inspired by Joie: part 3, ghosts, pt. 2
I experienced something bizarre intermittently for several years when I was a teenager and into college and beyond that I could never explain. I described the experience to people, but I've never been able to find anyone who experienced anything like it.

Then I read the book The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts by Maxine Hong Kingston, and there was a passage that described exactly my experience, but told it described in the context of ghosts!! It never occurred to me to interpret my experience in terms of ghosts. I still don't, but it was fascinating.

When I was 14 or 15 years old, one night I was lying in bed having trouble going to sleep. I looked over at my clock and it read 1:21. Suddenly, I saw a bright light like a comet shoot into me from a diagonal trajectory from the right. I was suddenly paralyzed and blinded, everything was just white light, the sound was like the roar of a jet engine in my bedroom. I tried to scream (for my mother of all things) but I couldn't get anything out of my throat.

I was frightened, I was panicking. It felt like it went on for a long time. And then as suddenly as it began, it ended, I was in my bed and bolted up fully awake and conscious, completely freaked out. I looked over at my clock. It read 1:22. That was the first time.

This happened intermittently over the course of the following years. One freaky time it hit me while I was sleeping on the floor in my closet (don't ask – it was a big closet and had a window). When it hit me, in my paralysis, I was able to struggle and force myself onto my stomach. I then pushed myself off the ground. Then it ended. I was lying on my back. I jumped up and ran out of the closet completely freaked out. That was the first time I was able to move myself.

As it recurred, I got to a point of comfort with it and stopped panicking when it happened. After more time, I stopped struggling with it. I would just relax and flow with it and let it happen. From prior experience, I knew it would end, nothing to be afraid of, can’t prevent it, so explore it.

By the time I was in college, it would happen, but then the state would fade into dream-like images. I knew it was happening by the gripping feeling and the conscious state, but it wasn't paralysis anymore, it wasn't just white light, white noise and white panic. I wish I could remember some of the dream scenarios that it faded into. It got fascinating after a while.

My interpretation of the experience has nothing to do with ghosts, though. And it can still happen. I don't remember the last time it happened, but it wasn't so far in the distant past that I'm sure it will never happen again. It still recurrs. It only occurs during the sleep cycle.