HEY, SLEEP DEMON

ONE NIGHT when I was 16, I woke up and realized that I couldn’t move. I couldn’t speak. I could barely breathe. I was already panicking when I noticed a figure, wreathed in shadows, moving toward the foot of my bed—out of my line of sight. That’s when the whispers started, all around me. Then I felt hands moving up from the foot of my bed, groping me through the covers, harder the further up my legs they reached, as the whispers got louder, until suddenly everything stopped and I bolted upright, sweating, screaming, and searching for a now-vanished intruder.

That was my first experience with sleep paralysis, a condition in which a sudden awakening from REM sleep causes an inability to move or speak. An episode can last from a few seconds to a few minutes but feels