Concerning the UFO Sighting*

My freshman year of college, in the first few weeks of school, I awakened one night to blood-curdling screams. Bloody murder screams. Hair-on-the-back-of-your-neck-standing-up screams. I had been sleeping in the top bunk of standard dorm bunk beds, and my roommate had been sleeping below me. In the first few instants after I had awakened I was actually terrified that someone was killing my roommate. In the next instant I jumped out of my bed, perhaps with an idiotic lack of fear, to see if she was okay.

My roommate was upright in bed, with tear streamed eyes, screaming. I said her name and shook her shoulder and told her it was a dream. Her eyes were strangely vacant, and as the screaming stopped, the tears grew heavier.

I had no idea what to do. I barely knew her at the time; I had no idea why she was crying, or why such a normal person in the day would act so strangely at night (and so suddenly, too). I sat and talked with her, calming her and repeating that it was only a dream and that she was okay, while every-so-often asking her if everything was alright. She never responded to my questions or really acknowledged them, but she finally went back to sleep, and so did I.

The next day I didn't say a thing about it because I was afraid she might be embarrassed or ashamed. We yammered over the noise of our hair dryers in the morning, like we usually did, and we got lunch together when our afternoon classes were over.

A few weeks later, when we were having a typical "getting-to-know-you" roommate heart-to-heart, she told me, with lots of laughter, that she was a horrific sleep walker, and when she still lived at home, her little sister would often give her reports on her nocturnal activities in the morning. "Fortunately," she said, "I haven't had any sleeping problems here."

"Except for the other night, you mean"

"What other night?"

"When you woke up in the middle of the night...screaming...and I talked to you and told you it was only a bad dream."

"What?"

So began my knowledge of night terrors.

I've never had a night terror, and I'm seriously thrilled about this. They sound absolutely horrific. According to Wikipedia (which I just used to refresh my memory about all the symptoms), night terrors are non-specific dream-like things, that are sometimes so bad and frightening that they cause temporary amnesia. Often times the person experiencing one cannot be awakened (because they are in slow-wave sleep). As it turned out, my roommate, who I had so lovingly comforted, had not been awake at all, and had no memory of the occurrence.

Despite my lack of personal familiarity with night terrors, my normally amazing sleep has started to take a slow turn for the worse. About every six months now (starting with one of my best friend's birthdays in 2006), I've been experiencing what the doctor diagnosed as sleep paralysis. I told my young doctor about my symptoms in the course of a check-up and she said (in a very thick Romanian accent) "Yeah that happens to me sometimes. You wake up and you are like 'oh shit.'"

Kind of.

It's more like I wake up and I have no idea if I am awake or asleep. Everything I've read says that people who experience sleep paralysis are actually awake when it happens, but your brain doesn't know you're awake so it acts like you are still in REM sleep, making for a very surreal and disorienting experience. It's so disorienting, in fact, that people hallucinate while it's happening (which is, apparently, what leads them to believe they are dreaming).

Last night I "awakened" to the feeling of being shaken violently from my waist; like the world's strongest man was trying to break my neck through whiplash. It was absolutely horrible. I tried to get to my phone to call for help, and was so disoriented and uncoordinated that the effort was futile. Shortly afterward I felt like people were absolutely beating the tar out of me. The kicker is, you're always where you went to sleep. In dreams, you might be on a cloud, or in a swimming pool, or in a park with purple grass; with these, you're always where you went to sleep. Things are always the way they are in real life (which coincides with the reality of wakefulness).

Last night I was so frightened that I actually tried to get my dog's attention, to see if she could help me. I'd condemn my dog for being a crappy companion, but I don't know if I was actually making noise, or even moving.

Suddenly, it was like a screen was lifted from in front of my eyes. I pushed myself with all of my strength and was able to, very sloppily, reach for my phone, next to my bed. With a lot of effort, I made a phone call. In all honesty, I called my boyfriend just to be certain that I wasn't still sleeping (there really isn't an easy way to make a distinction when this happens).

When this first happened to me in Washington DC, on Blake's birthday, I was asleep in another friend's guest bedroom, and Blake was in a bed across the room from me. When I began to feel the shaking motion, I said to Blake "Help me, help me." He rolled over and said "No one can help you."

This was all a hallucination, of course, but take a moment to think about how you'd feel if you asked one of your best friends to help you, in a moment of terror, and they replied "no one can help you."

It isn't real, but the memories are really there. It's hard to tell your mind that a "real" memory isn't there. It's in the repository. You think of it like a real memory when someone says something associated with that memory, but it never really happened.

It says on Wikipedia that doctors think most people's alien encounters are actually just sleep paralysis. I have to admit, I don't judge "believers" so harshly now. It's hard not to believe in something that even your brain seems to think is true.


* This title was inspired by (and obviously derived from) the Sufjan Stevens song title "Concerning the UFO Sighting near Highland, Illinois" - I know it seems a little ridiculous to credit this, but I always try to give credit where credit is due (call it a writerly nod of respect).