I have no blog today.
What I do have, however, is a writing/editing partner who not only listens to me whine when I have no blog, but often dons a cape to save the day when I need him. Within a few hours he'd whipped up the piece below, just for your reading pleasure. Without further ado, I give you Rob Smales.
I had an odd experience recently.
Being a writer of dark fiction, I’ve done at least cursory research into a whole host of things some folks might find odd. Methods of speeding up decomposition. How much chocolate, by weight, it would take to actually kill a dog in one sitting (it’s a lot—you might be surprised). How Satan might go about winning a national election. I’ve even checked out weird stuff like sleep paralysis.
Sleep paralysis is one of those natural things we all do that only seems weird or scary when we notice it, either from it working too well or not well enough. Now, this is only in layman’s terms, but what I’m referring to as sleep paralysis is that disconnect that happens between your brain and body when you sleep. Your body doesn’t know what’s going on while you dream, so if it starts getting signals—like if you dream you’re competing in a marathon, so you’re constantly thinking run, run, run—it’ll try to obey them. Without that disconnect, the dream mentioned above would have the sleeper waking up twenty-six miles from home, exhausted, footsore, and embarrassed. Especially considering their yellow ducky pajamas.
Not that I have yellow ducky pajamas.
Anyway, when the brain manages to throw a tin can on a string across the divide and get some soft, maybe garbled messages through to the body, like a pair of giggling kids shouting Can you hear me now? across their first clubhouse, you wind up with sleepwalking; weird, but it happens often enough that we sometimes laugh about it—it, and those pajamas.
But that’s not what I’m here to tell you about today. I’m here to talk about the other end of the spectrum, when our brains have had their little turkey timers pop, or they’ve run out of things to dream about, or you just really have to pee, and your mind has decided it’s time for you to wake up and get about your business . . . but your body hasn’t gotten the memo.
Stupid, stupid body.
So your brain wakes up, and you come back from climbing Mount Everest, or reliving your first date (and it’s going much better this time around), or telling your boss what you really think of them, or whatever happy dreamcation you’ve just been on. You’re lying in your bed, and fully aware of it, and you try to open your eyes and rise and shine—or at least rise and pee, I wasn’t kidding about that—but that’s as far as you get. You try to open your eyes. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, but either way, you’re in that bed and that’s where you stay, because you can’t move. Someone forgot to open the connecting door, or your body’s phone is on silent—again—and try as you might, you just can’t tell it what to do like you used to.
Sounds creepy, right?
And it gets worse if you were having a bad dream. Have you ever dreamed about having an argument with someone, then been mad at them for the rest of the day? You know, intellectually, that they actually had nothing to do with that argument, that it was all in your head, but you just can’t help giving them the squinty eye the next time you see them? That’s simply emotion you can’t get rid of, based on an imaginary experience. Now, picture you’re falling off Everest, or that first date turns out to be with your real first date’s father, or your boss is telling you what he thinks of you, and you try to wake up from that panicked state (especially that father thing, Jesus) and find yourself completely paralyzed.
I’m pretty sure I’d no longer have to pee.
I’d done some reading on the phenomenon, and I’d come to the same conclusion you’ve probably come to by now: waking in this state would range from disconcerting to terrifying, but it sure ain’t gonna be happy.
And then, a few weeks ago, it happened to me.
I woke in my bed. Sort of. I mean, I couldn’t open my eyes, but I’d fallen asleep lying half on my side with my right arm pinned beneath me, reading from my Chromebook on the bed beside me, and damned if I wasn’t fully aware it had grown pretty uncomfortable. My elbow was digging into my side, and I think that right arm had gone numb. I tried to open my eyes again. No dice. I tried to roll onto my back. Might as well have been trying to lift a Buick . . . no, that’s not quite right. That sounds like I was straining to move, fighting some kind of restraint, but I wasn’t. The strain was all mental; try as I might, I couldn’t get my muscles to try with me.
Well, I thought, this is interesting.
I knew what was going on, you see, and I actually did find it more fascinating than frightening—and then I felt a presence, close and looming over me, practically breathing in my face. This should have been frightening—in fact, it almost was—but I’d read about this too: the sensation during paralysis that you’re not alone in the room. It’s a little more of you carrying dream sensations into the real world, like the fear from a nightmare or the anger from an argument; right before I woke, I must have been dreaming I was talking to someone who loomed over me. But I’d woken calm. Who would loom over me, yet make me calm?
My son, for those of you who don’t know, is fifteen years old and already two inches taller than me, and he loves to loom over me.
That’s one mystery solved. Now I just have to figure a way out of this weirdness.
I gave up on trying to open my eyes; they both seemed heavy as a couple of skyscrapers, and besides, all they’d do is close again, leaving me right where I started. I decided to focus on my left arm.
My right arm was pinned beneath me, but my left lay atop me, running along my side. If I could just get those arm muscles to heave once, to give a really good jerk, I’d at least roll myself forward with the motion and let some blood back into that pinned arm—if I was really lucky, maybe I’d even punch myself in the face! That’d break the paralysis for sure. I ignored the phantom looming boy and focused all my will on that arm, straining with every synapse at my disposal. I mentally yanked at that arm for, oh, ten seconds. Or maybe ten minutes. Possibly ten hours—things were really subjective right about then. It was like thinking my way through a lake of warm peanut butter (the smooth kind, of course) just to try to make contact with a limb that’s been attached to me for more than forty-eight years, but I yanked with everything I had.
The arm became unbalanced and slipped forward and off my side, planting the back of my left wrist in the mattress and locking my elbow straight. Actually, a little more than straight. Over-straight to the point of pain.
I’d managed to make myself even more uncomfortable. Terrific.
I lay there pondering this predicament—when suddenly I was standing in another room. Well, not suddenly; it was more that, as sometimes happens in dreams (and I realized pretty quickly I’d fallen asleep again), I’d always been in that room. Well, I thought, at least I’m not pinning my own arm any--
A looming shape passed the doorway, and I saw it was my son walking by.
Was this where I’d been talking to him before I woke up? I went to the doorway and found myself in a kitchen, one I’d never seen before, but that was still perfectly familiar. Hey, this was a dream, right? Things don’t have to make sense. I saw my son walk through another door, and seconds later heard the water turn on in a shower.
Hey, I thought. Dream or not, this is just too good to pass up!
I got to the bathroom door and saw a big, old, clawfoot tub with the shower curtain drawn around it, the water on. Steam billowed over the curtain, carrying with it the sounds of washing, and my boy quietly singing to himself.
Isn’t he cute, I thought—right before I hollered “Boo!” at the top of my lungs.
With a scream, water, suds, and a bottle of conditioner came flying over the curtain—and I laughed myself awake in my room. My left arm hurt and the right one was numb, but I could move again, and I rolled back off the bed and onto my feet. I marveled at the strange experience I’d just had as I tried to shake some feeling back into my right arm as I shuffled toward the bedroom door.
I’d been wrong. I still really had to pee.
_______
You can find Rob's books on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and in select retail stores. He's not only a fabulously talented writer, but as I mentioned, the best writing and editing partner ever. Thanks for saving the day yet again, Rob.
What I do have, however, is a writing/editing partner who not only listens to me whine when I have no blog, but often dons a cape to save the day when I need him. Within a few hours he'd whipped up the piece below, just for your reading pleasure. Without further ado, I give you Rob Smales.
I had an odd experience recently.
Being a writer of dark fiction, I’ve done at least cursory research into a whole host of things some folks might find odd. Methods of speeding up decomposition. How much chocolate, by weight, it would take to actually kill a dog in one sitting (it’s a lot—you might be surprised). How Satan might go about winning a national election. I’ve even checked out weird stuff like sleep paralysis.
Sleep paralysis is one of those natural things we all do that only seems weird or scary when we notice it, either from it working too well or not well enough. Now, this is only in layman’s terms, but what I’m referring to as sleep paralysis is that disconnect that happens between your brain and body when you sleep. Your body doesn’t know what’s going on while you dream, so if it starts getting signals—like if you dream you’re competing in a marathon, so you’re constantly thinking run, run, run—it’ll try to obey them. Without that disconnect, the dream mentioned above would have the sleeper waking up twenty-six miles from home, exhausted, footsore, and embarrassed. Especially considering their yellow ducky pajamas.
Not that I have yellow ducky pajamas.
Anyway, when the brain manages to throw a tin can on a string across the divide and get some soft, maybe garbled messages through to the body, like a pair of giggling kids shouting Can you hear me now? across their first clubhouse, you wind up with sleepwalking; weird, but it happens often enough that we sometimes laugh about it—it, and those pajamas.
But that’s not what I’m here to tell you about today. I’m here to talk about the other end of the spectrum, when our brains have had their little turkey timers pop, or they’ve run out of things to dream about, or you just really have to pee, and your mind has decided it’s time for you to wake up and get about your business . . . but your body hasn’t gotten the memo.
Stupid, stupid body.
So your brain wakes up, and you come back from climbing Mount Everest, or reliving your first date (and it’s going much better this time around), or telling your boss what you really think of them, or whatever happy dreamcation you’ve just been on. You’re lying in your bed, and fully aware of it, and you try to open your eyes and rise and shine—or at least rise and pee, I wasn’t kidding about that—but that’s as far as you get. You try to open your eyes. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, but either way, you’re in that bed and that’s where you stay, because you can’t move. Someone forgot to open the connecting door, or your body’s phone is on silent—again—and try as you might, you just can’t tell it what to do like you used to.
Sounds creepy, right?
And it gets worse if you were having a bad dream. Have you ever dreamed about having an argument with someone, then been mad at them for the rest of the day? You know, intellectually, that they actually had nothing to do with that argument, that it was all in your head, but you just can’t help giving them the squinty eye the next time you see them? That’s simply emotion you can’t get rid of, based on an imaginary experience. Now, picture you’re falling off Everest, or that first date turns out to be with your real first date’s father, or your boss is telling you what he thinks of you, and you try to wake up from that panicked state (especially that father thing, Jesus) and find yourself completely paralyzed.
I’m pretty sure I’d no longer have to pee.
I’d done some reading on the phenomenon, and I’d come to the same conclusion you’ve probably come to by now: waking in this state would range from disconcerting to terrifying, but it sure ain’t gonna be happy.
And then, a few weeks ago, it happened to me.
I woke in my bed. Sort of. I mean, I couldn’t open my eyes, but I’d fallen asleep lying half on my side with my right arm pinned beneath me, reading from my Chromebook on the bed beside me, and damned if I wasn’t fully aware it had grown pretty uncomfortable. My elbow was digging into my side, and I think that right arm had gone numb. I tried to open my eyes again. No dice. I tried to roll onto my back. Might as well have been trying to lift a Buick . . . no, that’s not quite right. That sounds like I was straining to move, fighting some kind of restraint, but I wasn’t. The strain was all mental; try as I might, I couldn’t get my muscles to try with me.
Well, I thought, this is interesting.
I knew what was going on, you see, and I actually did find it more fascinating than frightening—and then I felt a presence, close and looming over me, practically breathing in my face. This should have been frightening—in fact, it almost was—but I’d read about this too: the sensation during paralysis that you’re not alone in the room. It’s a little more of you carrying dream sensations into the real world, like the fear from a nightmare or the anger from an argument; right before I woke, I must have been dreaming I was talking to someone who loomed over me. But I’d woken calm. Who would loom over me, yet make me calm?
My son, for those of you who don’t know, is fifteen years old and already two inches taller than me, and he loves to loom over me.
That’s one mystery solved. Now I just have to figure a way out of this weirdness.
I gave up on trying to open my eyes; they both seemed heavy as a couple of skyscrapers, and besides, all they’d do is close again, leaving me right where I started. I decided to focus on my left arm.
My right arm was pinned beneath me, but my left lay atop me, running along my side. If I could just get those arm muscles to heave once, to give a really good jerk, I’d at least roll myself forward with the motion and let some blood back into that pinned arm—if I was really lucky, maybe I’d even punch myself in the face! That’d break the paralysis for sure. I ignored the phantom looming boy and focused all my will on that arm, straining with every synapse at my disposal. I mentally yanked at that arm for, oh, ten seconds. Or maybe ten minutes. Possibly ten hours—things were really subjective right about then. It was like thinking my way through a lake of warm peanut butter (the smooth kind, of course) just to try to make contact with a limb that’s been attached to me for more than forty-eight years, but I yanked with everything I had.
The arm became unbalanced and slipped forward and off my side, planting the back of my left wrist in the mattress and locking my elbow straight. Actually, a little more than straight. Over-straight to the point of pain.
I’d managed to make myself even more uncomfortable. Terrific.
I lay there pondering this predicament—when suddenly I was standing in another room. Well, not suddenly; it was more that, as sometimes happens in dreams (and I realized pretty quickly I’d fallen asleep again), I’d always been in that room. Well, I thought, at least I’m not pinning my own arm any--
A looming shape passed the doorway, and I saw it was my son walking by.
Was this where I’d been talking to him before I woke up? I went to the doorway and found myself in a kitchen, one I’d never seen before, but that was still perfectly familiar. Hey, this was a dream, right? Things don’t have to make sense. I saw my son walk through another door, and seconds later heard the water turn on in a shower.
Hey, I thought. Dream or not, this is just too good to pass up!
I got to the bathroom door and saw a big, old, clawfoot tub with the shower curtain drawn around it, the water on. Steam billowed over the curtain, carrying with it the sounds of washing, and my boy quietly singing to himself.
Isn’t he cute, I thought—right before I hollered “Boo!” at the top of my lungs.
With a scream, water, suds, and a bottle of conditioner came flying over the curtain—and I laughed myself awake in my room. My left arm hurt and the right one was numb, but I could move again, and I rolled back off the bed and onto my feet. I marveled at the strange experience I’d just had as I tried to shake some feeling back into my right arm as I shuffled toward the bedroom door.
I’d been wrong. I still really had to pee.
_______
You can find Rob's books on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and in select retail stores. He's not only a fabulously talented writer, but as I mentioned, the best writing and editing partner ever. Thanks for saving the day yet again, Rob.
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