Hypnos

100 Feet (2008)
HP LOVECRAFT (1890-1937)
Sleep paralysis

A.MICHAEL

THE HORROR APPRENTICE

His story Druid's Temple Virgin's Prey may have been very heavily influenced by HP Lovecraft's Hypnos without him even realising it. If not, the similarity and coincidence is remarkable. No one does it better than Lovecraft.

Open about his sleepless nights after having kept a dream journal for many years, my cousin lately claims to have experienced only his second ever "tactile" nightmare. Except it wasn't technically a nightmare because he wasn't fully asleep. The body was alseep, of course....he couldn't move....but his brain was %100 fully conscious.

I myself have the odd lucid dream, wherein I know I am dreaming, but nothing like what A.M tells me.

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His first tactile one, about six years ago, felt like a single finger tapping him once on the top of his head. It woke him up from a snooze on his couch.The most recent one was a handshake from the charming bloke in black (top picture). This is a still from the movie 100 Feet, about a woman who cannot leave her house. It has the most truly terrifying ghost in it which totally decimates a young man in one of the most shockingly brutal scenes I have ever seen. Think The Grudge is an angry supernatural flick? You ain't seen nuthin'.

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A.Michael has a brief history of prescription drugs to which he attributes a portion of the blame. That, and the fact that he is a self-proclaimed 'sensitive'.

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"Dreaming awake is like been caught in a rift between 2 realms," he says. "It's like tripping in a straightjacket. A single crease in the pillow could be a canyon miles deep and somehow you're tumbling down it even though your eyes are wide open and you can see the warddrobe and the window beyond the bed in your peripheral vision. Then you snap out if it. You haven't opened your eyes, because your eyes were already open. You've just twitched a little bit, that's all. The crease is still there, just how it was, but the canyon has gone."

He adds, "The crease is a common one. That's a good title, actually....FACES IN CREASES. They are usually a mixture of all the faces I have seen in movies, moulded into just one by my imagination, especially for me. Designer masks, if you like. These are never pretty, let me tell you. The last one was a young girl with a jaw that hung down to her waist. Another was so folded and mangled it looked like features on a roll of pastry.

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"The handshake was by the ghost in 100 Feet. I was having a bit of trouble trying to wake up, hearing and seeing stuff, typical merry-go-round, so seen as though movement usually arrives in the fingertips first, I thought I would slowly reach my hand out when I was able, and dare the zany dream state to play with my actual flesh and blood, instead of my mind, and prove to me that there was something really going on.

"Instantly I saw that guy and felt something flat touch the whole of my palm. I shrieked and pulled away, then put the radio and light on."

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I keep telling him to get into the rom-coms. 'My Last 5 Girlfriends' is a good british one.

Hypnogogic hallucinations are visual, tactile, auditory, or other sensory events, usually brief but occasionally prolonged, that occur at the transition from wakefulness to sleep.