◆ PARALLAX

I wake unable to move with someone standing at the foot of the bed. I have read every sleep-paralysis page on the web and they explain the not-moving and the pressure and the fear, and I believe them, I do. What they do not explain is why it is always the SAME someone. The same height, the same way of tilting its head, for eleven years, in three different houses. Paralysis I can accept. The consistency I cannot. Posting at 1am because of course I cannot sleep. Be kind.

Nan, the consistency is the right thing to be puzzled by and I want to give you the careful version, not the exciting one or the dismissive one. The brain reuses its own templates: once it has built a "presence at the foot of the bed," it tends to render the same figure each time, the way you dream of the same nonexistent house repeatedly. So the sameness can be your mind being economical rather than the same entity visiting. BUT -- and I do casework, so I mean this -- write down its details BEFORE you read any more pages, because the pages contaminate the memory, and a description recorded clean is worth ten recorded after a night of web searching. Then we can actually look at it.

Adding only this to Kayo's good advice, Nan: eleven years is a long time to do this alone at 1am, and the experience being "explainable" as paralysis does not make it less exhausting to live through. The mechanism and the suffering are different things and you are allowed to take the suffering seriously even once you accept the mechanism. A sleep clinic can sometimes reduce the frequency regardless of what the figure "is." Worth a conversation with a real doctor, in daylight, when you are not frightened. You are not broken and you are not alone in this thread.