn't covered by the blinds, teeth and eyes glinting in the moonlight. Please don't think to break it....

"Let us in. Unlock the door. We can see you."

All I really wanted to do was pull down the shade so that they were gone, but I was afraid of what might happen if I got too close, so I ran up the stairs, tripping on my way. Why are stairs always right in front of the door? I could be dead.

"MATT, CALL 9-1-1. NOW."

When I picked myself up and got to the second floor, I was in a combination of both my old and new house. I was on my way to the room at the end of the hall, where Matt was, when I saw Mom was in the old master bedroom, watching TV with kids.

The kids who were outside.

They were fine. They were nice.

But I didn't trust them because of how they watched me.

I opened my eyes in the morning and looked at my door.

There is a man there. Impossible, but he's half there and half not. Why is he so flat? But that's a man....

I took a picture with my cell phone to remind myself what I saw, thought about my dream and remembered hiding my family in a tiny alley lined with hidden doors on the left wall. Shiel was the farthest away from me, wanting to know if she should keep moving forward or if we should stop and listen to Anjel's suggestion of opening one of the red doors. I was thinking --

When I woke up again, I stared at the man some more. His head was tilted backwards and he had a nice shadow for half of his face. I should take a picture of this for later....

What did I dream? Something about Matt... Was I yelling? Or hiding in a small street with him? Kids.... I had a key, and was knocking on a red door....

I refuse to move in the morning when I can't remember my dreams. It came to me slowly, and then I realized that it was 11 am; that's enough sleep.

Now as for the man on my door. I never took a picture, but he was still there. So I made sure to really do it this time.

He's dead, like my clothes. He is my clothes. I know that.

I took a picture, put on my glasses, and didn't understand how I saw that at all.

Just like in the morning.

The other night -- and I mean the night before last night -- I found myslef trapped. Sleep paralysis, you've done it again!

But I think I've finally figured it out.

All I have to do is open my eyes to trigger it. Sounds kind of funny, right?

Well, the moment I open my eyes and realize I'm paralyzed,

I feel like I'm gonna die.

My body is surrounded by that pins-and-needles feeling, and I can't do much else other than freak out in my head.
I was suddenly aware that I was stuck, but I know this feeling all too well. I also know how to get out of it without using too much energy, but I wanted to know how quickly I can do it. So I scrunched up my whole body, fighting what I could only imagine looked like convulsions, until I successfully moved. Only, it was just my head that I was able to turn towards my pillow. It was enough to wake myself up, but I was left with my heart racing and temperature rising. This doesn't happen to me much, but when I have sleep paralysis, I end up with that feverish feeling. It's not fun.

The next morning, I did some research about SP to learn about other ways to snap out of it. I came across an interesting article in which the author explained that "out-of-body experiences" could be brought about by using SP to your advantage. Most of the essay dealt with how to get yourself into the sleep paralysis state (at which point, I thought to myself, Who in their right mind would want to put themselves in that position? But then I looked at myself. Guilty.) Fortunately -- in this case, anyway -- I already know how trigger it.

So I read on.

...Focus on your awareness on your face and concentrate on breathing slowly
and easy. Don't be alarmed if you feel vibrations or a rapid heart beat, this is
normal. If you let this scare you, you'll blow it, so it's important that you
don't let this freak you out. After the vibrations and sounds disappear, you'll
be able to get right up out of your body just like you would get up out of bed
in the morning.

Bullshit.

1. If I don't feel the vibrations anymore, I must be awake. I've done that before.
2. If I'm lying still in bed and then suddenly move, I'll trigger sleep paralysis all over again. How can I sit up in bed when I know I can't even move a finger?


So I let it go and forgot about it, until last night when I tried to reach for the cord of my earbuds wrapped around my arm. I couldn't move.
Fine, then. Let's try it.
I opened my eyes and immediately heard in my ear all the buzzing that my nerves were creating. So noisy....
It's okay, you're fine, you're just temporarily paralyzed. Don't freak out, just stay awake. Stay awake. Don't lose it, stay.
I knew my door was locked, but I felt someone's gaze focused on my back.
Nobody is there. Your door is locked. Just stay calm, you're fine. STAY AWAKE.
And sure enough, the buzzing subsided and my body felt fine. Whoever was watching me decided to leave me alone.



And I sat up in bed.

I felt dizzy and light-headed, kind of groggy in a strange way. But nothing too unusual. Just still in that dream-like phase because I just got up.

I walked to my door and unlocked it, not looking back at my bed. If there's anything I know, it's not to look at myself while I'm asleep. If you're not trained to withstand the shock of seeing yourself, then you'll lose lucidity and wake up. And I didn't want to lose the undeniable control that I had.

Not that I thought I was still asleep. I was so sure that I was awake. I just didn't want to face the facts yet. Because there's no such thing as an "out-of-body-experience," that's just silly.

So I unlocked my door and stepped out into the hallway barely lit by the night sky. I still felt strange, so I decided to test myself even more and wake myself up by walking downstairs. From the third floor to the second floor, and from the second floor to the.... third floor to the second floor, and from the second floor to the.... third floor to the second floor, and from the second floor to the.... living room of my old house.

Okay, so there's a glitch or something. I figured my brain was just being super slow in processing things. I'm all the way downstairs in my house.
Then I noticed that the stairs were different, the last time I went down them. Different, but I still knew them. It wasn't until I reached the bottom of the staircase that I realized where I was. And even then, it took a while because

the furniture was different

the set-up wasn't the same

the lights were off

where's the piano?

where's the entertainment center?

I felt the carpet beneath my feet when it struck me:

I'm in my old house. But it looks as if someone else is living here.

I finally blinked and found myself in bed again. I shocked myself awake. I looked around. I felt the cord still wrapped around my arm, my blanket still draped over my shoulders, and my door was still closed. Still locked. I didn't so much as shift, let alone sit up in bed and wander around.

So I was asleep the whole time.

Come on. There's no such thing as an out-of-body experience. At least, none that you can induce yourself. Right?

I had sleep paralysis two more times after that. And two more times, I held onto my awareness and simulated lucid dreams. Both of them were ended when I gave myself a bit of a surprise at seeing my hand or "feeling" a sort of trigger.

In the second one, I brought back Alex. I'm not sure if we had a real conversation or if it was just based on thoughts we exchanged without forming words. But he told me that he left because he had nothing else he could do. He'd done all that he could.

In the third one, I just wanted to be somewhere I felt a familiarity. I ended up riding my bike in the school yard of SCIS.

In my first attempt to achieve this so-called out-of-body experience, I actually sat up in bed without waking up. Was that real, or did I just dream it up, like the other two dreams?

Was I just influenced by reading the article? Maybe I thought I was in control when, "in reality," I wasn't.

I want to know if there's a difference. I want to know what I'm capable of doing.

So I'm going to experiment further.

Tonight.

The last church on Earth

The undead are back again.

Everytime I dream of them, though, it's different, with the most recent episode having played out the other night.

Zombies were now in the water, polluting it with their infected bodies. I panicked because I knew that we were all screwed, as this was a worldwide epidemic. There was nowhere to go to for clean water.

There were three ways to die:

A. Be the victim of a zombie.

B. Drink the water and slowly become infected.

C. Die of dehydration.

With this in mind, I knew that as the survivors began to dwindle, more people would revert/convert to Christianity. In the beginning of the apocalypse, there was still architecture. Funny, but at the same time it wasn't. So we were all going to die -- I thought, Might as well keep myself busy and do my job: serve the people. It kept me sane, and I was sure that I wanted my last project to be a truly meaningful one. For my own sake, if no one else gave a damn.

My self-assigned project was to create a church/sanctuary on the top of a nearby mountain. With no actual solid walls, the space was enclosed by a series of crosses. They were tall enough that they blended in with the surrounding trees, fitting the context of the natural forest while simultaneously bursting through the canopy of leaves. They were all huge crosses, each one at least 50 ft high, but they were to be arranged around an enormous central cross about twice as tall as the rest.

This sanctuary was meant to be seen from everywhere in the valley below, a symbol of hope and a reminder to stay faithful. It was designed to be accessible by foot, greeting weary travellers and refugees at the end of a winding path riddled with hairpin turns... I never thought that zombies would make their way up there.

Construction was never completed.

Funding wasn't the issue, it was the end of the world.

Tons of people volunteered to help out, wholeheartedly praying and working hard with one goal in mind: to finish the project. But one by one, the team fell apart. Some were lost in the woods never to return, a few foolish people drank water from sources they believed to be clean, and yet others were pulled away as the infected began to spread out from the city walls. Whatever happened, in the end only a little more than half of the church was realized, and the grounds were littered with fading shadows of what used to be my crew.

Over time, the iron crosses rusted to match the color of the tree trunks around them, a beautiful design detail that I'd thought to incorporate. Vegetation wrapped around their trunks, adopting them into the family and burying the dead undead out of pity. Even half finished, my design looked like what it was meant to look like.

There they stood for years.

And then they fell in silence.

Imperfect Bride

Last night I dreamt that women would submerge their faces in bowls of scalding hot oil to ruin their features when they got married. This would be part of the rite, which took place the morning after the man and woman became one. It had something to do with keeping other men away from someone's wife.

I was in line waiting to dunk my face in boiling oil. I passed by women who were sitting with their eyes still shut from when they put their face to the liquid. They waited in painful silence to go numb; some of them tried to cry, but couldn't anymore. Others were trying not to scream. And others were probably shivering with piercing hot daggers of pain.

I don't remember doing that to myself. But all of a sudden I was rubbing some type of cream on my face when a man came up to me and talked to me about how clever I was. He came over and started to wipe it off, and all of the blisters and blemishes came off with it. My skin was more radiant than it ever was.

It made me imperfect, dishonorable, and frowned upon.

Backwards Deja Vu

I haven't updated in a long time.

I haven't been dreaming every night since my last update.

But I've been dreaming.

It's getting more and more difficult for me to describe, in words, what I see when I'm asleep. More often, my mind is confusing dreams with reality. Not to the point where I cross the line and my life is suddenly The Science of Sleep (thank God I don't sleepwalk) or Inception (thank God my significant other never committed suicide or framed me), but I've had my moments when I think I'm awake... and I'm not.

I don't know how else to describe the sensation other than calling it a "backwards deja vu"..... I'm so familiar with what's going on, but it never happened. Come to think of it, nothing about these dreams is even normal.

Maybe it's happening because I want it to happen.

I'll try to share a dream sometime tomorrow. I have to get up early, so that means I have to sleep early.

Oh! By the way, I'm studying abroad in Rome for those of you who weren't aware. So even though it says the time is 6:45pm or something, it's really.... 12:45am.

Don't worry, I haven't forgotten about this blog. :) I'll be back tomorrow night. Ciao!