I.
When I fall asleep in a coffin posture, supine, with my feet tenting beneath the covers and my nose tracing a line up toward the wobbling ceiling fan, I frequently wake up a committed if unwilling Cartesian.
Like anyone else in R.E.M. sleep, as soon I slip under my brain starts sending hormonal relaxants to my muscles that anesthetize and effectively paralyze them. Problem is, when I wake up from R.E.M. only a fraction of me pops awake sometimes. It’s not a split between the left and right sides of my body, like a stroke patient, nor a top-bottom paraplegic split. And it’s nothing like a foot or hand falling asleep, then dethawing with that achy tingle. Mine is an old-fashioned, cogito-ergo mind-body bifurcation. Mentally, “I” pop right awake, and as a natural course of being awake this “I” sends signals for my legs and arms and mouth and eyes to yawn, or stretch, or see what time it is and whether I have to go to the bathroom. Those signals echo, ignored. My mind casts the spell again, but it turns out I cannot twiddle a toe or even flex a nostril, no matter how much I strain. Within seconds of the failure, I’m agonizingly aware of the discrepancy. It’s not a dream (there’s nothing fantastical happening), more like a huge karmic blunder, what being reincarnated as a park statue would feel like.
This rigor mortis is actually easy to shrug off, as long as—and here’s the philosophically troubling bit—the outside world intervenes. I can still sense my environment, like some sort of amoeba or slug—that’s a passive act—but the universe must change somehow. I’m powerless to effect change myself and will remain locked up, alone. A sudden alarm clock will unchain me, but not any noises that were already mewing when I “woke” up. A dramatic unmasking of a window might do it, but not the slow creep of the sun. The slightest nudge from my girlfriend will budge me (I suppose it’s the opposite of those little jerks she makes whenever she falls asleep), but the heat of an arm already draped across me is useless.
I told my girlfriend after my latest “attack,” when I woke panting, “If you ever see me lying there immobile and straining, or hear a strangled scream, you should shake me.” Just to be sure, I added, “Hard.”
“But everyone makes noises when they’re sleeping. How will I know?”
“It’s only when I’m rigid. And it’s only when I’m sleeping on my back.”
“Why only when you’re sleeping on your back?”
“I don’t know.”
“That doesn’t make any sense. And why would shaking you help?”
“It just does.” Too early to be having this conversation.
I should have told her that as long as the external world remains static, I’m trapped in my own mind. It’s the ultimate solipsism—except, unlike a real solipsist, I’m aware of being trapped, and get to glimpse what that would really be like. The oxymoron is part of the horror. And I’m lucky compared to some people. Posture makes no difference to them; they’re always vulnerable. Someone I ran track with in high school would slip into sleep paralysis not just in last few minutes of morning sleep, either, but in the middle of the night. He would have to lie there, awake and mute and rigid for hours, suffering like Philip Larkin in “Aubade” until his mother would notice his tardiness before school (“Shawn’s having a spell again …”) and rock him awake. Not the most restful nights, you can imagine. Others slip narcoleptically into this state while awake, a nod known as cataplexy. One poor cataplexic in England has been declared dead three times, and not just by movie ushers and petrol attendants: Her body locked itself up so tightly that medical professionals sadly shook their heads and began calling family members. The first time, age seventeen, she woke up in a morgue.
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