Marek Makowski in The Millions:
I will never forget the first time I saw the devil—leering at me, lurking in the corner of the room, glowing red and approaching my motionless body. I was caught between sleep and waking; I blinked furiously; I struggled to rouse my heavy limbs as he raised his hand to my face. I could not even muster the strength to open my mouth and cry out, help, mommy, help, the monster will get me—
In the weeks that followed this first encounter, I discovered an online community of survivors who documented their experiences with sleep monsters and demons. I remembered it as one of those rare, significant encounters in the region of the mind where reality and fantasy, literature, dreams, and the occult coexist, but the commenters taught me that doctors had a term for our episodes (sleep paralysis) and a hypothesis that the monsters at night were hallucinations caused by irregular sleep and lack of sleep. Maybe sleep, I thought sadly, had been classified and pasteurized like all the other great human mysteries. I had not escaped the grasp of the antichrist; I had bad dreams.
I could not stop myself from constructing a story of my life through sleepless nights as I read Sleepless, Marie Darrieussecq’s strange, beautiful meditation on the horror and valor of insomnia. “This book is the result of twenty years of panic” that began with motherhood, writes Darrieussecq. “As my children learned to sleep, I unlearned.” Across 255 pages she attempts to learn again, consulting with physicians, downing barbiturates, and dwelling on the vast literature of sleep and sleeplessness.
More here.