Frankie Fleetwood

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I have had sleep paralysis many times through my teens and 20s, and occasionally now in my 30s. The first time was when I was 13, and I had just spent my first night in boarding school. I felt my mind wake up, but my body was frozen in place, confused. Usually though it would happen when I was falling asleep. I would feel my body and mind falling asleep separately, and my body would become frozen while my mind was still active. I would try to relax, reasoning that I was going to sleep anyway so I didn’t actually need to move. But then I would feel that my mind was being sucked into a nightmare while my body was frozen. It felt as if being sucked towards that precipice on the beach floor where suddenly the sand disappears and there is a sheer drop into the dark depths below. I was so tired but didn’t want to be sucked into the nightmare, so I would try with every fiber of my being to move my body, one finger or toe at a time, to jerk myself awake and away from the underwater nightmare cliff. Sometimes I would do this all night until the sun came up. Other times, I would wake in the middle of the night and find I was frozen in place and could see a figure in the corner of the room. I had a coat that hung on the back of my door, and whenever I would wake up frozen, it would seem as if a tall man was there staring at me. Even though I knew it wasn’t real, I could still see every detail of his face, neck, and hands when I looked closely. The only thing that would break the hallucination, was if I looked down to the bottom of the coat where there should be feet, and instead there was a white wooden door. This broke the spell, and when I looked back up at the top of the coat the face was gone and it was just a coat.