Sarah Oleksik Photography
When I was sleeping one night back in my room at home, I stirred for a few seconds while shifting position and opened my eyes. On the left side of my bed I saw a blacked out figure of a suited man wearing a top hat standing over me, I closed my eyes and opened them again this time looking to the right of my bed, where he had moved to.
I then closed my eyes out of fear and felt a heavy thud on my chest, I couldn’t breathe. After a few minutes of pure panicking, I managed to turn on my lamp and hide under the covers for a while. When I gathered the courage I left my room and stayed the night in my sisters bedroom.
For about a year after this I slept every night in my bedroom with the lamp on.
After moving away to university, I found I was able to sleep in a different room in the dark without any feelings of anxiety, nervousness, panic etc.
This led me to starting to attempting to sleep with the light off again in my room at home when I returned for holidays, however I found when I was in my room at home in the dark I was afraid to close my eyes in case when I opened them again if I couldn’t fall to sleep straight away, the figure would be there. This continued for quite a while and it got to the stage where I was physically scared to even go into my room. Whenever I did I felt uneasy, nervous and like I wanted to get out.
This continued for a long time and I spent many nights sleeping in any other room than my own.
This series of images is a narrative telling the story of my experience with sleep paralysis.
A few years ago I experienced sleep paralysis, however I have only recently attempted to accept that fact that there is a ‘scientific’ explanation for what I experienced.
Still today, whenever I go home I feel quite anxious because I know I’ll have to stay in that room.
I’ve never investigated my experience, I passed it off as a nightmare I’d had and didn’t want to look too far into it in case I found something which made me feel more scared than I was, for example at the time I didn’t want to know if it was the workings of a spirit or supernatural presence in my room, and whether it was still living in my room and that was why I felt so uncomfortable in there, or whether it was the fact that I had built up all this fear and anxiety in my head about my room and had made something out of nothing, the fear of what was in my head was controlling my feelings towards my bedroom.
The series of images above is about how my experience controls my mind, the fear of what once happened is still ligering in my mind, telling me it will happen again.