A whisper On Your Back

  In the early 1980's I was having a strange problem with my sleep. It wasn't necessarily sleep as much as that period of time that occurs between sleep and being awake. We had moved into a new home and shortly after I was having this strange thing happen to me. I would awake laying on my side and I would hear a whistling noise, like you would hear on an old train, I would hear it from behind my back, like it was far off in the distance. The whistle would gradually get louder and louder as if it was getting closer. I would begin to try and roll over and found I couldn't move. It was like I was tied down. This thing that sounded like a large locomotive was barreling in on me from behind and I couldn't move. I would struggle hard to break free, almost panicking, thinking I'm going to get run over by a train in my own bed, and just as I thought that something inexplicably awful was going to happen to me I would break loose of this bond, roll over and the noise disappears all at once. No train. I would be awake for this every time, and it happened often. At first I thought that it may had been an inner ear problem, but that never explained why it always happened at that strange inbetween time of sleep and wake. Years later I had a coworker come up to me and say that he had had "a whisper on his back". I asked him what that was and he went on to tell me that that had been a term his Grandmother used. What he described was the same thing that I had suffered years before. I finally went on to discover "sleep paralysis" and all the different things that you can experience under its influence. It's actually something that happens to us all. It is your bodies way of protecting itself from harm during dream stages of sleep. Some people have a defect of sorts and doctors say that this causes some people to have hallucinations, such as seeing ghosts, and even experienced auditory hallucinations (hearing sounds and even voices). Whether or not these assumptions by the scientific world are correct is debatable. What I would really like to know is, with the exception of one time why has this occurred to me only during the short time that I lived in one particular house and why was it always a train whistle?

  December 19, 1843 "A Christmas Carol", by Charles Dickens was first published in England. You don't suppose that old Ebenezer Scrooge suffered sleep paralysis.


                                                         

                                                                Pleasant dreams