Although to be fair to Emily, she was just the first of my long line of monsters. Next was Jim, my old apartment super. In 2018, he came over to fix my leaky faucet. Soon after, I hallucinated a gremlin Jim breaking open my door. In 2020, I moved. As I carried cardboard boxes into my new place, the building’s handyman Gary introduced himself. And just like that, my mind found its third demon: Gollum Gary.
Intruders, as it turns out, are some of the most common hypnopompic hallucinations among those with sleep paralysis. Often, they felt threatening—like evil versions of these perfectly nice people were creeping into my room. Yet other times they were just confusing: “Gary,” I asked one morning after a harmless episode where I heard keys jingling outside my door for several minutes. “Did you need to come in and fix something?”
He looked back at me, perplexed.“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
But I’d take Emily, Jim, and Gary any day over Hat Man. (Unoriginal, I admit.)
But he’s got this hat that has the shape of Magritte’s Son of Man and the height of Erykah Badu’s. On a good night, the Hat Man lurks on a corner, a shadowy, menacing presence akin to Slender Man. On a bad one, he rushes toward me, slashing a set of sharp jagged teeth, and jumps on my chest. And on the worst? He held a knife to my throat and ripped off my clothes.
When I finally could, I screamed. Then, I went to my bathroom to throw up.
In the cold shower I took to slow down my heart rate, I considered taking the morning off of work. Yet what excuse could I give? It may have felt real at the time. But none of it really was. Ever was.
That’s the thing about sleep paralysis. There’s no real medicine for it. (Doctors will occasionally prescribe SSRIs if the underlying cause is narcolepsy, which I thankfully don’t have.) Nor can you really prevent it: All I can do is try to have as deep a sleep as possible—my doctor has advised me to cut back on drinking, to stay off my phone before bed, and practice “good sleep hygiene.” Which, vague. Then there’s the fact that there’s just not that much known about it and no motivation to. Sure, it’s scary. However, it’s not that serious—no one’s ever died or been hospitalized from sleep paralysis.
