Thursday, October 31, 2019

The disappointment of a good night's sleep

When selecting my cinematic accompaniment to carving my annual jack o’lantern, I’ve tried two different strategies in the past. One is to watch a horror movie I do not expect to be very good, so little will be lost by watching with the lights on and my attention distracted. Another is to watch something I’ve already seen, even if it’s scary, as the best scares are always going to come on the initial viewing, when you don’t know what’s coming.

Last night I went with the second choice, that being Rodney Ascher’s 2015 documentary The Nightmare, which I first watched almost exactly four years ago under similar circumstances. Well, they were similar in terms of being Halloween-themed viewing, though that time we watched it on Halloween night itself (which you can read about in this post). Four years on, it made for an acceptable pumpkin-carving activity, where I wouldn’t necessarily catch every single moment, and where the light would inevitably be on. (To make it a really scary Halloween, I suppose I could cut my hand open using a knife in the dark.)

Well, I was still scared with the lights on.

I won’t go into detail on Ascher’s movie – if you want that, follow the link to the previous post above. But I will tell you that it’s a documentary that concerns the phenomenon of sleep paralysis, a kind of lucid dreaming where the dreamer believes he or she is still awake, and there are evil presences moving around in their room, standing over them, sometimes climbing on top of them. Try as they might, they can’t speak or move. And this can go on regularly for weeks, months, years, a lifetime. If the dream were taking place on the top of a mountain or home plate at Wrigley Field, it might be easier to rationally understand as a dream. But because the dream picks up seamlessly from where waking left off, it feels far more real.

And yes, even though this is a documentary, it’s one of the 25 scariest films I’ve ever seen.

The thing about the phenomenon is that people seem to be able to talk one another into having it. A character interviewed in the movie talked about having it happen after his girlfriend first told him about it, then there was another who passed it on to his own girlfriend. Likewise, it seemed possible to see the movie and then start having it happen to you.

That didn’t happen in 2015, even though I sort of hoped it would, but I thought there was a chance it would happen last night.

See, a couple nights ago I awoke with this intense sensation that I was about to die. Or more accurately, that the universe was about to end. It wasn’t just some narrative dream about The Big Crunch, but rather a distinct sensation that the molecules in my body were about to collapse into themselves into some kind of singularity. It was accompanied by this cold rushing sensation, like the characters in the movie liken to a feeling of death approaching. The visual focus of this moment was a little box in the corner of my bedroom ceiling that has a light that alternates between green and red. I think it’s a carbon monoxide detector but I’m not sure.

Anyway, it was incredibly vivid. I’m pretty sure I went right back to sleep, but the moment was not forgotten.

So I did wonder if, perchance, that recent occurrence was going to meld somehow with my second viewing of The Nightmare, and create an intense, white-knuckle sleep last night.

Instead what happened was that I awoke with a start two minutes before my alarm went off, sure I had overslept, and not remembering a single thing I had dreamed about.

Getting a good night’s sleep should not be disappointing, especially since I have a few stressful things going on in my life that have prevented me from getting many lately. But there is a little something disappointing about having my best night’s sleep in two weeks right after I watched a movie that should have scared the wits out of me.

Maybe it was having the lights on.

Oh, and if you’d like to see my jack o’lantern, here it is, followed by what it’s supposed to be:



You know, from the Black Mirror episode, and elsewhere in our meme culture.

Happy Halloween!

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