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I think it was way back at the beginning of puberty. There were so many stressors in my lie at the time. I was living with the cousin who I felt was taking away what was left of my family's love for me. I had bigger responsibilities at a middle schooler. My body was changing and I was always in some sort of pain. I was angry and depressed all the time, and I was lonely.

There were few things that I felt connected me and my mother. I couldn't stand being in the same house with her back then. Although I always felt she was overly superstitious, there was always part of me that felt the need to heed her warnings. Especially when it came to the paranormal. She was always fascinated by her dreams and their meaning. I began to develop an interest in my own dreams as well. Despite the thick barrier in our relationship, there was a slight crack in the wall were the unusual was concerned.

There was a time when my mother was sent to the Emergency Room for a severe migraine. Around that time I was developing quite a few headaches myself. The onset of puberty would bring about many migraines within those few years. That is around the time my mother began talking about a ghost sitting on her while she slept. The moment she mentioned it, I thought that this was just crazy Mommy talking about so old Jamaican superstition again. But when she went into more detail about how she couldn't wake up, but she was aware of her surroundings, I didn't know what to think. In a way, I believed her.

Then one day, I woke up. But I didn't wake up at the same time. At first I was disoriented and half asleep. Then, I became aware of my state and I realized that I couldn't move. My first reaction was panic. I thought back to my mother's ghost theory and I began to freak out. I could hear my sister and bother in the hallway and I was screaming out to them to wake me up, but I knew they couldn't hear me. Then, I tried to wake up on my own, but nothing was happening so I began to panic again. I finally got angry and told myself that I wasn't going to let any ghost or anything keep me down. I fought the desire to go back to sleep out of fear that I wouldn't wake up again. Then, I tried to isolate my concentration on the muscles in my fingers and toes. When I was able o move them, I figured I could concentrate on moving my arms. Then, I opened my eyes with my hands to wake up. I quickly shifted my body from my back onto my side.

This wasn't the only time it happened, but it wasn't like it happened constantly or even now. When it did happen, it was in isolated incidents. The feeling was nothing like the movie “Nightmare.” In fact, I'm sure I've died several times in my dreams and I'm still alive in real life. I forgot all about those incidents until now. I didn't know there was a term for it. I looked up sleep paralysis and found out that there was a connection between sleep paralysis and migraines and that it's more frequent in people of African decent. Because of my depression, I had increased stress and I kept irregular sleeping patterns. I was also surprised by similar folklore all over the world about supernatural beings resting on the bodies of the sleeping. Just as I had found out for myself, it usually happens when a person is sleeping on their back. I personally found it more difficult to move when my arms and legs were stretched out from the rest of my body or trapped beneath my sheets. There's so much extra weight on you it's scary.

Since then, I've made it an routine to sleep on my side with my body rolled up in a fetal position. I find it also helps to snuggle something like a pillow or teddy bear. I have a body pillow that I keep to my back so I don't roll too much and I have my Mookie Bear to snuggle with at night. That way my arms are usually close to my body and I'm rarely lying flat on my back. The movie really brought my back to that time. It really played more with the idea of the European “Old Hag” folklore and the out-of-body experiences more than the science of sleep paralysis though.