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! 
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