That moment in sleep where you know are nearly awake and cannot move; have you ever felt it?
There's nothing quite like it. All you can see is black. You try to open your eyes, but they refuse to respond, and you flick them back and forth under closed lids, hoping that they'll open. You can hear noise, everything that happens around you, you remain painfully aware of, but still you remain powerless to change it. You want to say something; but once again, your mouth won't obey what you desperately tell it to do.
And that isn't even the worst part.
The worst part is the paralysis. Your whole body is locked down into muscle paralysis during dreaming to stop injury. In that awful moment though, between dream and wakefulness, your body remains paralyzed, but your mind does not. You remain all too aware of the weighted feeling, the panic that hits as you realise in mere seconds that you cannot move, and you start to wonder if you can breathe like this, or if your slow death is only minutes away.
Perhaps the only blessing is the continued, even breathing that you cannot change, slowly in and slowly out again. It comforts only slightly though, when the fear of paralysis still grips you.
Noises are around you, and you cannot move, cannot respond; can do nothing but lie exactly where you are, futilely moving your eyes back and forth in behind blind lids.
You wonder why you cannot move.
Then, you wonder if you'll ever move again, or remain like this forever.
That thought sets in, and you try to make a noise. Any noise, scream, cry, sing, anything but the silence your body has committed itself to. Slowly, you think you hear the odd noise from your unmoving lips, and wonder how so much effort can yield so little results.
One of two things happens.
Sometimes, you know about dream paralysis. You tell yourself to wake up, force your body awake, force it to move. You wake up, and the feeling of terror subsides immediately as control is relinquished back to the conscious mind.
More frequently, your panic wakes you enough that you stir into the land of the waking again. No more panic, sometimes the entire incident is forgotten within seconds of waking up.
The terror ends. No more dreams that you cannot control, and a horrible awareness of a body that it the same.
I do not wake up.
I live there.