| trisherina |
10-17-2008 11:53 PM |
I lost a day as a kid in about Grade 4. There was a lot of stuff going on that could have led me to make that conclusion, but there was something about phoning someone who later denied that I ever called (and the vivid memory of our black wall phone in the entry with the stretched-out cord that hung above a wire and veneer phone desk with a black-and-brown-patterned vinyl chair in a cozy alcove formed by the staircase landing meeting one of the kitchen walls) in the memory of the lost day. I always wondered about that lost day until
As a pre-teen I often had sleep paralysis. I assumed that it meant I was afraid of the dark and began to read horror suspense novels to cure myself of the fear. At some point in my early twenties sleep deprivation fueled the sleep paralysis to the extent that I mentioned it to my boyfriend at the time. After donning a tinfoil hat and reading a library book or two, he suggested that I had been abducted by aliens on my missing day, and that the sleep paralysis episodes were really efforts by the aliens to revisit their territory and see how I was doing. This notion, however skeptically viewed by me personally, destroyed whatever comfort I had around the act of sleeping. The sleep deprivation got worse and I could no longer even nap without "waking" to vaguely threatening hallucinations, howling in my ears, and paralysis. So finally I went to a mediclinic, and the family practitioner told me my boyfriend was stupid and put me on a short course of low dose tricyclic. Actually, he just prescribed the drug and I drew my own conclusions about the boyfriend. My sleep pattern was restored to normal within two months and I have rarely been visited by the aliens since.
In all fairness I should mention that the boyfriend was well endowed and had a nice cleft chin.
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