Paralysis

Making the decision to have a child - it's momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking outside your body.

Elizabeth Stone

I was about to drop off to sleep last night when Lily woke up. Immediately, my breathing transformed from slow, deep, stready breaths to short, shallow ones, almost panicked. And of course I was in no fit state then to sleep. Why should Lily waking up so briefly induce such a state in me? When I eventually dropped up, I was then forced to wake myself up because of my 'sleep paralysis.' I can't remember if I've described this before on my blog but I feel like I'm drowing and thrashing about, trying to wake up. The reality of it is that I am completely motionless in the bed, desperately trying to make a sound so that Andy can hear me and wake me up. The best I normally manage is some very quiet whimpering which sometimes he hears and brings me out of it, and at other times it's just too soft so I must fight it myself. I find this experience quite traumatic. Normally it comes after a string of bad nights so I'm not sure what happened last night.

If I could find some way to confront this feeling whilst asleep, I feel I may have conquered whatever demon this is. I don't know if it's connected with my greater pattern of sleeplessness, but something that Priya said before Reiki the other day about the possibility of a bad memory from childhood, and subconsciously not wanting my own children to go through this....it's certainly interesting and a seed has been sown. It's something I need to pursue.