I’m not implying that I expected my sleep paralysis demon to be as cool as the other demons. I’m saying it. Meeting my sleep paralysis demon for the first time was like taking one of those Buzzfeed “What’s Your Spirit Animal” quizzes and getting something useless like “blobfish” or “Martin Shkreli.”

Sleep paralysis is what happens when you wake up unable to move a muscle. The science says sleep paralysis occurs when you wake up during REM sleep, which is the stage of most vivid dreams, so you’re partially awake but partially dreaming. It’s most common in young people (especially twenty-somethings) and can be caused by stress, medications, mental disorders, and disordered sleep (i.e. sleep deprivation, altered sleep patterns, etc.)

Sleep paralysis can manifest itself in hallucinations, or dreams projected into your waking world. The typical categories are 1) feeling a presence of someone at the foot of your bed, 2) feeling something sitting on your chest, and 3) feeling like you’re being levitated (why SP is a common explanation for alien abduction experiences.)

That intruding “someone” or “something” is a sleep paralysis demon. I hadn’t realized, but there are entire communities dedicated to people sharing stories—some funny, some deeply troubling—about their demons. What I found more disturbing, though, was how casually everyone was talking about the shared experience of demonic visits. I mean, why is this not a bigger deal?

I was on this “sleep paralysis demon” Internet deep dive while texting my friend about this new medication, Trazodone, that I’d gotten on to fix my insomnia (and, hopefully, linked mental struggles.) I’d been on Trazodone for about a week, and so far it’d been pretty effective in getting me to sleep. When it kicked in, I felt like my muscles and brain would just shut down. But I was still experiencing interrupted sleep, so my doctor had just doubled my dosage.

Friend 1: Wait doesn’t that one make you sleepwalk like CRAZY?? You’ll hallucinate pretty hard

Friend 1: Have you read My Year of Rest and Relaxation? Bc that’s the one she’s like “yo idk about this one”

I took my Trazodone and read a couple of sleep paralysis posts on Reddit and, seeing some images I could never unsee, instantly regretted the decision.

That night, I woke up feeling a presence in my bedroom. I can’t say how I knew that, considering I wear an eye mask to sleep and couldn’t see anything, but if this is the detail that breaks believability for you, I don’t know what to tell you.

I sensed my phone next to me, even though I remembered plugging it in to charge across the room before I went to bed. I wanted to pull my mask off. I tried to move, but my body refused to cooperate. My fingers felt heavy and unresponsive. Even twitching them was a struggle. I opened my mouth to scream, but nothing came out.

And then my tried and true coping mechanism of remembering that everything is pointless anyway kicked in. So what if Edward Cullen or whoever was standing in my room watching me sleep. He wasn’t doing anything. And taking off my mask to look at him wouldn’t help matters.

At this point, I relaxed into the passivity and neutrally observed through my eye mask that the quarantine companion I’d conjured up was a normal, 30-40-year-old Asian man.

Even hallucinating, I remember feeling a wordless sense of “that’s it?” I mean, other people see, like, horned devils and night crawlers and creepy little girls who need haircuts like the rest of us in quarantine. Mine was so… not scary. Which, I suppose, I was grateful for.

Me, writing this: Wait. Dear God. An old Asian man. Is that supposed to be my father?

— June 21, Father’s Day

Maybe he would be flattered to be thought of, especially as a decade younger, but upon some reflection, I don’t think so. Somehow I not-saw with my not-eyes that the man looked more like the dad in Parasite, Song Kang Ho. Just the vibes.

Me, texting: Surprisingly I wasn’t as scared as I would’ve been if conscious. Handled with aplomb.

Me: Well, besides the trying to scream and not being able to LMAOOO

Friend 1: -_____-

Friend 1: -__________________________-

Friend 1: bro that ain’t it

I talked to some other friends about my sleep paralysis demon the next day, thinking I was being interesting.

Friend 2: Oh, yeah, I get those sometimes.

Friend 3: Yeah, same.

Me: How has this only now come up?? You mean you hallucinate demons while partially conscious and that’s not the wildest thing that’s happened to you?

Friend 2: I just don’t overshare for the purpose of building positive associations of excitement with myself so that people will like me more.

Friend 3: And I don’t start taking wild artistic liberties with what my friends actually say just to roast myself in a blog post.

… We certainly have learned a lot today. Apparently, Club “We See Demons” isn’t that exclusive. I don’t know if I actually experienced sleep paralysis or just one extremely vivid dream. Seeing Song Kang Ho in my room was actually part of a larger dream (in which my bedroom was somehow located in the mountains, which is another story entirely,) and I haven’t experienced sleep paralysis since.

It’s also possible I only saw him because Friend 1 and I, that night, had been talking about Trazodone side effects an hour or so before I went to sleep. So I guess the lesson here is, also, don’t freak yourself out at night.

Which is why I’m writing this blog post right before I go to bed. Sweet dreams.

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