LOVE Reading Club’s latest essay is called A Death and Life Experience and is written by Khadija Patel. It appeared in Our Ghosts Were Once People, edited by Bongani Kona and published in 2021 by Jonathan Ball Publishers.
Anyone can read the essay, but meetings are only open to paid subscribers. The next one takes place on Saturday, 6 December 2025 at 3pm. Please let me know if you would like to come.
You don’t know terror till you know the terror of sleep paralysis
‘I have a story,’ is how our wrangle started.
That’s what she said: ‘I have a story.’
I thought she was about to ask me how to go about writing her story. I thought she wanted to know about my services as a book coach. I turned towards her to listen to her and two things happened simultaneously: I was instantly aware that something was off and, in exactly the same moment, she transformed.
She snarled and leapt and straddled my chest pinning my arms down. Her human eyes had turned into big anime eyes – yellow and cat-slitted and angry. Her long nails were filed to points. They were Tippex white and had little black symbols painted on them. She began to strangle me.
It was my choking sounds that woke me, but being awake didn’t make this thing on me leave. I wanted to throw her off but I was paralysed – and I couldn’t breathe. Dream-me was fighting and squirming under her to get away but other me was just lying there going ‘ggggghhhhhh’ until, eventually – mercy! – I was released and the night whipped that ghastly thing away like a flake of ash in a whirlwind.
I lay there panting and rolling my eyes around the room because they were all that could move and because I wanted to make sure she wasn’t there. She was that real. After a while could move my fingers and then my whole body.
My first thought – when I was certain I was awake and there wasn’t an evil cartoon harpy sitting on me trying to kill me – was, ‘Oh my God, I wish I’d known how bad Ollie had it.’
What was it?
‘It’ is night terrors. I’ve had only one – this one that happened earlier this week. Oliver, my son, has had them regularly since he was sixteen.
We spoke about it a lot then. He immersed himself in research about night terrors and it was through him that I learned that the theory about them is that there is a glitch in your sleep/waking cycle. Your brain is coming out of that part of sleep in which dreams occur and in which your muscles are a paralysed. In this unsynchronised two-step, your mind conjures a malevolence straight out of a horror movie, while your body is, quite literally, unable to do anything but whimper.
Almost invariably, I learned this week, the evil thing your mind crafted is sitting on your chest.
Night terrors are not the same as nightmares. I suffer (I don’t use that verb lightly) from nightmares and I have for most of my life. I thought I knew what it was like to be terrified in my sleep.
I didn’t.
Night terrors are nightmares on steroids.
