Tourists!

Recently, I've come to recall an odd sleep paralysis episode that happened one night in Manila, August 2005.

I was shifting around, waiting for sleep when I noticed that, while my body could move, my arms felt very heavy while I did it. I presumed that was a sign that I would fall asleep right away. As became a habit, I rolled into a position that would feel as protected and comfortable as I could possibly be should a nightmare monster loom over me while I lay paralyzed in a mental replication of this college dorm room. Just in case it would happen.

It happened, but instead of a nightmare monster, it appeared to be my high school English Literature teacher if she had been born with Dwarfism. And had no face. Similar bone structure, skin tone, hair coloring, made me think that it really was just a being born from some imagined jumble of memories. It wasn't looming so much as kneeling when it was already petite, but I was sleeping on the floor in a sleeping bag.

So, it was still quite creepy. Not creepy enough that I had to fight to move and wake myself up, though-- I slept, and dreamed, of pushing a grocery cart through the mall. A faceless dwarf in shorts and a T-shirt jogged ahead of me, turned and slowed as if to make sure that I was chasing it, ducked into aisles and peeked out again and ducked in again. Like a human toddler. It was cute.

I liked to think that it was the same astral critter, rather than something silly my mind cobbled from concepts and memories, like the ant-lion from Physiologus. It amused me that it seemed to be able to walk into dreams from whatever world I would be in during sleep paralysis, unlike most of my nightmare-sleep-paralysis monsters that were just there and then gone (or, on occasion, walked in from dreams, and then I would have an episode of sleep paralysis, and then I would wake up and they would be gone and I wouldn't dream of them again.)

Today I read about the のっぺら坊 , romanized nopperabo, a creature from Japanese folklore, that sometimes takes the form of human people, to the characters who encounter them perhaps even a human form that would be familiar... except for that the nopperabo would have no face. I like to think, now, that it might have been one of those.