I Started Sleeping With a Camera On, and It Recorded Me Whispering

I am an engineer by training, so when the paralysis started I did what engineers do. I decided to gather data. If I could film it, I told myself, I could demystify it. I would watch myself lie there, see that nothing was in the room, prove to my own overheated brain that a frozen body plus a scared mind equals imaginary monsters, and then I would sleep like a normal person again.

The attacks had been happening for about a month. I would wake in the deep part of the night, unable to move, chest tight, absolutely certain something was in the room with me, usually near the door, usually just out of the line of sight I could not turn my eyes far enough to catch. I read everything. I knew the science. Muscle atonia, REM intrusion, the brain surfacing early. I found it reassuring in daylight, which is the recurring theme of my life now, that everything is reassuring in daylight.

So I bought a little night vision camera, the kind people use for babies, and I clipped it to the shelf across from my bed, angled down at me, and I set it to record all night. First night, nothing. I woke normally, checked the footage over coffee, watched three hours of a man sleeping, fast forwarded through the boring miracle of my own unconscious body, and felt a bit silly.

Third night, it happened, and the camera was running.

I remember the attack itself. I woke locked in place around three. The tightness in the chest, the presence by the door, the whole familiar horror. I lay there and I actually thought, through the fear, the camera is on, this is good, I am getting this on record, and that thought was the only handhold I had while my body refused me and the presence by the door felt like it was studying the back of my head.

In the morning I made coffee before I watched it. I want that noted. I was calm. I scrubbed to the timestamp.

There I am, on the bed, on my back. And I am perfectly still. That is the first thing, and it is exactly what the science predicted. Perfectly still, not thrashing, not struggling, because the whole point is that the body cannot move. Just a man lying flat with his eyes, I could see even in the grainy green light, open. Open and darting. Alive and trapped behind a still face. It was deeply unpleasant to watch myself like that, to see from the outside what I had felt from the inside, the total stillness that contained so much panic.

I almost turned it off. Then my lips moved.

On the footage, my mouth, which I know for a fact I could not open during the attack, because I tried and tried to call out and could not, my lips begin to move. Small. Careful. Shaping words. I turned the volume all the way up. There is audio on these things, not great, but there. And under the hum of the room and my own slow breathing, there is a whisper. It is my voice. It is unmistakably my voice, low and even, and it is saying something over and over, the same short phrase, and I have listened to it maybe two hundred times and I still cannot make out the words, only the rhythm of them, four syllables, patient, repeating, like a person soothing a child or answering a question.

I was not awake enough to speak. I could not open my mouth. I have felt my own mouth refuse to open during these attacks, felt it fused shut. And there it is, moving, whispering four syllables to the dark corner by the door, in my own voice, in a tone I have never used while awake.

I took the camera down the next day. I told myself the microphone picked up the neighbors, that lip reading grainy footage is a fool errand, that the mind sees mouths moving the way it sees faces in clouds. I told myself all the daylight things.

But I have not filmed myself since, and I think you understand why. It was never the thing by the door I needed to be afraid of. The camera was pointed the right way the whole time. It was pointed at me. And whatever I was answering in that low even voice, I do not want to know what it asked, and I do not want to catch myself saying yes.