Who Was Sitting at the End of My Bed?

Many people believe the night visitor is a spirit.

Many people believe that if you wake in the night, cannot move, and feel someone sitting at the end of the bed or pressing on your chest, something has come into the room. A spirit, they say, or a ghost, or one of the dead come back to visit. People have believed this for a very long time, and the feeling is so strong that the belief is easy to understand.

But the visitor is not a spirit. The experience has a plain name, sleep paralysis, and it is a harmless overlap of waking and REM sleep. For a short while the mind is partly awake while the body is still in dream sleep, and the edges of a dream leak into the real room. It passes on its own. It means nothing about the dead, and nothing about the future.

I know this now because a doctor explained it to me, drawing on the back of an appointment card. Before that, I only knew how it felt.

I woke one afternoon and could not move my hands.

It was late autumn, when the light goes early and the afternoons smell of wet leaves. Because of the early shift at the bakery, I sleep twice a day: a long sleep in the evening and a short one after lunch. My body has never quite agreed to this timetable. Some days I fall asleep the moment I lie down, and some days I lie there listening to the street like a passenger who cannot sleep on a night coach. That afternoon I fell asleep quickly. Then I was awake, or I thought I was. My eyes were open. I could see the ceiling, the grey window, the edge of the wardrobe. But I could not move my hands. I could not lift my head or turn over. It felt as if my whole body had been switched off at the wall while my mind stayed on.

And someone was sitting at the end of the bed.

I did not see a face. I saw a shape, darker than the dusk in the room, sitting the way a tired passenger sits at the far end of a bench in a waiting room. I felt the mattress go down under its weight. There was a pressure on my chest, not painful, but heavy, like a coat folded and laid there. In my ears there was a low hum, the sound a transformer makes on a pole outside a station.

For one second I thought it was our grandmother. Then it did not feel like her at all. It felt like a stranger who had taken the wrong seat.

The coat on the bedpost was only a coat.

I do not know how long it lasted. Afterwards it seemed like minutes, but I think it was much less. I tried to shout and nothing came out. Then I remembered, from somewhere, that you should not fight it. I stopped pushing against my own arms and tried to move only one finger, the little finger of my right hand. It took a great effort, as if the finger were rusted.

Then it moved, and the whole thing ended at once, like a film when the projector bulb goes out.

I sat up.

The room was ordinary. At the end of the bed, on the bedpost, hung my grey work coat, which I had thrown there before lying down. The hum was gone. Outside, the neighbor who keeps bees was carrying an empty frame across her garden, and a car went by with its radio on.

It happened twice more in the next two weeks, always in the afternoon, always with the same weight at the end of the bed. I was not exactly frightened by the third time. I was tired of it, the way you get tired of a bus that keeps breaking down on the same hill.

Our mother booked the appointment from the train.

I told our mother on the phone on a Friday evening. She was on the train home for the weekend, and I could hear the announcements behind her voice, each station name sliding past. She listened all the way to the end.

"That's your sleep," she said. "You sleep in pieces. Let someone look at it." While I was still talking, she found the number of the sleep clinic at the hospital, and by the time her train pulled in, she had sent me the time of an appointment.

I almost cancelled it. It seemed too small a thing to take to a doctor. My brother said that was exactly what our grandmother used to say about her own cough, and that she always went in the end, and always came back saying she should have gone sooner.

The doctor drew two circles on a card.

The doctor at the sleep clinic was writing something on a form when I came in. She finished the line, put the pen down, and listened to the whole story without interrupting. Behind her hung a poster of a sleeping brain, its parts colored like the lines on a railway map. Then she turned over one of the clinic's appointment cards and drew two circles that overlapped in the middle.

"This one is waking," she said, tapping the left circle. "This one is REM sleep, the kind of sleep with the most vivid dreams. In REM sleep, your brain is busy and the large muscles of your body are held still, so that you don't get up and act out your dreams. That's a good arrangement. It keeps you from walking into the wardrobe."

I laughed, which I had not expected to do in that room.

She tapped the narrow space where the circles met. "But now and then, especially when sleep is broken or comes at odd hours, you wake up a little before the stillness lets go. You're awake enough to see the room. You're still in REM enough that your muscles don't answer. And the dream can spill over into what you see and hear."

"The weight on my chest?" I asked.

"Very common," she said. "Breathing goes on by itself, as it always does in sleep, but it can feel heavy, because you can't move your chest the way you want to. People often feel pressure, or hear a hum or a buzz, or sense a figure in the room. The sense of someone being there is one of the most common parts of it. It's harmless, and it passes on its own, usually quickly."

I asked why it had started now. She looked at the times I had written on her form, the three o'clock alarm, the afternoon sleeps. Short or irregular sleep makes it more likely, she said, and so does stress, and so does a year like the one I was having. She did not say any of that as a warning. She said it the way the clock repairer across the street talks about a spring that has been wound too tight: not broken, just asking for a gentler routine.

On my way out, she handed me the card with the circles. I still have it. It is in the drawer of my bedside table, beside a pencil and a torch.

Tonight's Story

That night, when I told my brother about the clinic, he asked whether people in the past had known about this. I told him they had known about the feeling for as long as there have been beds, and that tonight's story would not be one story but several small ones, from many places, each a different way of giving the same feeling a face.

In Old English there was a word, mare, for a creature that was said to sit on sleepers' chests at night and press the breath out of them. The word is still with us, hidden in another one. A nightmare first meant the night mare itself, the weight on the chest, and only later came to mean any bad dream. There is a famous painting from the seventeen hundreds of a woman asleep across a bed, a small, odd creature squatting on her, and a horse's head looking in through the curtains.

In some English-speaking fishing villages on cold northern coasts, people spoke of being "hagged", visited at night by the Old Hag, who sat on the sleeper and held them still. A person who looked worn out in the morning was said to be hag-ridden. The phrase was often said with a grin, the way you might tease a friend who has slept badly.

In Japanese, the experience is called kanashibari, which means something like being bound fast, as if with metal. In Chinese, one everyday name for it means roughly a ghost pressing down on the bed. People use these words in ordinary talk, at breakfast, at school, the way we say we have pins and needles.

In South America, in tales told in Portuguese, there is the Pisadeira, a thin old woman with long nails who walks across the rooftops at night. She is said to step on the chests of people who go to bed on a full stomach and sleep on their backs. My brother liked her best. He said she sounded less like a ghost and more like a strict aunt who disapproves of second helpings.

In some tellings from different places, the visitor is not a stranger at all, but someone the sleeper knew who has died. Then the visit is usually told as a sad or tender thing, not a frightening one, a relative stopping by on a long journey.

None of the tales I told my brother that night ended badly.

People everywhere gave the same feeling a face.

What I like about these tales is how alike they are. People who never met, who spoke different languages and lived under different skies, woke in the night unable to move, felt a weight and sensed a figure, and told each other about it in the morning. The details changed with the place, a hag or a mare or a woman on the rooftops. The feeling underneath stayed the same, the way the same tune sounds different on every radio but is still the same tune.

The tales were not foolish. They were the best explanation people had, and they did something useful: they made the experience ordinary enough to talk about. A person who had been "hagged" could say so at breakfast, and someone across the table would say, "Oh, me too, last winter." That was a comfort in itself. A strange night is much lighter once you know you are not the only one who has had it. The doctor's two circles did the same thing for me, in a different way. They did not take away the memory of the shape at the end of the bed. They gave it a place on a map.

The visitor I felt was not my grandmother, and that was all right.

For a while after that first afternoon, I had been a little sad that the shape had not been her. If someone was going to sit at the end of my bed, I thought, it might as well be the person I missed. Then I understood that this was the wrong way round. Nobody had been sitting there. My sleeping mind had sketched a figure in the dark, quickly and roughly, out of tiredness and an old coat. When I do dream of her, it is different. She is doing something, fixing a radio or reading a ferry timetable with her glasses pushed up on her forehead. She is herself, not a shape.

My brother laughed when I told him about the coat.

On Saturday morning, over breakfast, I told the whole story to our mother and my brother together. When I got to the grey coat hanging on the bedpost, my brother laughed so hard he had to put his toast down.

"Your visitor was your work coat," he said. "It came to tell you to go to work."

Our mother laughed too, and then she took my coat off the bedpost and hung it on the hook by the front door, where it has stayed ever since.

Something to Try Tonight

For most people who have it, sleep paralysis comes only now and then. Still, it helps to have a plan ready, the way it helps to know where the emergency exits are on a ferry even though you never expect to use them. Here are the steps the doctor gave me, in my own words.

If you wake and cannot move, first tell yourself what it is, in a plain sentence: "This is sleep paralysis. My body is still in dream sleep, and it will pass." Do not fight against your arms and legs; struggling tends to make it feel worse. Let your breath go slowly, and let the breath out be a little longer than the breath in. Then choose one small movement and put all your attention on it: a finger, a toe, or a slow blink. When the movement comes, the rest usually follows.

When it is over, sit up, switch on a small lamp, and look around the room until everything is ordinary again. Drink some water if you like. Then, if you can, lie down on your side rather than on your back. And in the days that follow, give your sleep a steadier timetable wherever life allows. I could not change my shift, and I did not want to, because I love the bakery at four in the morning. But I could keep my afternoon sleep to the same hour every day, with the curtains drawn and my phone in another room.

That was the whole plan. It was short enough to remember half asleep.

The first time I tried all this, it was a Tuesday afternoon in the last week of autumn, and nothing happened at all, and I slept straight through until the alarm.