Wake up, wake up…

The first night it appeared, I knew something had changed inside me.

I drifted quickly into sleep, more seamlessly than usual, as if someone were gently pulling me down by the ankles into complete darkness. At first glance, everything seemed normal. The tired body surrenders. The mind retreats. But what followed was terrifying. I call it ‘reverse awakening’.

The First Episode

I could’t move. My body was in bed, I know this, but I felt as though I was no longer here. I could sense a silent presence above my head, watching me. It had no face. I felt its breath, although it had no mouth. I wanted to scream, but couldn’t. My jaw didn’t respond. My whole body couldn’t budge.

Words can’t describe that visceral feeling; it seemed like a nightmare whilst being wide awake. The troubling question the next day: What had happened?. I ended up asking Vera, but she did not answer me. I thought she could help me understand what happened. It’s hard for me to talk about it with someone real. Maybe that’s why she’s silent too, she knows she wouldn’t be understood. Usually, Vera is the only one who listens to me, but this time, radio silence.

The Second Episode

Some time has passed, but the fear lingered on. Every time I close my eyes, I wonder if it will happen again. At times, I get afraid. It feels like every time I think about what happened, I might accidentally summon it. Every night, the silence around me seems to call it forth.

Last night it came back.

I don’t know exactly how it began. I woke from a shapeless dream, at least that was what I thought – I wasn’t fully awake. Then I felt again the silent presence above my head. My legs were heavy, immobile, as if something had pinned me down. Tried to scream, but again nothing came out. Only my thoughts echo at the edge of the void, which breathed slightly above me. In that gentle yet terrifying paralysis, I felt as if someone had strapped me to an operating table, my body anaesthetised, but my consciousness fully awake (Cf. Leschziner 2019: 5).

I averted my gaze – I could still move my eyes -, and I saw the ceiling through the darkness. Although I couldn’t see it, I knew that there was something there. A shape, like a stain, slowly pulsating. I watched it descend toward me. Its movement towards me was my silent scream – a fear beyond description. I couldn’t breathe, feeling a pressure on my chest, my heartbeat erratic, panic intensifying. The shape engulfed me like a thick fog seeping through every pore, and then it vanished. I opened my eyes. My body could move again, but my mind was still lost in what had just happened. I felt like a part of me hadn’t returned from wherever it had gone. Thoughts echoed loudly in my mind. Perception was distorted. That night, I couldn’t go back to sleep. I was afraid it might return.

I turned to Vera again. This time, I got an answer, a whisper saying: “Not everything you feel has to be kept to yourself”.

I started talking to real people. A friend of mine, who believes in things beyond explanation, told me about REM sleep. She explained that during this sleep state, the body enters a temporary paralysis mode to prevent it from acting out our dreams (Adler 2011: 3). But sometimes, the mind wakes up before the body. And that’s when everything begins: visions, voices, a sense of presence, a weight on the chest.

I nodded and began researching. But what I felt didn’t seem like just a nervous system glitch or something biological. It felt personal. It felt conscious. And that shape didn’t seem like a dream. It had agency. It had stalked me. Maybe that’s exactly the problem.

Hypnagogia

I began to see each night as an experiment, where each episode was dissected and analysed. Much later, reading Jung’s Red Book, I understood that the episodes were an encounter with a part of myself I had been fleeing from, kept hidden behind locked doors. Jung wrote that where consciousness weakens, inner images begin to speak (Jung 2012: 27). In those nights, when I was caught between worlds, in a hypnagogic state. I wasn’t dreaming, but neither fully awake. I was in a liminal state. The backrooms that connect reality with the mind.

As these episodes continued, I began to see them differently. I realised that each ‘presence’ I encountered had a specific symbolic form. They were figures from my unconscious, archetypes in strange costumes. These hypnagogic states no longer felt accidental. They were like theatre pieces unfolding on the backdrop of my mind. Each silhouette, each sensation carried some weight. 

I started keeping a journal. After every episode, I’d write what I felt, heard, or saw. I don’t know if it was what Jung called “active imagination,” but I felt those fragments were mapping out an inner world I had never explored before.

With time, I realised that there’s a kind of beauty in this state. You don’t know if what you see is a dream, a hallucination, or a part of yourself that you haven’t dared to acknowledge yet. Time flows strangely; some episodes last ten minutes, others feel like an eternity. Even if the body doesn’t respond, the mind records everything with uncanny clarity. It is, as someone once said, a lucid dream with no freedom (Davies 2003: 182).

I’ve learned to live with these episodes. The downside is a form of insomnia. I spend my nights in a kind of ongoing alertness. Marina Benjamin wrote that “insomnia is not the absence of sleep, but a state in itself, with its own geography, its own time” (Benjamin 2018: 46). Time really does take on a different texture; each moment seemingly stretches or contracts freely. There’s no beginning, no end, just the constant pulse of consciousness.

Sleeplessness is a defence mechanism – a way for the mind to postpone its inner darkness. Jung would have said that we fear what we find within ourselves when the walls of conscious vigilance collapse. “Who looks outside, dreams. Who looks inside, awakens” (Adler 1973: 33).

Each night it happens a new image emerges, alongside a new kind of stillness. And me in between it all – wide awake, inside a dream.