So somebody actually learned something from Bob Ross…
The Nightmare
Have you ever felt this, this exactly, before?
The famous painting by Johann Heinrich Füssli (or John Henry Fuseli) describes precisely the experience I have had in the early hours of this morning and that are so perfectly phrased in the old German word “Albdruck”, referring to some kind of pressure caused by mythological creatures that were thought to be responsible for our dreams.
I was woken - or at least thought I was - by a whisper in my right ear. In reality I must have been somewhere in between dreaming and waking; I could hear the whisper, which (hopefully) was in my dreams, but I could also see, because I had opened my eyes and was looking at the dark ceiling. What I couldn’t do was move. As hard as I tried, it was impossible to just tilt my head to the right to see the source of the whisper. I could feel my entire body, but - as is natural when sleeping - I couldn’t move it. But since I wasn’t sleeping entirely this was a horrific experience of paralysis that was made even worse by a kind of pressure on my chest that I felt was holding me down.
Oh how blissful the moment when I finally woke up completely, the whispering stopped and I could move again to look around and see that I was on my own, just like I had been when I went to bed! But now I’m left wondering slightly if my paralysis was merely induced by the “disconnection” of some synapses that is typical for the REM phase, even an irregular one like this, or if it might have been a protection mechanism to stop my brain from imploding or just going outright crazy when seeing the lack of a whisperer and hence percieving an actual outside sound from inside my head?
