I hear it.
The demon, void of the slightest silhouette, caresses my darkened studio room with its sinister staccato laughter at max reverb. I have no idea how this shapeless grim reaper got the keys to my squeaky door just to play hide and seek. Problem: I can’t control myself. My recumbent body rises from the bed and floats in a quite familiar cube of darkness – my apartment studio. My head drifts under the ceiling, shoving down the cups I was too lazy to put in the dishwasher. “Crack!” yells cup no. 1. “Crink!” goes another. The next moment, I don’t even have to touch my precious items to make them fall. Everything – my pillow, wallet, papers on the desk, the Dante textbook I bought yesterday from Norris – whirlpools into a black sink that opens its pitch-black jaws. What makes it worse is that I’m completely conscious. This shouldn’t be true, I think. This can’t be true.
I struggle, of course without any motion, to give myself a kick. Just when I think I’ve fallen too deep in this supernatural gravity, my eyes open to a room that is quiet as the night. My last memory from the real world is struggling to go to bed at 2 a.m. reading a Murakami book.
Lacking the courage to re-enter the other world that just blew my mind, I consult my physician with the last name Google about the mental disaster that just happened to me. Beneath my dread is an excitement for an abnormality finally happening to my life.
Sleep paralysis – that’s what they call it. Some sleep researchers and psychoanalyticists have spoken about it, some horror stories of the “five of the scariest sleep paralysis stories.” Summary: I’m tired, and I’m living an unhealthy lifestyle.
Tiredness? Maybe. It’s true I have been staying up late for the last few nights deciphering calculus signs with which my last encounter was in high school.
But tiredness? What a mundane word to describe the “cool” thing that just happened to me. I’ve only heard people use the term in conversations on campus such as “I’m soooooo tired, I can almost walk sleeping” or “I’m tired of you now ...” More than that I’ve befriended ‘tiredness’ for quite a long time of my life, especially in college. Why today? There certainly must be something more to this. These aren’t everyday events.
Just like that, I desperately seek for meaning, to disclosing the true shape of the entity larger than me. Everything is a sign, or at least an omen of something else. Maybe a certain calling or a prediction of an odyssey that will visit me tomorrow with a yellow brick road. Or maybe, an inspiration that has been bestowed upon me. I can write the next “Inferno” out of this. I think I once heard that Terminator first appeared in James Cameron’s dreams.
I text some friends that night who may have some knowledge about this mystery, mostly the ones who loved daydreaming back in the days. They certainly will, at least, make a story out of this. With their psychological knowledge of Freud et cetera combined with the deepness of thought they have acquired from piles of classics, they will become my fortune teller. Curled up in my blanket, I wait for the biggest decision I have to make in life.
“LOL”
“You’re just tired, bro.”
I’m just tired.