YouTube is home to many videos of people describing what they have gone through in the night, from the banal to the chilling. There’s Connie, a former atheist who found religion when she drove away her unwanted sleep visitors by invoking the name of Jesus, and Forrest, who made Halloween masks of the faces he saw.ĭirector Rodney Ascher found his subjects online, and, indeed, the early days of the internet was, for many, the first time people became aware that their sleep disorder had a name, and was shared by people around the world. The Nightmare found eight people to share their own experiences, from Manchester to New York. Another may see it as an actual supernatural experience. Some worry it is a sign of mental illness, while others rationalise it in a variety of ways: one may see it as part of brain activity, deriving from the same complex part of our subconscious as dreams. Around 30% of people questioned in a recent study reported experiencing it at least once, though a more conservative estimate suggests around 10% of the population get it frequently. Many people with sleep paralysis suffer in silence.

Eventually, that release would come and I’d sit up in bed, sweating, hyperventilating, the “shadow man” nowhere to be seen. I would fight to wake up, concentrating all my energy on getting one finger to twitch, as that would release my body from its prison.

Occasionally it would get to me, and would squat on my chest. Most commonly – and The Nightmare re-enacts this surprisingly common experience in a variety of disturbing ways – I’d feel that there was someone in the room, a dark presence slowly edging towards my prostrate body. Sometimes I’d feel that I was leaving my body, but my journey out beyond my bedroom door was accompanied by sickening Hitchcockian lurches of perspective. As a boy, I would experience a frightening sound, somewhere between white noise and insect buzzing, while feeling a dark presence in the room.

Just as I reached the point of unconsciousness, I’d wake, aware of where I was, but unable to move.īut it’s the hallucinatory aspect of sleep paralysis that is its most petrifying feature. I had my first experience of it at around five or six. But few disorders can be as routinely terrifying as sleep paralysis. From narcolepsy to insomnia, restless legs syndrome to sleep apnea, many of us find our nights are tormented, and our days ruined as a result. Sleep disorders are a common part of the human experience. I was feeling tired, as so often over the past 35 years, because my night’s sleep had been punctuated and, ultimately, ruined, by the very same terrors the film depicts. T he other morning, I sat down to watch The Nightmare, a new documentary about a condition called sleep paralysis.

Nightmare in the dark artwork