The Traveler
Special thanks to Shaleen for giving me the idea to write about sleep paralysis.
Rob lay down and closed his eyes. It was time to sleep.
Darkness. Relaxation. A moment in eternity, suspended in the half-life of semi-consciousness. Then he was drifting away from the waking world.
He was a traveler, an empyreal wanderer who roamed the spaces not accessible to him during his waking hours. He didn’t know if there were others like him, didn’t know if his talent was common or rare, only that it was fundamental to his nature.
There was a doorway in the distance, a bridge between Earth and the infinite expanse beyond. Rob rushed toward it eagerly, trailed by the ephemeral white mist that connected him to the slumbering body back at his apartment. It opened as he approached, and he stopped for a moment on the threshold to marvel at the celestial canvas beyond, universes stacked on universes, a cosmos of limitless bounds.
He took it in, a deep breath of the freshest spiritual air, then burst through the doorway like a rocket. He soared across the stars, a soul unfettered by the shackles of solid form. He could be anybody, anything. He thought of a bird, and he was flapping his wings in an endless expanse of blue. He thought of an ocean, and he was feeling his immense world-sized body crash into the rocks. In a timeless instant that could have been a millisecond or a thousand years, he cycled through an uncountable array of creatures and structures both physical and abstract, visited an unknowable number of worlds both alien and familiar.
Then suddenly there was a presence. It bubbled up around him, cutting off his flight through the stars. It reached for him with oily tainted feelers. Rob recoiled. He’d never seen anything like it, had never been afraid in this place before today. He dashed back toward the doorway between the worlds.
It followed. He could feel it gaining on him. If he stayed, he thought it might sever the cord that connected him to Earth, that it would carry him away to someplace dark and cold.
Almost there. He was almost back on the other side. But just as he’d started to wake, that dark entity snatched him from behind. He could feel the mattress beneath his head, feel his lungs rise and fall as his body breathed, yet he couldn’t move his arms or legs, couldn’t open his eyes. The world was still black, with that dark presence trying to reel him in.
He tried to kick loose, but its grip wouldn’t budge. Meanwhile the heart back in his body started to race, the lungs drawing in shorter and shallower breaths. He lunged at his body, scrambled to reanimate muscles that had been frozen by the paralysis of sleep. But he was maddeningly out of reach. All the while that mysterious entity continued to pull, dragging him inch by inch.
Rob clawed, scratched, dug in tight with his heels. Finally its hold began to slip. He could feel himself slide closer to his body. Reach. He had to reach. Just a bit farther. He could almost move a finger. The entity yanked harder, but Rob gave it everything he had. Finally the muscles in his fingers twitched. He felt the doorway between the two worlds begin to close behind him. He was almost there. Almost—
The door slammed shut.
Rob bolted from the mattress in a pall of cold sweat, heart thundering in his chest. He scrambled to catch his breath. He’d made it, but barely. What was that thing? Was he safe now?
For the first time in his life, Rob was afraid to go back to sleep.
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