Whispers Behind My Eyelids
Night after night, the world shrinks to a tremor at the edge of sleep. The room becomes a pocket of quiet that holds its breath, and somewhere inside the dark, something listens back.
Sleep paralysis finds me with a ledger of sensations: a pressure on the chest, a refusal of limbs, a soundless screeching in the ears, and a mouth that refuses to utter the prayer that would invite dawn. I know the ritual: the moment when the eyelids refuse to part, and the body lies as though a trapdoor has sealed shut from the inside.
From the corner of the ceiling, not quite a silhouette but a rumor given weight, the figure arrives. It does not breathe, but it draws a breath for you. It speaks not with words but with an ache—the ache of something ancient pressed against the temple, a whispering that slides into your skull and fumbles there like a key that refuses to turn.
“We have waited for your quiet mouth to open,” the voice says, softer than moth wings, colder than steel. “We are the night’s careful guests.”
Their language has no vowels, only the sensation of sound: a murmur that makes the room tighten, a hinge that creaks in the mind. I try to catalog the moment as if it were a map: the lamp that flickers not from fear but from recognition, the clock that ticks in increments too slow for life, the air that tastes of old stone and rain-quiet graves.
- My chest becomes a locked door, and somewhere behind it, hands try to turn the knob without a key.
- My breath halts, then returns with the ferocity of a storm I never invited.
- Shapes gather at the foot of the bed, not monsters, but measurements—their statistics of danger calculated in the space between heartbeat and sleep.
- The whispers thread through my eyelashes, threading the night with a language I cannot translate, yet somehow understand enough to fear.
One night, I ask a question I should not have spoken aloud. The room goes colder, and the voice answers not with a phrase but with a promise: if you listen, you may learn what you fear, and if you learn, perhaps you will learn to untangle the knot that holds you here. The thought makes me shiver so deeply that the paralysis loosens for the briefest breath, a window cracked open by a wind from the other side of sleep.
“Remember,” it says as release slips away, “we are not your dream; we are your memory of the dark.”
When dawn finally drips through the blinds, the weight dissolves into morning light, and I am free—until night returns with a different whispers behind my eyelids, waiting to test my courage again.