The Nightmare- A documentary film review

Disclaimer: I shall not be held responsible if this post gives you nightmares. I doubt that it would but still I'd like to be on the safer side, hence the disclaimer.

Origin of the word ‘Nightmare’- Middle English (denoting a female evil spirit thought to lie upon and suffocate sleepers): from night + Old English mære ‘incubus’

Have you ever woken up from sleep suddenly feeling out of breath and realised you cannot move no matter how much you tried? If yes, then you have experienced a ‘nightmare’ in the true sense. It feels like someone is sitting on top of you pinning you down rendering you motionless. This picture best describes what it feels like to have one-

My sister used to have them back in school when for a few months we moved to a small cottage next to a huge well. Her place in bed was right next to a small window which opened up to a view of the mouth of the well. It is considered that wells are usually haunted and so when my sister complained of experiencing breathlessness and the feeling that someone is choking her, dad did some chanting next to the window and hung some sacred thread there. The nightmares were gone!

I’m not a very religious person so when this happened I decided that it has to be psychological. Dad’s chanting must have given my sister a subconscious assurance that everything will be fine and so it did. The placebo effect! Then I read about the sleep paralysis. Basically, there’s a chemical that our brain secretes during REM periods of our sleep (when the dreams occur) which paralyses our muscles so that we don’t act out our dreams in sleep. The lack of this chemical is what is thought to cause sleep walking (or worse scenarios where people hit anyone nearby while sleeping). But it so happens that sometimes the brain wakes up from the dream while the chemical is still in effect, making the individual feel completely incapacitated because their body is frozen and doesn’t respond to their will to move. So if it’s a biological disorder how did the prayer work for my sister? Did the demon really run away from the window? Or maybe further inside the house? If so where? I was the only one sleeping next to sister *jerks as a chill takes over*

That was ten years ago. Some six months back, one day as I lay sleeping on my bed in my room -past morning and pretty much into the noon as I usually do on holidays- my eyes opened partially and I saw a huge shadowy figure near the wall opposite to me. Still in half sleepy state I couldn’t understand what was happening. Why is there a man made of shadow standing against the wall looking at me? Is it even a man? Looks way bigger than a normal man. The figure was HUGE, covering most of the wall by himself with no facial features (except maybe what I imagined to be the menacing eyes) and wearing something like what a member of Klu Klux Klan would wear but in black. I remember feeling terrified and powerless, but couldn’t stop looking at the thing with my half open eyes because I couldn’t do anything else about it. I don’t remember if I tried to move but I remember that I didn’t move. I tried to reason that this must be a dream, but realised that I’m a lucid dreamer and that mere thought would’ve made everything clearer as they do in my dreams (which means I can do anything in my dream from hereon), but there I was still lying motionless and still having hazy vision of a shadow creature by my bed.This has to be real!

I don’t know how long it took for me to regain full consciousness but when I did, I was in for a surprise. I was lying face up on my bed with the blanket pulled up till my chin. The blanket had formed a small irregular but pointy ‘tent’ shape on my chest. That tent when projected against the wall appeared huge as I looked down with my droopy eyes, and my partially-conscious-but-still-genius mind had back-flip-jumped to the most logical conclusion for having such a vision: A creepy shadow man!

Don’t grin!

A couple months later my roomie from Pune texted our WhatsApp group and asked me if I know anything about his condition. He is someone who frequently suffers from insomnia. The current condition? He wasn’t able to move if he woke up from sleep in the middle of the night, and that really freaked him out. What a coincidence I thought, and explained to him this phenomena and told him not to worry about it as worrying makes it worse. After that he didn’t report such incidents. Phew! Neither did I, if you’re wondering.

So, when I heard about a documentary about nightmares I simply had to watch it. And I did. And man, what a film it is! We see some people narrating their experiences, from the first experience to the most recent one, each getting “curiouser and curiouser”. As their mind tries to ignore them, the nightmares find new ways around the fences to attack even more fiercely, sometimes getting physically painful. Some go through the ordeal almost daily. The nightmares they describe have been re-enacted for the documentary and wonderfully filmed. It feels like we are experiencing the whole deal, the way they woke up from sleep and found themselves paralysed, with anything from a shadow person to aliens to the Devil himself standing next to them or worse right behind them where they can’t turn and see! They are in fact so creepy to look at that you’ll thank your heavens that you don’t have them.

The shadow people are the most recurring theme of their nightmares (what coincidence!), but unlike my shadow man who was simply a creep watching me sleep (that’s not at all romantic Twilight fans!!) their shadow people (yes plural) walk around the room and even talk to each other. How about that? I can’t explain that in terms of blanket tents!

If you still can’t get the clear picture of what a standard shadow person looks like, imagine waking up in the middle of the night to see this-

And that’s just the initial experiences. Thank goodness I never had such experience after that one time event. You’ll feel pity for these people in the documentary as they narrate their nightmares. Something that’s very strange about them is that some people seem to contract these nightmares when it is brought to their notice for the first time (like yawning). A subject in the documentary states that his girlfriend once confided in him that she gets these scary nightmares in sleep and it sounded strange to him because he had never heard of anything like it. That very night he had his first experience! Later when it got worse he told his close friend about his condition and he did get the mental support he needed, but the next day he also got curses from the friend who also had had a nightmare the night before. Ahem.

It’s a well-made documentary, with nice production value and good acting for the re-enactment scenes. Good acting added with simple sets, sound effects and perfect lighting kind of hits the right nail. Towards the end the dreams and reality start to blur into each other we wonder which is which. For someone who enjoys horror movies a lot, even I came out a little disturbed. There’s not much medical explanation given in the film which shows how little we know about something that’s plaguing possibly millions of people worldwide.

I would strongly suggest watching this documentary if you like spooky stuff, but beware, for some people who saw this documentary claim to have experienced nightmare afterwards. Even the director Rodney Ascher said he had nightmares during the production of the film. So, if you’re a highly suggestible person, I’d say don’t watch it but then it’s already too late because you have read this long post about nightmares and you’re probably going to have one tonight.

Sorry! 

Excerpt from The Winds of Winter

The following is an excerpt from the upcoming book Winds of Winter, a much awaited instalment in ‘A Song of Ice and Fire’ series, due release next year. If you don’t know what this series is please read the review of the first book here, before you continue. Trust me it’ll be helpful.

~Sansa Stark~

Sansa found herself standing beyond the Wall, her feet softly depressing the snow beneath. “Is this a dream?” she wondered, “How did I come here?”

“Anybody there?” she called out. There was none to answer her leave the snow. “Snow” she whispered recalling her half-brother John Snow. “John!” she screamed into the distant woods. Something inside her told her that her brother was in the woods and not the seven hundred foot ice Wall behind her where he had taken the black and vowed to protect the Realm from whatever lies beyond the Wall. There were legends that there lurked the white walkers or the Others beyond the Wall, but nobody that Sansa knew had claimed to have seen one. The old Nan used to tell tales about them. Sansa recalled the times when she had first heard those stories, with her brothers and Arya, inside their warm walls of Winterfell when they were innocent children, all of whom she had not seen since long. All these thoughts clouded her mind and her eyes turned misty. She blinked to keep her eyes clear of tears. As her sight improved she noticed someone walking towards her from the woods.

“John!” she shouted excitedly, her brother was finally here. After a moment, from her still teary eyes she saw that the figure was not wearing black, but thickly clad in white. Sansa wiped her eyes once more with her sleeves and looked up to see who it was. Her heart froze when she realized that the figure was not as close as it had appeared at first. It was simply so huge that her eyes had interpreted it as being close.

“Giant!” she gasped. Giants were only a part of the legends as long as Sansa had known, but here was one in front of her, walking towards her. The face of the giant was icy white, thick white beard covered most of his face and his eyes had a blue shine to it. It was a white walker, a giant come back from the dead; dead but twice as deadly. Sansa turned on her heels and ran towards the Wall, the gate appearing like a tiny wooden window at the bottom of tons of ice. She ran as fast as her feet could carry all the while feeling the giant closing in on her, his every step sending tiny tremors in the icy ground beneath her. She looked ahead and saw that the gate was closing down. Perhaps the guards on the Wall had noticed the giant but not her tiny frame from above. She plunged into the floor slipping under the gate just as it closed loudly behind her.

The narrow tunnel turned dark from the gate being closed. Sansa pulled herself on her feet, still confused as to how she arrived here. She cupped her face with her hands, in a desperate attempt to wake up from the nightmare. “It’s just a dream. It’s just a dream”,she told herself.

“Are you alright?” called out a figure from the open end of the tunnel. In the faint light from outside Sansa saw a silhouette of a battle armour. She followed the voice to find a handsome man wearing an armour that was glittering shinier than the ice around them in sunlight. From the armour he appeared to be most certainly a knight. Sansa wondered how he moved in that armour at all. The armour covered the man entirely save his face where the helm had been pulled up, and it was coloured with symmetrical swathes of gold and crimson. The knight looked magnificent, even more so than the famous ‘Knight of the flowers’.

“I am alright, bruised and shaken but unhurt”, replied Sansa curtsying still marvelling at the beautiful armour, “Thank you Ser, for saving my life.”

“Oh I’m hardly a Ser” said the man.

“Is it so? You certainly look like an anointed knight” Sansa looked at him admiringly.

“Well, I look like a lot of things” said the man sheepishly, “By the way, what was that thing chasing after you? I’ve fought lot of monsters but never seen one like that.”

“I think it was a giant white walker.”

“Now isn’t that a little racist? Just because he’s pale we can’t call him names”

“What’s a racist?”

“Never mind. I apologize I believe we haven’t been introduced yet”, said the man and bowed down “I’m Anthony.”

Sansa bowed her head in reply, “And I, Sansa Stark.”

“Stark? I’m a Stark too!” said the man cheerfully.

“You are? That’s wonderful. I have never heard of an Anthony from our house.”

“I come from a very distant place. Say, do you know what place I’m at? I think I’m lost”

“You mean to say you don’t know?” asked Sansa in disbelief.

“Eh yes I’m sure I don’t know.”

“Why of course you are at the Wall. How could you miss it? Everybody knows about The Wall”, Sansa told him gesticulating at the seven hundred feet Ice in front of them, “You are a Stark and you don’t know? Our ancestors built this Wall thousands of years ago.”

“I… Apologies lady Sansa. I don’t think this is my world. I was travelling far and wide places when I got lost. I was looking for some… precious stones.”

“What sort of stones are you looking for, Ser Anthony?” asked Sansa suspiciously.

“They are sort of gems. There are six of them in total, each with special powers like the ability to control the minds of people and so on. In the hands of evil they can be catastrophic.”

“Indeed. But how did you come this far inside the Realm?” asked Sansa wondering if she should trust this man, “I don’t see a horse with you. You could not have walked this far.”

“I don’t need a horse to be honest. How far in am I? Let me see the map” said Anthony tapping on his metal glove and seeing something in it.

“Do you have a map in a compartment of your glove? That’s fascinating!”

Anthony smiled at Sansa and looked at his glove again. His expression changed as he looked back at her perplexed, “What is the name of this place again?”

“It’s the Wall. Why do you ask?”

“No, no the Wall. What’s the name of this country?”

“Country? It’s Westeros. Oh, are you from the free cities to the east of Westeros beyond the sea?”

“No my dear, I’m afraid I’m out of this universe. Friday! Scan for any open wormholes nearby. This isn’t our universe.”

“Scan for what?” asked Sansa, and then she heard another woman’s voice coming from Anthony’s armour- “On it sir”

“You can speak to spirits?” asked a flabbergasted Sansa.

“Umm, yes that’s what she is. My spirit guide. Her name’s Friday”, said Anthony and Friday responded “Sir, I can confirm that we are in a parallel universe”

“That’s why this country looks so much like the UK”, nodded Anthony.

“UK? What’s UK? Why is she calling you ‘Ser’? You said you weren’t one. And what’s a parallel…” began Sansa but she was cut short by the sharp loud knocks on the closed gate of the Wall. Sansa screamed, “The giant white walker is back!”

There were two more knocks and then a raspy voice from the other side, “Sansa… Do you wanna build a snowman?”

Sansa stood there taking deep breaths trying to hold her heart inside her chest which was trying to break out. Then the thick voice spoke again, “It doesn’t have to be a snowman.”

“That’s it! This place is weird. I’m getting outta here” said Anthony turning to leave.

“Wait! You can’t leave me! Take me with you. That giant will kill me”, pleaded Sansa as the knocking turned into loud bangs.

“Ok fine! I’ll leave you somewhere safe.”

“But where’s your horse? How do we leave?” asked Sansa exasperated.

“Friday, we have to look for the Infinity stones somewhere else. Let’s find a nice place for this young lady first” said Anthony and came closer to her, grabbed her with one arm, “Like I said dear, I don’t need a horse. In my place they call me Iron-man… and I can fly.”

Before Sansa could say anything they were off the ground and flying so fast that she had to hold on tight. Sansa couldn’t believe herself. This dream had turned too weird to be true. Before she woke up she dared herself to look down. The Wall looked like a fence and the giant was still visible. Not afraid of it anymore, she shouted at it- “Go to hell white walker!”

The giant looked up in dismay and murmured “Okay bye….”

P.S- I haven’t watched the latest season or read all the books, but I’m unfortunately aware of a few spoilers but mostly trying to avoid them. So, if this excerpt defies some of the recent unfolding, please don’t mention any spoilers in the comments (let’s keep it clean for the new readers). If it’s not obvious, the references made here are to the “Do you wanna build a snowman” song from Frozen, Tony Stark (Iron man) and the Infinity Stones that are the central items for the next instalment of Avengers movie. Why G.R.R. Martin decided to use them in his next most awaited novel is beyond me.