I know what sleep paralysis is. I've had it since I was seventeen, and I've spent enough time in the clinical literature to understand the mechanism — REM atonia persisting into wakefulness, hypnagogic hallucinations, the classic intruder-in-the-room experience that cultures worldwide have attributed to demons, hags, and supernatural entities.
I know this. I understand this.
The entity that sits on my chest during episodes is not a hallucination.
I know because of the marks.
The first time I noticed was three years in. I'd had an episode — the classic version, woke from REM, couldn't move, felt the weight on my chest, saw the shape at the corner of my vision that my brain resolved into a crouched figure. Waited it out, fell back asleep, woke normally.
In the shower I found bruising on my chest. Four points, bilateral, consistent with pressure from something gripping.
I told myself I'd slept on something. I looked for what I might have slept on. Nothing.
The bruising appeared again after the next episode. And the next. Always the same pattern, always fresh, always fading within a day.
I started photographing them. I have fourteen photographs across three years, all showing the same four-point bruising, all taken within hours of an episode, all documented with timestamps.
I showed them to a doctor who specializes in sleep disorders. She looked at them for a long time. She said sleep paralysis doesn't produce physical marks. She said she wasn't able to explain them. She did not offer an alternative explanation.
The episodes have been getting longer. What used to be thirty seconds has stretched, recently, to four or five minutes. The figure is clearer now. I can see more of it than I used to.
Last week it leaned close to my face. I couldn't turn my head. I couldn't close my eyes.
It was looking at something behind my eyes. Not at me. At something inside me.
It seemed satisfied with what it found.
I don't know what happens when it's done looking.
I'm going to find out.