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!

Movies that make other movies scarier

If I had seen Scott Stewart's Dark Skies a year ago, I probably would have found the 2013 movie to be a pretty well-crafted little alien abduction horror movie. I would have given it a positive star rating on Letterboxd and maybe not thought much more about it.

But because I saw it this year instead, I think I'm going to keep on thinking about it, keep on allowing it to horrify me in the deepest recesses of my brain.

The difference?

Last Halloween I saw a documentary called The Nightmare, about a disorder some people experience called sleep paralysis. Without going into excessive detail about the disorder -- I did so in this post, if you want to read more -- I'll say that its symptoms are that you sense or even actually see a presence in your bedroom while you are trying to go to sleep, but you lack the ability to move your body to escape it. This is a dream, it would seem, but it's so realistic, and it's so little removed from your actual reality at the time, that it induces a kind of panic on the verge of madness. And it afflicts the same people over and over again, repeatedly, for months or even years on end.

What was probably most disturbing about it was that different people with sleep paralysis describe seeing the same types of creatures in their bedrooms -- and many of them conform to that traditional design of the almond-eyed alien, the one that appears so often in pop culture and really, throughout human history.

It's the same almond-eyed alien who appears in the poster above, though we don't really get to see it quite in that form in Dark Skies.

As a documentary, The Nightmare convinced me more than any fictional account would that these aliens have a legitimate claim to existing. If multiple real people explain seeing them in the same scenario, there's got to be something to that, right?

So this is not me coming out as believing in aliens. However, it is me acknowledging that there are things in this world (or other worlds) that we just don't understand. Evidence that is just too compelling to conform to some kind of so-called logical explanation.

The Nightmare, then, has made me suspectible to finding things to be scary that I would otherwise not have found scary. Like Dark Skies.

I should give Dark Skies a bit more credit than that, though. It's well shot, it's well acted (Keri Russell continues to remind me what a treasure she is), and it presents its familiar tropes with an undeniable technical skill. It's certainly a big step forward from director Scott Stewart's previous efforts, such as Legion (which I hated) and Priest (which I assumed was bad and did not even bother to see because I hated Legion so much). However, I should also acknowledge that even while making a very bad movie in Legion, Stewart still managed to present some frightening imagery that I will probably always remember.

Without The Nightmare, though, Dark Skies would not have burrowed down into my consciousness, would not have given me an extreme case of the willies as I walked down my darkened hallway to the bedroom after turning off the movie.

A Nightmare on Curran Street

Curran Street being the name of the actual street I live on, and The Nightmare being the name of the scariest documentary I've ever seen.

It had been the obvious candidate to watch all week -- for a couple weeks, actually -- when planning out a Halloween night viewing. We hadn't even vetted any of the hundreds of other available candidates on Netflix. But always bothering me slightly, whenever I thought about it, was the fact that it was a non-fiction film. And it was still supposed to be incredibly scary.

I'd have to see it to believe it. Now that I've seen it, I believe it.

I'm not even sure if I can think of another documentary that I've seen that was scary at all, let alone possibly one of the 25 scariest movies I've ever seen. I mean, I've seen scary behavior in a documentary. But it was something that was under investigation, something reported dispassionately in the context of the type of research that goes into preparing any documentary. Not something that I thought would give me nightmares.

Well, I'm writing this right as I'm going to sleep, so I can't say for sure about the nightmares. But my wife is already sure she's going to have them. In fact, she's sure she's going to talk herself into the same type of sleep paralysis that is the focus of Rodney Ascher's film, which in fact is described at one point as something that people can talk themselves into -- or rather, something people hear someone else tell them about, then discover themselves having as well because the suggestion was placed into their subconscious. It's like some kind of STD of nocturnal torment.

So I should tell you a bit about this movie. It does indeed deal with a condition affecting some people that has been deemed, for want of a better term, "sleep paralysis." The reason this is a problematic term is that it's not actually a physical condition that is affecting them. People who experience this sleep disorder only think they are actually awake, only think they actually can't move. However, as anyone who has experienced a particularly vivid dream will attest, thinking you're awake is often the mental equivalent of actually being awake, given the similarities in the way your brain processes the things happening to you and feels the corresponding emotions. Once you're actually awake, it's easy to say, "Oh, that was just a dream." But when you're in the dream, no such distinction is possible.

So what seems to happen is that the person will fall asleep, but not realize they've fallen asleep as their dream essentially picks up where reality left off. In other words, it starts out as the world's most realistic dream, essentially creating a seamless bridge between the waking state and the dreaming state, which in turn convinces the dreamer that he or she is still awake. What starts to happen to these unaware dreamers is that they start perceiving things happening to them, right there in their bedroom -- a disturbingly similar set of things. It often starts with what seems like a hallucination of colors in front of them, as well as a tingling in their bodies and a sense of vibration around them. But things only get more sinister from there. People suffering from sleep paralysis usually report hearing something tapping at their bedroom window, or actually feeling a presence that they usually describe as evil in the room. If that weren't enough, they then usually see this presence, which some describe as the three-dimensional shadow of a figure entering the room and coming closer to them, or others compare to that popular image of the alien with the almond-shaped eyes.

What all sufferers have in common: They want to move, but they can't.

They can't roll. They can't shimmy. They can't even twitch. And they certainly can't talk or scream out for help.

It gets worse for some of them. Sometimes this creature talks to them, even screams at them. Other times it appears to climb on top of them. Still other times it causes a sensation of actual pain, pain they say they can still experience upon wakening. It never does anything like transform into a full-on boogeyman with clear features, or start to inflict any actual violence on them. But maybe that's all the worse, because it keeps things on the level of mental torment. In other words, pure fear, none of it based on the practical concern about being sliced in two by an axe or torn limb from limb.

So how, you ask, is this a documentary?

The Nightmare is constructed as a series of interviews with about six people -- mostly from the U.S., but one from England -- who recount their experiences with sleep paralysis, many in eerily similar details to each other. But that doesn't mean this is the entirety of the film's content. Nope, that in itself would be pretty tame.

What Ascher does to terrify us is that he creates visualizations and reenactments of what they're describing, using first-rate special effects to give their words a physical embodiment that is both spine-tingling and palpable.

Is that cheating for a documentary?

No way. Never once does Ascher try to pass this off as anything but a reenactment. That may be a rather obvious statement, but it's probably worth stating clearly. Just because a movie is a documentary does not mean it might not feature actors acting out scenes that are specifically staged as reenactments. The problem is that the use of such a tool is often ineffective, since the reenactments are not usually directed well and come across as clearly artificial. These aren't like that. These are anything but cheesy.

And what's so scary about these reenactments is not the images themselves, which would make effective additions to almost any fiction horror movie but are not in and of themselves original images. In fact, that's kind of the point, that some of the described images may somehow be embedded in the shared unconscious of the human race, and may have in fact helped inspire the monsters that have appeared in the oral, written and cinematic traditions of cultures around the world.

No, what's so scary about these reenactments is that they are things that people said have really happened to them. They weren't just dreamed up by a screenwriter. To these victims, what we see in this movie is real to them. They told Ascher that this is what the figures they saw looked like, and Ascher created figures that looked exactly like that. And now we're seeing those figures.

It would be like if you were describing the guy who mugged you to a police sketch artist, and the artist drew a photorealistic image of what the guy actually looked like.

And once you know that people out there, sane people, have seen frightening images that looked almost exactly like these, or possibly worse -- and that this could potentially happen to you -- well, that's not only going to send a chill down your spine. That's going to send a chill down the chill that's already going down your spine.

What's most horrible for these people is that they don't have just one or two episodes of this. They have one or two episodes a week. Or sometimes they have it occurring nightly for weeks on end, or periodically for years on end. Some of the people interviewed in this movie have suffered the condition their whole lives, and now they are adults.

They know that this stuff is a dream -- they do. In one very clear-cut case of that, a guy describes an experience in which he was not actually paralyzed, and shattered his phone when weird shit started happening to him during an episode. When he awoke a moment later, he discovered his phone still intact by his bedside, and only two minutes having passed since he first started trying to go to sleep.

But just because they know it's not "real" does not make it any less real. If you are scared shitless every night, it hardly matters if what's scaring you is real or not. What matters is that you can't control it, you can't stop it from happening, and you can't stop fear from being the primary emotion that accompanies it. Over time, that's enough to drive the sanest person insane. And when you consider the similarity of the things these people experience reporting, you probably have to ask yourself: Well, isn't it real on some level?

Now the question I'm asking myself is: Is this going to happen to ME? Tonight?

The answer is, "I don't know, but I'm about to find out."

I've written what I've written so far in about the 45 minutes since I finished watching The Nightmare. I guess what I should probably do is publish it now, and write a comment in the morning to tell you if I'm still alive. But I expect that comparatively few of you will read this in its first eight to ten hours live online, so you won't be sitting there, holding your breath, just waiting for me to confirm I survived the night. It would be cool if you were, but let's be real about it. It'll probably be all the same to you if I just include my follow-up in the body of this piece, and it'll save you the work of having to jump to my comments section. (Though if that encouraged you to comment, I guess that would be a happy byproduct.)

So instead I'll just give you a row of asterisks to separate the writing I've done on Halloween night and the writing I hope to do on the morning of Sunday, November 1st.

Because I don't really think I will sleep paralyze myself to death tonight ... do I?

Do I?

                                         ************

Hey there. It's the next morning and I'm okay. I did sleep horribly, though.

The thing is, the reasons for my horrible sleep seem to have had nothing to do with The Nightmare.

They didn't even have anything to do with my nearly two-year-old, who is usually the culprit when my wife and I wake up the next morning more bleary-eyed than usual.

Nope. It was just a shitty night's sleep.

At 1 a.m., I woke up thirsty and too hot. My stomach was also slightly bothered by our pizza dinner. I'd known it was too hot when I'd gone to sleep, but got to sleep anyway. To try to abate the heat, I opened one of our windows, but it was also too windy out. (That's a thing in Melbourne -- being both hot and windy -- though the heat in this case was something that was trapped inside our house.) With the extra wind, the blinds were rattling against the window, which was too noisy. (But did not contribute to a sense of fear that I thought one or both of us may be experiencing.) Still, I ultimately fell asleep again.

At around 3:30, I woke up again, drenched in sweat. My wife had closed the window, and I wasn't about to open it again. So I moved myself to the living room, where I could prop open the living room door and be cooled that way. But I didn't get to sleep immediately. A lot of tossing and turning was first required.

Time to dig our fans out for the season, I guess.

In short, no strange colors. No tingling sensations. No dark figures moving toward me.

Do I sound disappointed? Yeah, I guess a little. But only because that's what a good scary movie does to you. You want to stay in its grip for a little while after you finish it. And I was definitely in The Nightmare's grip in one way or another, even if it was only manifesting itself in me not being able to find that ideal comfy angle in which to repose my body.

If you think a restless night under the covers is the least way you can honor Halloween -- and you've still got your Halloween night viewing ahead of you in the U.S. -- then The Nightmare is available for streaming on Netflix.