Crushed

Lying in a bed with grey sheets, my head on a grey pillow. The room is grey and a silver/grey light is coming in through the window. A man stands by the side of the bed, wearing a grey coat and a dark grey suit. His eyes are sunken in and surrounded by deep black rings.

I'm trying to move, but I can't. Something is crushing me against the bed, forcing me down into the mattress. My body shudders with the effort of trying to move, but I remain crushed, pinned and immobile.

Then my brain clicks in and tells me I'm dreaming. It's telling me I don't need to move, I just need to wake up. I grit my teeth and tense up again, this time trying to drag myself to consciousness and with an almighty effort, I pop back into the world face down on my pillow, blinking blearily at the morning light that is creeping through the curtains.

For the scientifically minded, this is a phenomenon known as sleep paralysis that I've had on and off for most of my life. It's thought to be one of the explanations behind UFO abductions as you are always immobile, and generally there is someone or something, looking over you. I've seen the grey man many times there, and the first time it ever happened to me, he was peering in through the window of the door. I've also had a strange, twisted, hag like creature that stood in a cloud of darkness in the corner of my room (possibly my own 'Night Hag') and two silver, ghost like creatures that floated and peered at me with owl-like eyes.

And then there was the dog... In one episode I've never managed to explain, I had a session of this, only a large black dog was crawling over me and raking me with it's paws. When I woke up, I literally 'peeled' from the sheets as I turned over and I found three cuts running across my back, each about 30cm long. They were too far apart for them to have been made by my fingernails, unless each was done separately, and the best explanation I could come up with was I had scratched myself on the poppers on the duvet cover, but that isn't much of an explanation. To this day, I've no clue how it happened.