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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