Sleep Paralysis

Sometimes I get flashbacks. This is part and parcel of having C-PTSD. One of them came after a nightmare. For some reason, the "predicate event" (thing that I remember happening in the dream, but which never happened irl) was that I had viewed a video of a trans woman being murdered outside of my apartment. All my friends were posting on Twitter about largely trans topics and I was trying more and more to conceal I was having more and more and more paranoia/ill feelings due to having seen the tape, becoming more and more and more afraid of even sitting in my house. And then I began viewing the contents of the video in my dream, and the interesting thing was I wondered about if the perpetrator was a cis woman, at which point I found myself outside my apartment, at the scene of the crime, first running toward the woman about to be killed, and after she was killed running away from the murderer. Then I started to wake up. But I immediately went into a liminal state, saw myself in relative darkness, and felt like I was being raped while being pushed down on my side; I felt smaller than usual too. Then I tried to struggle, realised I wasn't actually moving, relaxed a bit, thought, "Fuck, I'm gonna have to try to enjoy this, huh," and then realised once I was slightly more awake that this was a temporary state, so I stretched out my body from foetal position, woke up, thought, "Well fuck, that was a flashback," then thought "Oh fuck, that was sleep paralysis, haha," then put my hand on my chest, and realised I felt deeply embodied and for some reason very feminine. This is an Arc song. • Lyrics: Inside my friends are joking with me, outside the Sun is starving to death. Climbing in kitchens and filling with fear, losing my memory, losing my breath. Outside she stands, alone, under threat. Inside I watch her murder unfold. Stabbed by a woman consumed by fear, her life's story forever untold. I crouch and curl up and cower in terror— the hands of the Empire reach into my dream and make me a hypnagogue, trapped 'twixt realities— the truth I must face is not what it seems. (Even in dreams, I am not secure; the safety of sleep offers me no cure or refuge for my broken head. Perhaps devils lurk within my bed.) The murderess pins me down to the table as flesh enters flesh and I can't move away from the NOTHING inside me, realer than real, that breaks me, transfixes me, seizes my day. I move to escape but I'm held back harder. Darkness increases, brutality swells. I'm supposed to be safe and snug in my bed, but I'm gone in my head, plunged into Hell. I say to myself, "Well, just lie back and enjoy it, you're not getting out of this anytime soon." And I couldn't move, and it just hurt so much, reality itself seemed to be out of tune. And then I awoke, and I felt like shit— At home in my body for the very first time. This kind of suffering can shape who you are, but it's without reason, it just has no rhyme. • Credits: • Evangeline Sutherland ——vocals, guitar, timbrel, production