‘Lockdown has given me night terrors’

The Crow’s Nest, a column by Russ Litten

Current Affairs

One side effect of lockdown for me has been fractured sleep patterns.

And whenever my sleep becomes disrupted I am put in mortal fear of a visit from an old and dreaded friend - sleep paralysis.

I have had two episodes of this, and they count amongst the most terrifying moments of my life so far.

The first one was about thirty years ago. I’d got back from Glastonbury after a weekend of general over-indulgence and very little sleep.

At that time I lived on the attic floor of a big old house. I spent the evening watching television then turned in at about half past nine. I was kipping on a double mattress slung on the floor, the room was in bathed in that weird summer half-dusk twilight, and for some reason, despite my extreme fatigue, I was finding it hard to drop off.

I think I was “beyond myself”, as the saying goes. I managed a few fitful naps, kept jolting awake and drifting off again.

I put this down to the remnants of the weekends revelry still rampaging round my bloodstream, a gradual winding down, a last orders for my metabolism, so to speak.

The landlord inside my head was shouting “can we have your glasses please, do your talking while your walking” etc. After a bit, I realised I was staring up at the ceiling, fully awake, the room now fallen fairly dark.

All sorts of random stuff was racing through my mind. Then, for some reason – and I remember this very, very clearly – I thought “Hmm, Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller – what a strange coupling that was”.

And with that, I felt this sudden massive crushing sensation on my chest, like an all-in wrestler had suddenly dropped both palms down onto me, pinning me to the deck.

My first and most obvious instinct was that someone had got into the room, which wasn’t entirely unlikely as it was a shared house with more than its fair share of itinerant weirdos. I tried to get up but this thing rammed me down with renewed vigour, as though sensing my resistance.

It felt exactly like big heavy hands across my chest and shoulders. My second instinct was to open my eyes. And that’s when I properly got the fear, because in a heartbeat I realised that my eyes were wide open, I wasn’t having a dream and there was actually no-one there.

But I could not raise myself against this overwhelming weight. And as soon as I realised that, I was shot through with a bolt of absolute pure terror. I mean stark raw fear, the likes of which I had never ever experienced before, a terror that is virtually impossible to put into words.

I felt as though I was in the presence of something absolutely unspeakably evil and it was hell-bent on ripping my heart out of my chest and feeding it to the hounds of hell. Writing this is making me break out into a sweat, I can still almost taste the fear of this evil entity.

I tried to shout out, but the sound was frozen in my throat. And then, as suddenly as it had dropped down on me, the weight was lifted. And then I started floating towards the ceiling.

I clearly remember thinking “Oh Jesus, this is happening, this is actually happening”. It was like I was utterly weightless, full of helium. I could see the Artex on the apex of the ceiling getting closer and closer.

I remember thinking, if I look down I’ll see my own body on the bed, so I twisted myself round and looked and I saw an empty bed, every detail of the sweat-soaked sheets below me.

That’s when I started properly sobbing. I remember thinking, am I going to heaven? Is this what it’s like being dead?

The ceiling got close enough to touch so I reached out and touched it and then I woke up in my bed, blathered in sweat and shrieking and crying like an infant. I pelted down the stairs.

There was no one in the house, everyone was out. I turned a radio on to hear a human voice, some normality to bring me back down to earth, but all I could get was white noise.

The clock said twenty past eleven. All of this is etched onto my memory because I kept thinking, “Is this real? Is this real?” Eventually I tuned into Radio 4 and calmed down enough to make a cup of tea and take stock.

Over the next few days I was jittery as hell. Everyone who I spoke to about it either thought I was lying, on psychedelic drugs, or had just had a nightmare. Eventually I went to the library and did some research and found a few articles that described similar experiences.

Then I realised I hadn’t imagined it and I wasn’t insane. Which was a relief, but for a few weeks after I was still a bit wary of bedtime and what it might bring.

The next episode was even more dramatic. Around a year or so later, I’d got my own flat and was in a romantic relationship. My girlfriend and I tended to have big dramatic rows and, without boring you with the details, one of these culminated in me spending a fitful night sleeping in a car outside the flat.

When I eventually got into my own quarters, I was dog-tired and decided to go to bed for the day and get some proper sleep. I got into the scratcher, completely exhausted and fell straight into the land of nod.

Woke up again some time later, same thing, Giant Haystacks on my chest. Broad daylight outside. The same sickening dread in the guts, the presence of sheer evil in the room like an ominous stink.

But this time I knew what was going on. “You’re asleep, you’re asleep,” I kept saying in my head. Then the weight lifted and the door opened and in strolled this fella with a top hat and a bone through his nose and his face all blacked up with boot polish.

A voodoo man with a crazy fixed grin and leering eyes and he was there, right in front of me, clear as day, as solid and as 3-D real as the rest of the room.

There was my wardrobe, there were my clothes on the floor, there was the door and the window and here was a jauntily dressed demon with a topper and a bone through his nose, boot polish about an inch thick on his face.

This macabre vision strolled up to my bedside. I was too frozen to move. He came right up next to me and bent down to stare into my eyes. “You’re not real,” I said. “Oh aren’t I?” he grinned. “Well, that means I can’t do this.”

And he reached down and grabbed me wrist and twisted with both hands, gave me a Chinese burn. I woke up shouting and screaming again. I’d grabbed my own wrist and was twisting it hard.

I can only conclude two things from these two carry-ons: one, there is a strange land halfway between consciousness and sleep which is more powerful than anything else on hell, heaven or earth.

And two, I never ever want to have sleep paralysis again. I would not wish it on my worst enemy.

I’m exhausted after recalling all of that. I’m off for a lie down. Wish me luck.