I was 11 years old. It was the middle of summer. My mother and I went to Minsk for one or two weeks (I don't remember exactly) to visit my grandmothers (we were from Latvia). My grandmothers were sisters, lived in a one-room apartment. It was an average apartment, where elderly people live, so the presence of icons and candles at every corner did not bother me ... at first.
We arrived in the afternoon, settled down, unpacked the suitcases, but as we were tired from the road, we did not do anything special, we waited for night and went to bed. We slept in one room, on one unfolded couch - the grandmothers, on the second - my mother and I. It seems that everyone fell asleep before me, and I was already falling asleep too... And at that very moment, when my subconscious mind was already 99% of the way into a stable sleep and there was just a little bit left to fall asleep completely, I suddenly woke up from unpleasant muscle contractions all over my body. I think a lot of people know that phenomenon where you feel like you're flying free in your sleep, and you wake up shuddering on the bed from a complete relaxation of your muscles? Well, that wasn't it at all.
Usually after such an effect my limbs reflexively buckled. I was in the middle of the night, and then the feeling was more like a shock wave through my body, but the body itself remained motionless. I sat on the bed for a minute in confusion, ignoring it, and soon began to fall asleep again. And again, there was nothing left to sink into a full-blown sleep when I woke up again from the same sensation. In general, I don't know how many attempts to fall asleep I made during the night, but by morning I could describe what that unusual feeling was like - falling on the bed from a 2-meter height. Yes, that's exactly what it felt like. That night I never got to sleep.
But the second night came... And everything was exactly the same... Then the third, the fourth... It may seem impossible to some, but I, an 11-year-old child, did not sleep for about a week (!!!). Now, as a student, I can stay awake for 24-36 hours at a time, but not longer, or else I feel like I'll either kick my skates or pass out. But then I went about a week without sleep... I don't know, maybe I was getting the minimum energy I needed just by lying motionless in bed through the night? Or from being able to stay asleep for 3-7 minutes at a time (in a drowsy state)? But during the day I walked around like a zombie... Not understanding anything and completely insane from the fact that I wildly lacked sleep.
Then I became strangely ill on about the fifth day of my stay in this apartment. My stomach ached with some kind of unexplained pain, but not in the sense that the pain was terrible... it just didn't feel like pain at all. It felt like my stomach was pumped full of air and I was about to take off. I had never felt anything like this before or since. I was taken to the doctor, who shook his hands and suggested that I was poisoned... And now I was not only sleep-deprived, but also sick with who knows what. Something was trying to kill me with all its might.
I could not understand the very nature of this insomnia. How can a person who collapses on the move from a catastrophic lack of sleep suffer from insomnia? And on top of that, a perfectly healthy child. There were no psychological shocks or traumas in my childhood. I wanted to sleep, I wanted to sleep badly, but something threw me out of my sleep... literally... threw me from a 2-meter height on the bed. I even, in order not to be bored at night, decided to analyze this phenomenon. I woke up from the impact on the bed, so I should feel the rising into the air and the fall itself... I tried to remain conscious, sinking into sleep, pretending to be asleep, but actually peeking, but I never saw myself rising into the air.
My mother, sleeping beside me, felt nothing, though I felt a distinct vibration across the bed from my fall, I was even somehow pressed into bed from the impact.
This glitch went away a couple of days before I left. The body simply overcame the mind. I remember sitting on the floor watching a cartoon with my cousin. At that point I fell asleep, yet outwardly awake. I remember frames from the cartoon, I remember talking to my brother, my eyes were open, but I was definitely asleep at that moment. I still can't realize how it happened. I was exactly like a sleepwalker, just seeing everything and being able to react adequately to everything. I involuntarily came out of that state about an hour and a half later completely awake. After this incident, I finally slept calmly and as a human being in that apartment for another 2-3 nights, and then we finally left.
What was it? At first I blamed it on some kind of glitch in my psyche, until a couple of years later I overheard my mother talking to an acquaintance in the kitchen. Turns out she was hiding something, too-she used to wake up at night in that apartment feeling like someone was licking her forehead (but no pets were there). That's when I realized that there was something going on.
You must be logged in to post a comment.