Had another instance of sleep paralysis last night. The hallucination du jour: the aliens touching me again. Or rather alien singular. The sensation of fingers on my ribs, paralysis. Not much fear this time but trying to get out of it.

Discovered something interesting last night. If I forget to turn off the Meraki and the modem at night, it makes the speaker in my old clock radio make little random popping noises, kind of like when you have your cellphone near anything with a speaker and it makes the weird modem-like noises. Only these from the Meraki/modem are just single pops, occurring randomly throughout the night. They're not loud enough to wake me up, but they are loud enough to disturb me enough that I spend what feels like all night dreaming.

It sounds sort of like the noise the clock makes when the alarm is about to go off, and that sound has caused me to dream in the past.

I figured this out after three nights of having very vivid dreams. At first I thought it was some kind of spiritual attack owing to unexpectedly encountering an old enemy from my pagan days a few days ago at the grocery store. Then I heard the noises from the clock radio and realized it was making me dream. It apparently makes me surface enough that my brain goes bugnuts and begins spitting out the machine code, so to speak.

I guess I should get out my digital recorder and start keeping track of these things, huh? Could be useful.

I guess I should have written about this this morning. Oh well. Better late than never.

I had an episode of sleep paralysis last night and this is the second or third time this has happened that I can remember in my life. If you've ever been through this you know how completely terrifying it can be. The first one I can remember happened when I was living in North Chattanooga after Aaron left and that one I thought there was an alien in the room with me. And now you know why I'm deathly afraid of Grays even though I'm a science-fiction writer. It is quite simply going through a night terror dream completely paralyzed and completely awake. That first one was so terrifying that when I broke out of it I could literally feel my heart working in my chest and I was just as terrified that I was having a heart attack. It scared me so bad I cried hysterically for the rest of the night.

Last night was just as frightening but at least this time I kept my head, so to speak. This time it was the usual paralysis combined with feeling clawed hands gripping me all over my body. This time the confusion profusion coughed up "demons!" One isn't too logical when these things happen. "Demons!" in rapid succession went to "Say the Lord's Prayer" went to "Wait a minute I'm not Christian it only works for things you actually believe" to "Say the Havamal!" and in my fright starting to think of the words of a Norse saga I once wrote and memorized and not the Havamal. (see the "Runatal" section, but I got my version from Ralph Blum's The Book of Runes when I was a kid.) I was kind of stressed at that particular moment so the fact that I managed that much means I'm at least able to keep my head in some form or fashion.

Anyway. It's a damned terrifying experience. Having read on it, it seems the hallucinations mean I've got the more serious version.

Okay, so I guess I'm going to have to cut out the laying on my back.