The moment I saw Emily in a Midtown hotel lobby, I tried to escape. But it was too late. She called out my name, loud and cheerful, making it impossible to pretend I didn’t hear. I must have shouted hers back because before I knew it, she was standing in front of me, clad in sensible heels and a floral dress. I recall her rattling off the usual pleasantries: ‘It’s been so long!’ ‘How are you?’ ‘How’s your family?’ The only thing I remember saying? ‘My Uber’s here.’ It wasn’t. In fact, I hadn’t even ordered one. Instead, I hid behind a hotdog cart on 47th Street, frantically puffing a banana-flavored vape I’d swiped from my friend’s pocket. ‘Are you okay?’ he asked. ‘You look like you just saw a ghost.’ I took a long exhale. ‘More like a demon.’
Emily and I were once classmates at the same private school in Connecticut. We shared a basketball team, field trips to Washington, D.C., and even read ‘Pride and Prejudice’ together in English class. An old Facebook photo even captures us at our pre-prom, both smiling with our corsages. Emily was brilliant, friendly, and kind. Everyone liked Emily, including me! This made it even more perplexing that she kept appearing by my bedside at night. Not her, exactly, but a shadowy, humanoid version of her—imagine the girl from ‘The Ring’ crawling out of that well and randomly possessing a pre-teen prep. Every few months, back in high school, she’d materialize next to my ‘Spring Awakening’ poster just as I was waking up. Not exactly. I was awake—I could see, think, and was aware of my surroundings—but my body was frozen. I couldn’t speak either. Despite my desperate attempts to ask Emily why she was in my bedroom, something would always snap me out of it. An alarm, my sister stirring in the next room, or my mom calling my name. Whatever it was, I’d jolt upright, and Emily would vanish. Forty-five minutes later, I’d be in the school hallways, and there she’d be again—the real Emily, in our plaid uniform with a pink ribbon in her hair.
This cycle continued throughout high school. Shadow Emily versus real Emily. I secretly hoped the visions would end upon graduation, hoping for a literal ‘out of sight, out of mind’ scenario. But while I didn’t attend Emily’s college, she came to mine. There she was, sitting on my dorm room desk chair, in the pre-dawn hours before my Art History exam. There she was, crouching on my laundry pile, the morning after my 19th birthday. And there she was, the first night my boyfriend slept over in my twin bed. I tried to scream at her to get out. The effort somehow broke my feverish state, and I started screaming out loud. He woke up, terrified. ‘What the hell was that?’ he asked. The hell it was, it turns out, was sleep paralysis.
Sleep paralysis is a condition where one experiences a temporary state of consciousness while waking up, without the ability to move or speak. It occurs as you transition out of REM sleep—the sleep cycle where most dreams occur. During REM, your brain immobilizes your body, a protective mechanism to prevent you from acting out your dreams. But for those of us with sleep paralysis, something goes awry in the process. Our brain exits REM, but our body doesn’t. It remains trapped in that frozen state. According to the Cleveland Clinic, around 30% of people experience at least one episode in their lifetime. About 10% will have recurring episodes. And approximately eight percent of those people will experience hallucinations during these episodes.
Some people feel a pressure on their chest. Some have a sensation of falling or flying. Others—a small, select few—will see a sleep paralysis demon, like me. (Here’s some additional science: Sleep paralysis subconsciously triggers the amygdala—the part of our brain responsible for fear. It tells us we’re in danger, that what’s happening is terrifying. And how does it convey this? Through a dark and disturbing creature.)
There’s a lot of folklore surrounding those of us who experience these living nightmares. Some scientists believe they could explain alien encounters. American folklorist David Hufford theorized that one or more of the accusers in the Salem witch trials may have unknowingly suffered from sleep paralysis. I fear that my 17th-century self, undereducated and overly doctrinated, might have gone full Betty Parris on Emily’s ass. But to be fair to Emily, she was just the first in a long line of my personal monsters.
Next came Jim, my old apartment super. In 2018, he came to fix my leaky faucet. Soon after, I hallucinated a gremlin Jim breaking open my door. In 2020, I moved. As I carried cardboard boxes into my new place, the building’s handyman Gary introduced himself. And just like that, my mind found its third demon: Gollum Gary. Intruders, as it turns out, are some of the most common hypnopompic hallucinations among those with sleep paralysis. Often, they felt threatening—like evil versions of these perfectly nice people were creeping into my room. But other times they were just confusing: ‘Gary,’ I asked one morning after a harmless episode where I heard keys jingling outside my door for several minutes. ‘Did you need to come in and fix something?’ He looked back at me, perplexed. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
But I’d take Emily, Jim, and Gary any day over Hat Man. (Unoriginal, I admit.) He’s got this hat, shaped like Magritte’s ‘Son of Man’ with the height of Erykah Badu’s. On a good night, the Hat Man lurks in the corner, a shadowy, menacing presence akin to Slender Man. On a bad one, he rushes toward me, baring a set of sharp, jagged teeth, and jumps on my chest. And on the worst? He held a knife to my throat and ripped off my clothes. When I finally could, I screamed. Then, I went to my bathroom to throw up. In the cold shower I took to calm my racing heart, I considered taking the morning off work. But what excuse could I give? It may have felt real at the time, but none of it was. Ever was.
That’s the thing about sleep paralysis. There’s no real medicine for it. (Doctors might prescribe SSRIs if the underlying cause is narcolepsy, which I thankfully don’t have.) You can’t really prevent it either. All I can do is try to get as deep a sleep as possible—my doctor has advised me to cut back on drinking, to stay off my phone before bed, and to practice ‘good sleep hygiene.’ Which, vague. Then there’s the fact that there’s just not much known about it, and no strong motivation to learn more. Sure, it’s scary, but it’s not that serious—no one has ever died or been hospitalized from sleep paralysis.
The morning after my attempted sleep paralysis demon murder, I went to my coffee shop. ‘How are you this morning?’ my barista asked, handing me my cup. I paused, staring at it for a second. Then I looked up. ‘I think I might be nuts,’ I said. He laughed. ‘Aren’t we all?’ I lay in bed that night, pondering his words. As a child, it felt like my brain was a beam of light, the engine behind my scribbled stories, first loves, and inside jokes that I’d laugh at over and over with my dad. Then came my monsters. Suddenly—or maybe it was slowly?—I held both such beauty and such terror. It’s funny how powerless we can be over the madness lurking in our own minds. The sadness that turns into depression. The diet that turns into a disorder. The drinks that turn into addiction. In a way, we all have our demons.