Some Traumatic Memories for you, Dave
Last night, via MSN, I was called immature, a 5 year-old in a man’s body, an easily manpiulable moron, and more, by someone I haven’t dated in long, long time! Part of the conversation, I swear, reproduced as faithfully as possible:
Her: Would you have told Alyssa if you’d had sex with me?
Me: I wouldn’t have had sex with you.
Her: But, in theory?
Me: In theory, yes I would have told Alyssa. But in theory, I also wouldn’t have had sex with you.
Maddening. However, I also have had several good conversations with this person recently, so in the interest of fairness let me say that last night’s conversation was unusually annoying. And also, it would appear that many of my life choices appear retarded from the outside.
Since Dave asks about my sleep paralysis, I’m going to write it up real fast here. [If you’ve heard this, or if you’re Carol and found me paranoid in your bed when you returned from you 8 am class, you probably won’t find this very interesting]:
Oh, also: I wrote a story based on this that won honorable mention in the UNI Sci Fi contest. Yes, honorable mention means that my prize may as well have been a box of soggy donuts. Actually, that might have been better than the no-prize I got. Really the only satisfaction I got was one of the fiction professors standing on the other side of the English awards ceremony room, yelling across a sea of literature dorks:
“Honorable mention goes to Tim Dicks for . . . hey, Tim, what was the name of your SF story?!”
“Paralysis,” I would have said if it’d been called Paralysis at the time, but it was called something more dumb.
Also, this story was accepted for publication by a magazine that went ouf of business last summer, around the time of my birthday, and never told me.
The preface is that just a few nights before I had been sitting in my little office of a dorm room, which was still strewn with remnants of my relationship with Michelle, researching sleep paralysis. I have no idea how I found the SP website; I’d never read much about it before. But I found this site, and researched it sort of whimsically, chatting up Carol on MSN.
A few mornings later it happened to me. Carol and I sometimes shared her loft bed, 40 fucking yards above the face of the earth, and she was off at her 8 am class. I sort of woke up but was also dreaming; dreaming with my eyes closed, I guess. It was like there were two sets of visuals: what my eyes were seeing—Carol’s blankets and pillow, the mirror, clothes, lamps, storage boxes—and the dream scene, where I was sitting behind the wheel of my car.
One of the traits of SP is that it’s accompanied by a feeling of extreme dread, terror, etc. And this was going on too. In the dream scene, which was getting more vivid despite my eyes being open, something in a black suit with black shades and a black fedora slid into the back seat. Very MIB although it wasn’t a man even though it wore a man’s suite and body. Its hidden eyes filled the rearview mirror and . . . I couldn’t see what was in them but it was terrible, terrible, something consuming and devious and above all unknowably weird.
Also there was a little box of some sort in the backseat, and, in the weirdest part, a chanting sort of voice, which repeated, almost auditorily, the goofy phrase “the man in the machine.” Almost as a warning.
So I tried to move, because I was also paralyzed, and despite the weirdass dream I knew I was awake. Behind the colors of my car and the suited thing and the box and the rearview mirror I could see Carol’s white sheets. I tried so hard to move that I heard little grinding noises—the sort you hear when a drill bit can’t spin a screw anymore but still tries—from my neck, although they could have been hallucinatory. And then finally it broke and the dream vaporized and I could move.
And the absolute best part is that just as I was calming down and getting ready to slip back to sleep, I opened my eyes to make sure the door was locked, and there on top of Carol’s closet was one of those cardboard crates textbooks come in. Those crates have two handles, both long ovals, both almost perfectly in the shape of a rearview mirror. And I couldn’t stop staring inside, into the darkness inside.
Anyway, that’s my ridiculous story. In the SF story I wrote, the narrator’s friend is getting pretty close to figuring out time travel, but has an SP experience that he believes is high-level intelligences threatening him not to continue his research.
Oh, and by the way, I’ve had SP two or three times after that. It was all around the same point in time, though, probably because that’s when I was so freaked out and also, maybe, because of an exercise I developed. A couple weeks after the Man in the Machine episode, I woke up around dawn and just as I was slipping back to sleep I made a conscious effort to go into an SP state. And it happened a few moments later, and the trademark dread came over me with the paralysis. But it was kind of fun, this time, and I experimented with ways to break the spell. Mostly I used eye movement and a rocking of the head, which I guess is used by some other people.s
All three times, the SP state was brought about (I think) by consciously thinking about SP. So maybe you too could try this at home! All right!
And one more thing: a lot of people think alien abduction stories are really SP experiences. After all, most alien abduction stories involve paralysis, dread, and the feeling of an evil presence in the room, just out of sight. Having experienced SP, I agree completely . . . it’s a good explanation for alien abduction stories, assuming you don’t believe they’re really real real really real real.
Her: Would you have told Alyssa if you’d had sex with me?
Me: I wouldn’t have had sex with you.
Her: But, in theory?
Me: In theory, yes I would have told Alyssa. But in theory, I also wouldn’t have had sex with you.
Maddening. However, I also have had several good conversations with this person recently, so in the interest of fairness let me say that last night’s conversation was unusually annoying. And also, it would appear that many of my life choices appear retarded from the outside.
Since Dave asks about my sleep paralysis, I’m going to write it up real fast here. [If you’ve heard this, or if you’re Carol and found me paranoid in your bed when you returned from you 8 am class, you probably won’t find this very interesting]:
Oh, also: I wrote a story based on this that won honorable mention in the UNI Sci Fi contest. Yes, honorable mention means that my prize may as well have been a box of soggy donuts. Actually, that might have been better than the no-prize I got. Really the only satisfaction I got was one of the fiction professors standing on the other side of the English awards ceremony room, yelling across a sea of literature dorks:
“Honorable mention goes to Tim Dicks for . . . hey, Tim, what was the name of your SF story?!”
“Paralysis,” I would have said if it’d been called Paralysis at the time, but it was called something more dumb.
Also, this story was accepted for publication by a magazine that went ouf of business last summer, around the time of my birthday, and never told me.
The preface is that just a few nights before I had been sitting in my little office of a dorm room, which was still strewn with remnants of my relationship with Michelle, researching sleep paralysis. I have no idea how I found the SP website; I’d never read much about it before. But I found this site, and researched it sort of whimsically, chatting up Carol on MSN.
A few mornings later it happened to me. Carol and I sometimes shared her loft bed, 40 fucking yards above the face of the earth, and she was off at her 8 am class. I sort of woke up but was also dreaming; dreaming with my eyes closed, I guess. It was like there were two sets of visuals: what my eyes were seeing—Carol’s blankets and pillow, the mirror, clothes, lamps, storage boxes—and the dream scene, where I was sitting behind the wheel of my car.
One of the traits of SP is that it’s accompanied by a feeling of extreme dread, terror, etc. And this was going on too. In the dream scene, which was getting more vivid despite my eyes being open, something in a black suit with black shades and a black fedora slid into the back seat. Very MIB although it wasn’t a man even though it wore a man’s suite and body. Its hidden eyes filled the rearview mirror and . . . I couldn’t see what was in them but it was terrible, terrible, something consuming and devious and above all unknowably weird.
Also there was a little box of some sort in the backseat, and, in the weirdest part, a chanting sort of voice, which repeated, almost auditorily, the goofy phrase “the man in the machine.” Almost as a warning.
So I tried to move, because I was also paralyzed, and despite the weirdass dream I knew I was awake. Behind the colors of my car and the suited thing and the box and the rearview mirror I could see Carol’s white sheets. I tried so hard to move that I heard little grinding noises—the sort you hear when a drill bit can’t spin a screw anymore but still tries—from my neck, although they could have been hallucinatory. And then finally it broke and the dream vaporized and I could move.
And the absolute best part is that just as I was calming down and getting ready to slip back to sleep, I opened my eyes to make sure the door was locked, and there on top of Carol’s closet was one of those cardboard crates textbooks come in. Those crates have two handles, both long ovals, both almost perfectly in the shape of a rearview mirror. And I couldn’t stop staring inside, into the darkness inside.
Anyway, that’s my ridiculous story. In the SF story I wrote, the narrator’s friend is getting pretty close to figuring out time travel, but has an SP experience that he believes is high-level intelligences threatening him not to continue his research.
Oh, and by the way, I’ve had SP two or three times after that. It was all around the same point in time, though, probably because that’s when I was so freaked out and also, maybe, because of an exercise I developed. A couple weeks after the Man in the Machine episode, I woke up around dawn and just as I was slipping back to sleep I made a conscious effort to go into an SP state. And it happened a few moments later, and the trademark dread came over me with the paralysis. But it was kind of fun, this time, and I experimented with ways to break the spell. Mostly I used eye movement and a rocking of the head, which I guess is used by some other people.s
All three times, the SP state was brought about (I think) by consciously thinking about SP. So maybe you too could try this at home! All right!
And one more thing: a lot of people think alien abduction stories are really SP experiences. After all, most alien abduction stories involve paralysis, dread, and the feeling of an evil presence in the room, just out of sight. Having experienced SP, I agree completely . . . it’s a good explanation for alien abduction stories, assuming you don’t believe they’re really real real really real real.
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