The Ghosts Are Back

A small rewriting of one of my first pieces about waking dreams

Photo by Stefano Pollio on Unsplash

Hi all,

This was one of my first posts on here, except I didn’t know how to navigate Substack and basically only put it on as a note and it didn’t get sent out or seen much at all. Things have moved on slightly. So what you read below is the slightly edited added to version, italics original, normal added.

Recently my slumber has been disturbed by ghosts. At the same time most nights I am awoken by a feeling. A sense that something is wrong. Not my normal waking to turn over or adjust the quilt, but a sense of an other, something that doesn’t belong. And then a noise. Each night the noise has been different. One night I heard a girl whisper ‘okay’ from the other side of the room, another an elder man gasped by my ear, one night the curtain was twitched the swish extra loud in the silence of the deep night, on another a metal object was dropped under the bed, a young girl child whispered ‘mummy?’ from the foot of the bed. Lastly a knocking on the wall behind me, a rapping of a metal tipped cane on an old oak door. It has taken me a long time to calm my heart, to still the fear and sleep again.

I don’t believe in ghosts. But I have had to accepted that my brain is creating these phenomena for some reason. That I am woken by my own body whilst still dreaming and these ghosts are mere scraps of my dreamworld entering into wakefulness. They feel very real but they are not.

I’ve always had an ability to lucid dream, and I’ve always had sleep paralysis, that awful situation where you are awake but paralysed in the middle of a nightmare. My father suffers and my brother does too. My waking nightmare is a man standing by the bed with a knife ready to kill me. I can’t scream, I can’t move. I can’t stop him. He leers over me and the knife flickers in the moon light. I need to calm the fear and concentrate oh so hard on moving just one tiny muscle in my right hand little finger to break the illusion. It takes a gargantuan effort, the fear threatens to overwhelm me. When I manage it, the dream shatters and I gasp for breath.

When I was very young, around six years old, I had my first sleep paralysis episode. I remember it still incredibly clearly. Lying in my bed I wake and can’t move. I feel my blankets shift and the cool air let in touch my calf. A hand has reached under the covers. I know there is a man hiding under my bed. He is old and very wrinkly. He is unclothed. His hand is old and the fingers long and bony. As they reach towards my calf I know he is trying  drag me out of my bed and underneath into the world within which he dwells. His skin is leathery and as his fingers begin to curl around my small calf I try to scream. I can’t open my mouth, I can’t move my vocal cords, I can’t twitch my leg away, I am completely paralysed. I struggle against my body, I can feel the covers beginning to fall to the floor as he pulls me towards the edge. As my heel tips over the edge of the mattress the change of surface breaks the spell and I can move again. The man is gone. I curl up as small as possible and press my back against the wall, dragging the blankets up and tucking them in around me, sealing the edges so he can’t come back. I do finally sleep. In the morning I check under the bed and there is no signs of him, the dust is undisturbed and there is no portal to another world.

These new ghosts don’t paralyse me. I can move, and breathe, and see the room is empty. I can use logic to calm myself. I can concentrate on my husband breathing deeply beside me, see the light filtering through the curtains, I can count slowly to calm my thundering heart. I actually have come to like them, to feel comforted by knowing they will visit. But for the last couple of days I have been too tired and not woken. Maybe they bestowed upon me the sleep of the dead.

They have been quiet for a while. I’ve been in a deep crash with my ME/CFS after going to the concert and my sleep has been erratic but when I do sleep I’ve haven’t been hearing the ghosts. I’m slowly recovering now and I’ve been woken at least 3 times this week. Once my mother was there, just the feeling of her beside me, I heard her breathing and whispering something. I’d like to think it was an expression of love but that’s just wishful thinking. Another time a man whispered in my ear ‘When is it going to stop?’. And another night a child rolled something, a toy maybe, across the floor next to me. I’m not frightened anymore. My heart no longer thumps. I don’t believe what I’m experiencing is real at all. Somehow, for some reason, my brain is delivering some kind of experience to me at an odd hour. This is a new thing to the past 4 months. It’s never happened more than once in a blue moon before.

When I was around 8 I was convinced I’d seen a ghost. I woke up to an all white ghostly woman standing at the end of the bed. As I watched in amazement she sank very slowly into the floor and I rushed to the stairs to see if I could see her feet coming through the floor. My mother was already up and in the kitchen and was rather amused at my insistence that a woman’s ghosts had just descended through the ceiling. Of course she wasn’t there.

According to the internet it’s all part of sleep paralysis, and initially I was paralysed but not any more, I say hi to whichever ghost it is and go back to sleep. Or hypnogogic hallucinations apparently. Same thing bigger more difficult to pronounce name.

I really wish I was more of a spiritual person so I could interpret this in a wonderful way, but I’m just too logical. I was brought up to prove my theories, to reference and cross reference and make sure it was all ‘true’. My father didn’t allow belief of anything you couldn’t prove. I’m sure I should now provide some statistics on who sees ghosts and the beliefs of them being angels or spirits watching over us, but I just don’t have the energy for that. Suffice it to say, it is merely a little anecdote for you all to read with no message hidden or otherwise and that’s all. I doubt anyone will find a decent quote to restack with. But that doesn’t matter. I wanted to write so I did.