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Demons In The Dark

An experience of sleep paralysis



It was 3 am, that most oppressive and black time of night. Stillness enveloped my room, the shutters drawn, a pile of books on my desk, a jacket over the back of my chair. Small, familiar things: the quiet comforts of unthinking life. But darkness hung over me heavily, the silence taut and brittle. There was something airless about the scene. It was all too delicate, too fragile — as though preserved in a vacuum, under a scientist’s bell jar. 


Like creeping-ivy, anxiety began to worm through my body, tendrils tensing round my chest and throat, leaching downwards along my limbs. I tried to move but couldn’t. Horrified, I realised my eyes were still closed and wouldn’t open. I tried to scream, but the sound stuck in my throat, my mouth clamped shut.


As the fear intensified, I became aware of an ominous presence looming over me. And then it happened. The presence grabbed my neck from behind, and started to strangle me. An immense pressure compressed my throat and chest, like a hydraulic press. I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t move. I was going to die and I knew it. Then, like something out of The Exorcist, with my torso pinned down, the lower half of my body began to float upwards. A searingly lucid final thought crossed my mind: the Devil had come for me.


When I became fully conscious, able to move and open my eyes, I was lying completely still, my bed undisturbed. I really hadn’t been able to move, trapped inside my body. And whilst I knew it wasn’t real, I also knew it hadn’t been a dream; it was all far too vivid, and the sensation of constriction lingered across my chest and neck. I lay there, utterly petrified, for almost an hour, gradually realising that what I had experienced was sleep paralysis.


Little is known about the phenomenon, experienced by as few as 8 per cent of people just after falling asleep or before waking up, and characterised by momentary loss of muscle control, often with feelings of intense fear. The boundary between sleep and wakefulness is blurred, and subjects sometimes experience changes in their environment which do not actually exist: hallucinations ominously labelled “sleep paralysis demons”.


Like many things for which we lack adequate explanation, sleep paralysis episodes have historically been attributed to the supernatural. In St. Lucia, the experience was explained as the souls of unbaptised children crawling on the sleeper’s chest. In Cambodia, it’s known as “the ghost that pushes you down”, accompanying the belief in dangerous visitations from deceased relatives. Accounts from Europe in the Middle Ages interpreted the phenomenon in terms of nocturnal visits from witches, or sex-crazed demons, repulsed only by the sign of the cross.


Had I not been raised on the scientific rationalism of the modern world, I too would probably have attributed the experience to otherworldly powers. As one friend commented to me in the pub later that day, “if you were a fourteenth-century peasant and you’d gone around telling people about this, you’d have been burnt at the stake by now.” I sipped my pint nervously. For whilst I am confident that science can, in principle, provide an explanation, there is nothing conclusive yet. Our best hypothesis is that it involves a dysfunction in REM sleep, evolving as a mechanism to prevent acting out dreams in a harmful manner. The rest remains a mystery.


Besides the immediate terror, the experience presented me with a more existential horror: how little I actually know about myself. Something within my own psyche must have prompted the event. Had my Catholic upbringing riddled me with guilt? A fear of hell, or the Devil? Was I anxious and badly adjusted? As far as I could tell, I was perfectly healthy — but clearly, something was bubbling away in the cauldron of my unconscious mind.


The thought left me uneasy. The same mentality which gave me assuredness of scientific explanation has made our species arrogant and domineering. The universe is ours for the taking, there to be explained and conquered, yet we don’t even know the goings on of our own minds. Our subconscious is responsible for our deepest drives, but much lies there unexplored. 


True, there are probably no demons in the dark — but the truth is scarier than that. They probably live inside your own head.


Illustration by: Isabelle Holloway


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