Raft

By Kathryn Lee

It started as mundanely as anything else. My mother was taking a shower in the bathroom.

I could hear the water gurgling through the pipes, the drops pelting the plastic curtain as I burrowed into the blankets on the bed we shared. My mother has never cared about textures. Her bedsheets then, as they still are now, are made of thin polyester. Bare skin, like the kind exposed by short-sleeved and short-legged pajamas, constantly slides against the sheets. The further I burrowed, the more I slipped and struggled for sleep.

I laid on one cheek and surrendered to the domed ceiling light and its belligerent glow.

Somewhere in the haze — in the rhythm of water drops, in the harsh yellow glow of the light, in the restless scratching of my leg against the sheets — I drifted off. Drifted like a raft flowing downstream, a victim to the heartless waves. I surrendered quietly.

I know what drifting off to sleep feels like. I do it most nights, aided by a hefty dose of melatonin for an indefinite case of insomnia. The line between waking and sleeping, when the latter is done right, is invisible.

This kind of drifting off was different. It was unwilling, unbidden and dramatic. Behind my nose, behind my mouth — where postnasal drip invades amidst spring pollen — there is the sense that everything inside you is shutting down. It is like drowning. No matter how hopeless it is, as you sink deeper and deeper — a cinderblock in the opaque waves — your body makes one last effort to save you. It’s called the instinctive drowning response. Though you are already under the surface — never to be seen again — your body refuses to believe it. Your head snaps back. Your arms flap, akimbo. You die with your eyes facing the cloaked sky, your body wide open and waiting.

I dreamt of something before I drifted. The Power Rangers, I think. Whatever a six-year-old could have dreamt of.

When I came to, I never really came. I remained lost in the haze — the light beating down on me, the distant thunder of the shower.

I was trapped on an exhale. It was like trying to breathe through latex. I screamed for my mother and then realized that nothing had happened. I hadn’t opened my mouth or slid my legs restlessly against the polyester fitted sheet. I’d only thought, intensively and desperately, about calling my mother, and tried to will the action into being. I hadn’t even figured out how to breathe yet.

Eventually, because I am here and writing this, I figured out how to breathe. Over the years, sleep paralysis — the condition of being frozen after awakening, unable to move your body — has become a companion of mine. Infrequently now, though much more present in my middle and high school years, I have come to regard it as a minor nuisance.

I recognize the murkiness of being awake, the unwilling drifting in after the unwilling drifting off. I take stock of my body, how it’s crunched against the wall on my right side. (It’s always when I’m sleeping on my right side.) I realize I’m not breathing; this, listed last, is of course usually recognized first.

Breathing is still difficult. No matter how many WebMD articles assure me that I’m still breathing throughout a sleep paralysis episode, I will never not feel like Giles Corey, being pressed to death. But over many years and many episodes, I have learned how to breathe — to fancifully envision myself sucking air up through the bottom of my lungs and diaphragm and holding it in the back of my throat. And then exhaling, voluntarily returning to the frozen state from which I started.

The one thing I regret about sleep paralysis: the sleep paralysis demon.

I regret that I don’t have one.

Seeing a sleep paralysis demon, a menacing blob in the dark, is a consequence of the hallucinatory effects of sleep paralysis. While my friends with sleep paralysis assure me I don’t want one, I still feel I’m missing out on a fundamental part of the sleep paralysis experience. I always fall into sleep paralysis when I’m sleeping on my right side; therefore, I’m always facing the wall since all of my beds are pushed up into a corner: an L rotated 90 degrees clockwise. I never get to see my sleep paralysis demon.

I have so many questions. Is it the same demon waiting for me through every episode? Has the same demon been there for me since I was six? Is the demon offended that I’m always paralyzed in the same position, unable to turn my head to give them the attention they clearly deserve? Has the same demon patiently waited for me, for thirteen years, to turn around? And if so, is that why I’ve had more infrequent sleep paralysis episodes, because my demon has finally given up on trying to terrify me?

It’s a sad thought. I’ve lost a lifelong companion I’ve never even seen. I may have to risk all of it again — the terrifying grogginess, the racing heartbeats, the choked breaths — just to see them.