They Gathered at the Foot of My Bed and None of Them Had Faces

People who get sleep paralysis usually describe one intruder. One presence, one shadow, one hag, one man in a hat. I have read hundreds of these accounts because I could not stop looking for someone whose visitor came in a group. Mine always come in a group.

The first time I was nineteen and sleeping in my childhood bedroom over a winter break, and I woke around four unable to move, which I had never experienced and did not have a word for yet. I only knew that I was awake, that my old room was around me with its familiar shapes, and that at the foot of the bed there were several tall thin figures standing close together, leaning in, looking down at me.

They were dark the way a hole is dark. Thin, taller than people should be, and their heads had no features, just smooth forward tilted ovals where faces belong, and they were bunched together shoulder to shoulder the way people crowd around something they are all trying to see. Around a grave. Around a bed. I could not move. I could not scream. My chest was tight and my breath came thin and the only thing my body could do was tremble, a fine helpless shaking, while they leaned in closer, all of them at once, as if my waking had drawn them.

It broke, eventually, the way it always breaks, in a sudden return of my limbs and a strangled sound and a lunge for the light. Empty room. Of course. Empty room, four in the morning, my heart slamming.

I learned the term later, in a college psychology class, and I remember the relief of it, the sheer relief of a name. Sleep paralysis. Hypnagogic and hypnopompic hallucinations. The professor even mentioned that the figures are usually described as shadowy and featureless and that the sense of a crowd or a watching presence is well documented. I clung to that. Well documented. Other people, the featureless shapes, the crowd. I was not cursed. I was a case study.

I held that comfort for years and it worked, mostly, until I moved into a rented house with three roommates and it started up again, worse, more often. And one night, frozen, watching the faceless ones lean in over the footboard, I noticed something that the psychology class had not prepared me for.

They were not all the same height.

That sounds like nothing. Let me explain why it undid me. If your brain generates a hallucination from a template, a generic shadow crowd, you would expect them uniform, symbolic, dreamlike. But these had individual heights. One was much shorter than the others, child height, and it stood a little apart, and where the tall ones leaned forward with that eager crowding lean, the short one just stood, and its smooth blank tilted head was turned not down at me but sideways, toward the taller ones, the way a kid looks up at adults to see whether it is allowed.

I do not know why that specific detail is the one that lives in me. Maybe because it made them a family. Maybe because a crowd is a symptom but a family is a visit.

I have never told my roommates. I moved out of that house last year and into a place of my own, and it followed, they followed, the whole silent group of them, and now when I wake frozen at four in the morning and cannot move and cannot cry out, I count them. There are usually five. Sometimes six. The short one is always there, always a little apart, always looking up at the tall ones as if waiting to be told it is time.

The psychology class gave me a name for the paralysis and the pressure and the fear, and I am grateful for it, I truly am, it is the railing I hold in the daylight. But no lecture ever explained why my well documented, textbook, perfectly ordinary shadow crowd keeps getting one member taller each year, or why the short one has, this past month, started leaning in with the rest.