Sleep paralysis incident this weekend!  I woke up, and for the first time since I was a kid, had my eyes open.  (It was unpleasant.)  First, I heard what sounded like a cabinet door in the kitchen slam shut.  Then someone running down the hallway toward my room.  Then a light went on and off.  Then...silence.

My absolute first thought was, of course, that there was a demon.  I mean, could that have been more Paranormal Activity?  Then I figured it was Marshall doing who-knows-what, but when I asked him the next day he insisted he never got out of bed.  I checked with everyone else, even though I figured no one else would be running around the house.  The only alternative was sleep paralysis.

Which is kinda weird, since I never actually felt paralyzed.  That, coupled with my second visual hallucination in my entire life (the first and previously only one being when I was five, and I woke up to a little girl's face a few inches from mine, staring at me), still has me wondering just a bit if it actually was sleep paralysis, but I can't think of what else it would be.  Brrr.  I do not need to be seeing lights go on and off in the middle of the night.  No thank you, brain.

The Caprica mid-season finale was EPIC. Although I am totally sick of the network's insistence on splitting up a season with a long hiatus; the show won't be back until October. That's ridiculous.

It had been three months since my last sleep paralysis incident, so I suppose I was due. And it was my own fault for thinking about Slenderman so much. A couple of nights ago, I dreamed that I heard my bedroom door open, and when I rolled over Slenderman was standing in the doorway; I immediately woke up, and thank goodness my door was actually shut. I fell back asleep pretty quickly. Then I dreamed that my bedroom door opened again, but in the dream I assumed that someone had pushed it open because I was late for work, so I scrambled out of bed and made my way into the hallway only to find myself face to face with Slenderman. This time when I woke up, I was frozen, and it was a good, solid thirty seconds before I unlocked. When I'm desperately trying to move and I can't, I end up feeling like I'm vibrating or even shaking, sometimes very violently, even though I'm sure I'm not actually really moving at all - it's very unpleasant. I don't have this type of paralysis as often as the other kind, where I wake up normally enough and only gradually realize I can't move, usually in conjunction with some kind of hallucination. Even though waking up from a nightmare and not being able to move sucks, I prefer it to the latter kind, because I usually don't feel like I'm going to die and I'm not actually feeling anything, just freaked out and unable to check my surroundings out.

Aside from that, it's been pretty boring 'round these parts. I'm so, so close to being done with this draft of my Lizzie Borden script, and I figure it'll take me about a week to do a light edit and polish, so that's scheduling up pretty well. Laura and I are thinking of renting a table at the local craft fair coming up next month; I'll have some pics maybe this upcoming week.

Laura, Sarah and I have watched, oh, four episodes of MTV's Fear the last week - did any of you guys watch that show? If you didn't, basically, they take six people ages 18-22ish and drop them off at an allegedly haunted location, usually something old and abandoned and in disrepair. There's no film crew, so they have those cameras that point back at one's face and infrared lighting and that kind of thing. The team members complete dares, things like going to the cell where an inmate was bludgeoned to death and locking themselves in and staying there alone for twelve hours; if they chicken out, they have to leave immediately, but anyone who makes it through two nights wins $5000. Laura and I were talking about how we would have done, and we immediately came to the conclusion that we would have failed. Hard.

I'm pretty much a giant scared baby. Not only could I not sit in a cell in an abandoned prison or check out the hotel room where a woman was murdered or climb down into a smokestack in a Mexican mine, I don't think I could, like, sit downstairs in my own basement with all the lights off, by myself, for very long without freaking out. I remember when I was very little, my dad would assure me that when I grew up I wouldn't be afraid of things like the dark and ghosts and bumps in the night anymore. I'm still waiting for that.

Way back in December, I linked to a series of horror shorts called Marble Hornets, which purports to be footage shot behind-the-scenes as a film student tried to make a film but was unable to do so because of the mysterious events that began to take place. Namely, the young director keeps catching glimpses of a tall man in a suit, and starts keeping a camera running at all times. The tall man's name is Slenderman.

Laura and I watched the introduction through part four one night before calling it quits. That was December 14th, nearly three months ago.

I am STILL AFRAID OF SLENDERMAN. He probably has a total of five seconds of screen time in the videos I watched, and there will be times when I'll be walking down the hallway at night or be in the middle of opening a door and it will suddenly occur to me that Slenderman could be RIGHT THERE, and I'm eight years old again. I had to pee with the door open the other night because the thought of having to open the door afterwards (what if he's standing right on the other side waiting for me!?) was too much to take.

It's absurd. And yet there it is. Honestly, I can't help but feel that a lot of it is because of the sleep paralysis I've suffered my whole life. I only found out what it was when I was in college; before that, for as long as I can remember, scary, inexplicable shit happened to me at night, things that felt completely real, things for which the only explanation I had were the kinds of things that one eventually stops being afraid of: ghosts and vampires and demons and monsters. Two of my few memories from what we call The Old House, which I lived in when I was 3-4, are both of what I now know to be sleep paralysis incidents. In one, I woke up and there was a girl standing right next to my bed staring at me, and I couldn't move and just stared back at her until I finally woke up the next morning and realized that I'd fallen back asleep (my dad told me that it was probably the moon, which I still yell at him about); in the other, I woke up to feel my bed bouncing and shaking and understandably surmised that two monsters were dragging it behind the wall and down the secret stairs into the hidden basement where they would kill me. Four years old! Of course I ended up more afraid of the dark then some other kids might have.

All this to say that when I woke up in the middle of the night last night after a particularly gruesome and disturbing dream - and I've had some doozies over the years, let me tell you - after rehashing it over and over I creeped myself out to such an extent that I had to get up at 6am and just go sit in the living room and read. It's sad, right?

Aaahhh I had the scariest dream last night. I sometimes find myself bemused at the fact that I still have nightmares at my age; not just nightmares, but that I wake up and continue to be genuinely freaked out for some time. I have to share this one, because brrr, but I know how difficult it can be to read someone else's dream, so I'll try to keep this as succinct as possible.

It started off as a CSI dream. (Does anyone else have TV episode dreams?) They were investigating a pile of dead cats in front of an abandoned store in a strip mall. No one wanted to go inside the building to collect evidence, and they found out that as they moved toward the bottom of the pile, some of the cats were still alive, and they started putting them down.

Then, I was in the passenger seat of a car, being driven by some kind of military officer past the same strip mall. A dozen or so cops were inside that abandoned store, shooting towards a hole in the ceiling tiles. They ran out of ammo, and before they could fall back, men in the ceiling killed all of them with absolute precision. Bang, bang, bang. Then, two men turned long rifles on my car and shot; I screamed for us to hurry up and drive away, but not before I saw that the men from the ceiling had their eyes sewn shut. The leader, who was looking right at me, started talking into a walkie-talkie and I heard his voice on the radio; the men were turning that abandoned building into a hotel and were charging $9 a night, and I realized that they would kill anyone who checked in.

Then I woke up, and had to roll over on my back and stare at my pitch-black room for about ten minutes because I was convinced a man with sewn-shut eyes was standing in my corner, just watching me.

This also reminds me that I haven't posted about my three sleep paralysis incidents this year, about which I had intended to keep a log here. The first two this summer were fairly benign. One, I just woke up and couldn't move, and very rationally knew it was sleep paralysis and just waited for it to wear off. Another, I woke up with a heavy weight on the small of my back; I assumed it was Phoenix sleeping on me, and didn't even realize I couldn't move.

The third, though, I had about two weeks ago, and it instantly entered my top ten. I woke up on my back, frozen, with someone pressing their knee into my throat and holding their hand over my mouth and nose. I couldn't breathe, couldn't move, couldn't even think beyond the cold certainty that I was about to die. I wasn't even distantly aware that this was just sleep paralysis and a hallucination; I was convinced that someone had broken into the house and was quietly and methodically going to kill us all.

Sometimes I wonder why I look forward to sleep so much. ;/

The reason you haven't seen me post about sleep paralysis in a really long time is because I haven't experienced it in a really long time, which has been nice. I mean, I enjoy a terrifying hallucination of an evil monster sitting on the edge of my bed whilst I remain incapacitated as much as the next guy, but the break has been enjoyable.

Last night, I had a really wonderful - charming, actually - dream about this huge guy breaking into our house and strangling me while I tried to gouge his eyes out. I woke up sharply right in the middle of that, frozen, pretty sure the guy was still in the house. So that's always a great way to start your day, you know; mind-numbing fear.

In other news, we opened up the pool this week, so of course we've had highs around 60 and lows at night almost dipping into the 40s. I mean, I love cool weather, but I also enjoy swimming, so it's kind of a toss-up at this point.

I think I forgot to mention that my History of Greece TA is from New Zealand. He keeps apologizing for his accent, and I'm like, "Honey, don't apologize." Although I guess most people didn't watch hours and hours of LOTR behind the scenes docs, so it's probably a hard accent to decipher.

I had a terrifying sleep paralysis incident last night. I woke up, and thought that I'd heard a loud noise, but I didn't know what it was, so I waited to see if I heard it again. And then, I heard my BEDROOM DOOR OPEN. Which, it sticks, so it's a loud, friction-y, squeaky sound. All I can think is, I left my keys in the living room, someone has broken in to the apartment and has unlocked my bedroom door, and now they're INSIDE, and now they're GOING TO KILL ME.

By the time I finally was able to move, I had so much adrenaline that there was no way I was going back to sleep, so I was up at 6:30 this morning. Suffice it to say, that's a lot earlier than I usually get up.

Saw The Queen yesterday, which was very, very good in a kind of deceptive way. I enjoyed it well enough while watching it, but wasn't quite sure if it was BP material. And then I ended up thinking about it the rest of the night, and replaying scenes in my head, and even ended up reading all about Elizabeth II online. (She was a mechanic during WWII! I had no idea! So awesome.) And what I loved about Helen Mirren's performance is how it's not big and showy, but it's still so real and powerful, and you get the sense of the person behind the facade. I have felt lately that winning performances, especially leading performances, have had a lot of histrionics and show to them, so it's nice to see so much acclaim for a performance that goes against that type.

In a bit of a coincidence (OR IS IT?), I watched the first part of Elizabeth I, the miniseries she won her Emmy (and assorted other awards) for, which was actually at the opposite end of the spectrum, performance-wise. Elizabeth is a hard character, because she was so mercurial, and Mirren captured that perfectly. You felt her moods along with her, as she swung from one pole to the next. And the rest of the miniseries--the other performances, the mise-en-scene--was also quite good (the costumes! I was disappointed at the lack of brightly dyed beards, though), so I'm looking forward to part two.