Dying Twice
I don’t think I suffer sleep paralysis in the same way as most. It always begins while I am in a deep sleep, and always while I am in a dream. The last time was two weeks ago. That was the last time I almost died.
***
I was walking around to my partner, Steven’s, side of the bed; while he sat, propped up on pillows, playing our Nintendo Switch. But before I could turn the last corner, I felt myself die. My body just stopped. And as that feeling came over me, I told myself the same thing I tell myself each time this happens: you can’t die in your dreams.
It was as though my muscles had been stripped from my bones as I slumped in the direction I had been walking; hitting the bottom corner of the bed as I fell, flipping me so I landed on the floor somewhere between my back and right side.
My face was ridged, and the struggle against my weighted limbs had me exhausted in a matter of moments.
Although I didn’t fall in a way that allowed me to see Steven, I knew he was still concentrating on his game. He couldn’t see that anything was wrong; and I couldn’t move, couldn’t cry, and it even felt for a time like I wasn’t breathing. I was already an apparition in the room.
I was still in there though – my conscious, my soul – I could feel it trying to leave my body.
The panic from my realisation made me fight against myself further to move; to not let myself slip away. I knew from the exhaustion and pain I felt that I must also be straining to reanimate the version of myself sleeping in bed.
“Wake up, wake up, wake up.” I chanted it in my head. I had to wake up. I had to move before I finished dying in both my corpse of a dream body, and the one in my bed.
It was then that I realised Steven was now to the left of me, and I was in some state of awake – just for a moment or two – and that my left foot had begun to spasm.
He was to my right again. I was back in the dream, my foot still ticking aggressively. I tried so hard to let out a sound when I realised a word would just be too difficult. Then I switched again. And again. And again.
I was jumping between my two dying bodies, four feet apart, knowing I would die twice and all at once if I stopped fighting to pull myself back.
It felt like minutes had passed, when it had most likely been seconds, before I was jerked back in to consciousness by Steven and his ever-charming tone, asking why I was being a weirdo, and making weirdo noises.
I looked at his hands. In the waking world he had been playing a game on his phone.
***
This happens to me maybe once or twice a year, and it is something I will never not be afraid of. Sometimes it happens during nightmares, sometimes during the happiest of dreams. There is never a cause in my dreams for dying so suddenly.
It’s almost as though my body thinks I’m truly dying, and so my brain processes this by making me drop dead without reason or warning in my subconscious. That is a terrifying thought.
I don’t like dying, I know that much for sure. I especially don’t like dying twice.
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