In light of a recent posting by me regarding the existence of ghosts, I thought it a good time to post my personal story with the paranormal.

I do not rightly recall if it was 1989, or ’90, enough to say it was many years ago. I was deeply involved in playing Dungeons and Dragons, and reading the same genre of fiction, and enjoyed many a late night of putting myself in a completely different world of magic and mystery with an almost equal desire to believe that world was possible; possibly even preferable to the one I in which I was living. During one session we played long into the early morning hours and I was invited to stay over at the house where we were playing. A relatively frequent overnight guest in any case, I was familiar with the room in which I would be sleeping.

It was that hour of night, or morning, that as soon as you turned off the lights you could tell that the sky was just beginning to lighten. It is entirely possible my eyes shut as soon as I hit the pillow, because the next thing I remember was a great weight bearing down on my back, preventing me from moving a muscle other than my eyes. From the corner of my eye I saw flashes of light up in a corner of the ceiling. Something was in the room with me, something angry that did not want me there, a presence that I got the distinct feeling was female. It was seconds that I lay there pinned down to the bed, immobilized.

Now at this point I should say I was in my early twenties and am six feet, four inches tall and grew up chopping firewood for hours after school. Not an easy person to pin down in any way. Yet whatever was holding me seemed to exert no effort, or at least no effort of mine had any impact. My mind reeled, I began to hyperventilate, I was not wanted. I was hated. Possibly the strangest part was hearing a car go by on the road outside. There was a normal mundane world happening, oblivious, just the thickness of a pane of glass separating me from it. Then, as quickly as it came, it was gone. I was released, I felt the weight disappear and the presence vanish. I breathed again, waited a few seconds to be sure it was gone and got out of bed and out of that room.

I went immediately to my friend’s room and knocked on his door, waking him up to tell him the entire story. I was visibly shaken, without need to go into the number of times I have tempted fate I will say it takes something significant to shake me. Then he told me his story.

As a child, he said, he would be watching television and ask his mother to ask “the Lady” to move out of the way, she was blocking the screen. She was middle aged or older, in 19th century dress and mostly quiet, simply present. The housing development he lived in had been built on an old farm and it was his belief this woman was from that farm, possibly mourning a lost child, certainly a loss of some sort. He felt perhaps there was some reason she did not like me, maybe I reminded her of someone, or I had done something in the house she did not like. (Nothing comes to mind.)

It was only much later that I read about a phenomena called Hypnagogia. This is a state of the mind somewhere between dreaming sleep and wakefulness. Or perhaps more appropriately a mixture of both. The body, when sleeping releases chemicals that effectively paralyze the body when dreaming to prevent you from acting out those dreams in a manner that could cause you to harm yourself. This process, like any, can go awry. In one scenario, the body fails to release the chemical in sufficient quantities and the subject often becomes a “sleep walker.” In another scenario, the subject can actually wake up from a dream state while still under the paralyzing effect, and be influenced by the dream state to the extent that they dream with eyes open, sense presences and often report the feeling of a weight on their body, or total paralysis.

What happened to me is very close to this description. But then there is always the story I was told about apparitions in the house. It can become very difficult to distinguish what is real from what we perceive and see only through the mental filters we choose to put into place. This is my one and only personal experience with anything out of the ordinary. I would love to see a UFO, I live in Bigfoot country, and have heard reports but not yet had an experience myself.
I hope to.