You can’t move; no wiggling of the toes or stretching of the legs. You open your mouth to speak, but nothing comes out. Not a squeak, squeal, or peep. Panic rushes through you because you don’t know what’s going on. Your mind’s awake, but your body is not responding to its internal commands. Why is your body failing you?

​

Your eyes roam towards your closet, and that’s when you see it. Something that makes your heart jump and your body stiffer. A tall, white spirit glancing at you from the darkness. Its sunken black eyes and white, flowy skin meant to terrify you. Your eyes grow wide upon seeing the being. Just when you think things couldn’t get any more extraordinary, a small, black shadow figure appears next to it, beckoning it from its hiding spot. The spirit moves further out of the closet but doesn’t leave. Thin hands gripped the sides of the walls, looking around, observing the objects of the semi-darkened room. It looks towards your collection of books, then towards your door, which is closed to outside disturbances. Its white, glowing body makes it the brightest object in the bedroom.

​

The shadow ignores you, not even taking a small glance your way. It’s whispering to the spirit, almost comforting it. Your intuition tells you the spirit is unsure of what realm it has appeared or why. Nothing’s familiar to it, which is probably why it stays in the confines of the dark closet. Good, stay there!

​

You continue fighting with your body to move any way you can, and it still refuses to listen. “Wake up. Wake up!” You scream in your head because your voice is still mute. You know this isn’t real, despite everything around you being in perfect form. “Wake up!”

​

Your body finally listens, and you wake up, looking around, confused, and shaken after what just happened. Heart racing. Terrified? No! You realize in your immobile state that you aren’t afraid of it. Is that bad or good? You weren’t trying to wake up because of fear. You were trying to wake because of the unknown. Desperately trying to understand what this invader was and why it chose you. It isn't something you want to see early in the morning.

​

Then, it hits you. The spirit wasn’t looking to attack you. If it was, it wouldn’t have taken its time to assess its surroundings. Your defenseless situation was the perfect time for it to descend upon you. The black shadow wouldn’t have ignored you. Both had lots of time to inflict pain upon you. If that were their intentions. Curiosity, perhaps! Maybe even scared… of you. You sit up in your bed, thinking to yourself how weird that was.

​

Sleep paralysis hadn’t invaded your body since you were young and stressed about life. Why now? Was it a message or something inside yourself burning stronger, finally ready for you to embrace its power? Who knows what the spirit and shadow meant? What is clear to you is, they meant no harm.

©2022 by Latrell R. Morris.

This story is protected by a copyright. No part of this story may be used without written permission from the author.