Just when you thought Succubi didn't exist...

I like to use this blog as an outlet to be witty, sarcastic, and silly. Well, I haven't been feeling particularly witty or sarcastic or silly lately, so good content has been hard to come by. Now bad content? There have been plenty of those ideas. You should probably thank me for stopping myself from posting photo streams of Helo or video of myself playing Rockband or inspiration boards for my office redecoration or my imagined audition for Les Miserables. Yes, all of these things I've considered and then wisely unconsidered. Because not only would they be painful for me down the road (as I'd look back and wonder what the heck I was thinking), they'd be disastrous for my readership.

So for today's post (because I really should be consistent about posting regularly), we're going to get a bit serious. We're going to talk about my sleep disorder.

It all started in high school. I'd wake up in the night, eyes wide open. And I'd see something in my room. Usually, it was a person. Sometimes it was a creature. Always very terrifying. I'd keep staring and staring and staring at it until it dissolved and there I'd be alone in my room.

When this first started happening, I was so freaked out and confused and frustrated that once when I awoke to find a man standing at the head of my bed, looking down on me, I started to talk to him. I asked him what he was doing there. He answered me, though I don't remember what exactly he said, and then he dissolved.

So this...this suspension of the dream world...continued. I experienced it through college, post-college, and I even experience it now (it happened last night, actually). I've come to accept it as part of my sleeping experience. I go to sleep, knowing it's very probable that I'll awaken in the night only to have the crap scared out of me due to some super-sized Helo, or bugs swarming the ceiling, or an old man sitting in a chair. I've accepted this and told few people. Because to be quite honest, this isn't really the type of thing you want people to know about you. Mostly because it sounds like you're demon possessed. And secondly....because it sounds like you're demon possessed.

But then today, my whole world changed.

On Yahoo!'s home page, it had an article that said "Strange Sleep Disorder Makes People See Demons."

You bet I clicked on that thing so fast it were as if I were playing Gopher Bop.

Come to find out, I am NOT demon possessed. I'm not even being haunted by spirits. Turns out I probably have Sleep Paralysis--a sleep disorder in which the mind remains suspended between dream world and reality while the eyes are open. (Okay, it's either Sleep Paralysis, or I'm being stalked by an incubus...which is gross and exactly what the ancients would have told me back in the day had I explained my symptoms).

Sleep Paralysis is also the likely explanation for those who claim to have been abducted by aliens (!) or had ghostly encounters (!).

I can only hope that some night my SP leads to imagined alien abductions and sweet encounters with Casper. In the meantime, I'll settle for seeing antlers grow out of light fixtures and random appearances of my siblings as the foot of my bed.