The moment I saw Emily* in a Midtown hotel lobby, I tried to leave it. But it was too late—she said my name so loudly and cheerfully that there was no way I could pretend not to hear. I must have shouted hers back, because within seconds she was in front of me wearing sensible heels and a floral dress. I remember her rattling off the standard checklist of pleasantries: It had been so long! How was I? How was my family?
The only thing I remember saying back? “My Uber is here.”
It wasn’t. In fact, I hadn’t even ordered. Instead I hid behind a hotdog cart on 47th Street, frantically puffing a banana-flavored vape I stole from my friend’s pocket. “Are you ok?” He asked. “You look like you just saw a ghost.”
I took a long exhale. “More like a demon.”
Emily and I were once students at the same private school in Connecticut. We played on the same basketball team, went on the same field trips to Washington, D.C., and read Pride and Prejudice together in the same English class. An old Facebook photo even shows us in the same pre-prom photo, smiling with our corsages. Emily was smart, friendly, and kind. Everyone liked Emily. Including me!
Which made it all more confusing that she kept hovering over my bed at night.
Not her, exactly. A humanoid, shadowy version of her—like if the girl from The Ring crawled out of that well and randomly possessed a pre-teen prep. Every few months, while I was back in high school, she’d appear by my Spring Awakening poster right as I was waking up. Well, again, not exactly. I was awake—I could see and think and was aware of my surroundings—but my body couldn’t move. Nor could I speak. Despite how hard I tried to ask Emily why she was in my bedroom.
Something would snap me out of it. An alarm, maybe. My sister stirring in the room next door. My mom calling my name. Whatever it was, I’d jolt up and Emily would vanish. Forty-five minutes later, I’d be in the hallways of school. And I’d see her again; the real Emily, in our plaid uniform with a pink ribbon in her hair.
This went on throughout high school. Shadow Emily versus real Emily. I secretly hoped the visions would stop when we graduated; a literal out of sight, out of mind.
But while I didn’t go to Emily’s college, she came to mine. There she was, sitting on my dorm room desk chair, in the 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 exertion 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 happens as you try to exit REM sleep—the cycle where most dreams occur. In REM, your brain makes your body immobile; a protective response so you don’t physically respond to your dreams. Yet for those of us with S.P., something goes haywire in the processor. Our brain exits REM, but our body doesn’t. It remains stuck in that frozen state.
According to the Cleveland Clinic, around 30% of people experience at least one episode in their lifetime. Around 10% will have recurrent episodes. And around eight percent of those people will hallucinate while doing it. Some people feel a pressure on their chest. Some have a sensation of falling or flying. Others—a small, small, number of others—will see a demon. Like me. (Some more science: Sleep paralysis subconsciously triggers the amygdala—the part of our brain responsible for fear. It tells us that we are in danger, that what is happening to us is terrifying. And how it tells us that it is through a dark and disturbing creature.)
A lot of lore surrounds those of us with living nightmares: Some scientists believe that they 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 17th-century me, undereducated and over-doctrinated, would have likely have gone full Betty Parris on Emily’s ass.
Although to be fair to Emily, she was just the first of my long line of monsters. Next was Jim, my old apartment super. In 2018, he came over 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. Yet 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.)
But he’s got this hat that has the shape of Magritte’s Son of Man and the height of Erykah Badu’s. On a good night, the Hat Man lurks on a corner, a shadowy, menacing presence akin to Slender Man. On a bad one, he rushes toward me, slashing 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 slow down my heart rate, I considered taking the morning off of work. Yet 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 will occasionally prescribe SSRIs if the underlying cause is narcolepsy, which I thankfully don’t have.) Nor can you really prevent it: All I can do is try to have as deep a sleep as possible—my doctor has advised me to cut back on drinking, to stay off my phone before bed, and practice “good sleep hygiene.” Which, vague. Then there’s the fact that there’s just not that much known about it and no motivation to. Sure, it’s scary. However, it’s not that serious—no one’s ever died or been hospitalized from sleep paralysis.
The morning after my attempted demon murder, I went to my coffee shop. “How are you this morning?” My barista asked while handing over my cup. I paused and stared 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 thinking about what he said. As a child, it felt like my brain was a beam of light; the engine behind my scribbled stories and first loves and inside jokes that I laughed 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.
*Names have been changed.
