Calamitous Paralysis

The nightmare was bad enough. A device not unlike a record player but significantly larger, and featuring a round, sandpaper like material instead of a vinyl record. It spun rapidly. A man held my elbow to it. Flesh and bone were grinded away. After my elbow was reduced to immobility, the man held the palm of my right hand to the spinning surface, and my flesh began to be rapidly grinded off, strips of dermis sent flying into the air.

I woke up screaming.

I woke up into an episode of sleep paralysis. I still do not know if my entire body was shaking, or if I had the sensation of my entire body shaking. I also wasn't in my body. I slowly floated down from above my bed towards it. Every sound was magnified, loud, my computer was a jet engine and the traffic was a train. Reality was distorted and that was the most innerving thing, that sounds I was wholly familiar with were suddenly, inescapably wrong. The world I knew around me I suddenly did not know. The shaking became worse. I could not move. I was possessed, demonic.

My body slowly fell into place and I stopped the shaking, or the sensation of. I could move again. I rolled over.

The nightmares would follow me the rest of the night, I danced in and out of sleep. I sit at my desk, shaking, for real this time, from an utter lack of sleep. At least I am inside my body.