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Part I

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Sleep paralysis happens when bodily activities become uncoordinated, when the brain wakes up but the body does not.     Normally, sleep paralysis can be accompanied by hallucinations, many believe that this is the way the brain tries to find to wake up the rest of the body, but others believe that these are related to paranormal activities.To be honest I don't know what to believe anymore .
   Ever since I can remember, I have always been terrified of sleep, scared to death of the night, of the dark. There were days when I simply refused to give my body its due rest, so I would take litres and litres of energy drinks, afraid of having to face it again.
   During my paralyses, I would see a man in a black suit, a white shirt, a grey black striped tie and some half-worn black leather shoes.                                               In the darkness, sitting in a wheelchair, he looked at me with his distant lifeless eyes. He had rotten teeth, which I could see because he always smiled at me. I could smell something coming from him, it was a rotten smell, but for me it was the smell of death.
    Every night he would open my bedroom door and it would creak, it was an endless creaking that would run down my spine and give me goose bumps and then he would appear out of the darkness and enter my room slowly in his wheelchair that dragged and clawed the floor. I tried every way to make any kind of noise so that my mother or father would come to my rescue but it was useless, the only part of my whole body that I could move was my eyes. The next thing I knew, he was standing in front of my bed with his sinister, disturbing smile, staring at me with his black, lifeless eyes.                                                                                  He stared at me briefly, but to me it seemed like an eternity. Right away, he would get up and fall to the floor and I could swear I heard his rotten bones slamming into each other.   Sometimes he would get under my bed and start laughing. They were long, shrill laughs, I would try to move, to scream, to do something that would make me wake up, but the more I struggled, the louder he laughed. But those weren't the worst nights. The worst were when he didn't hide in the darkness, but climbed into my bed and stood next to me. He would stare at me and slowly open a wide smile and start shouting words I didn't know, or he would do different voices, making it sound like a thousand and one other voices at the same time, all with intonations of pain and suffering. When he finally stopped shouting, he would get really close to my face and whisper in a slimy, disgusting voice "I'm waiting for you baby" over and over and over again.             

   I couldn't stand going through that every night anymore. I started having anxiety attacks every night before bed, I couldn't rest and it started affecting my school and personal life. My mother, seeing my despair, took me to a psychiatrist to try to solve my problems. My psychiatrist prescribed me various medicines to help me with my sleep. These remedies left me with a very deep and heavy sleep but when I woke up, I no longer looked like "me". I was totally airborne, I felt like a bit of a junkie with no focus or interest in what was going on around me.                                               But I felt fine, however much I didn't show it, I no longer saw him, I no longer heard his whispers and his laughter.                                                                                              I've been medicated for almost two years now and I don't think I'll ever get over him. I don't think I'll ever have a peaceful night without my medication.

I just know that on the day of my death, when the darkness takes over my whole being I will meet him again and I know that on that day he will be waiting for me so that we can walk together into the void where I can no longer avoid him. The funniest thing is that sometimes I seem to feel his presence, in the darkest corner of my room sitting in his wheelchair smiling at me with his big rotten smile.