You just turned the television off after a few hours of sawing Necromorphs in half. Satisfied, you turn off the light and get comfortable on your favorite spot in bed. You run through the previous day as your mind remembers the good and the bad: the funny joke you told to friends, the massive headache that three Advil couldn't cure, and the 200 Necromorphs you just finished de-limbing. All is well, and you fall asleep.

It is not a peaceful sleep, however. You feel as though you have been tossing and turning for hours. Your mind is racing and you can't focus on a single thing. You are no longer just remembering the previous day but your entire life: the time you dropped a cup of paint onto your shoes in the second grade, and the way you felt when you learned your best friend was moving away for college. Frustrated, tired, and aggravated, you get up.

Only, you don't. You can't move. You open your eyes and look around your room. Panic begins to set in when, despite putting every bit of energy into it, you cannot move a single muscle. Your eyes are your only weapon in this nightmare. Is it even a nightmare? Your room looks the same, and the empty bottle of Pepsi is still sitting in the same place you left it. The clock says that only a few minutes have passed, even though it feels as though you have been tossing and turning for hours.

You try again. Focusing every last bit of energy in your legs, you try and move. It does not work. You try your arms. You try screaming; surely someone will hear you. You can't. You are a prisoner inside your own body. It's as if you are merely spectating yourself from behind your own eyes. And worst of all, you can't breathe. You have given up on trying to move at this point. The fact that you're suffocating has taken the top spot in your "Top 5 Things to Fix while Paralyzed" list.

You breathe in as deeply as you can, but it isn't helping. Are your lungs paralyzed too? Is this even possible? Why is this happening? All of these are important questions, but not as important as the new danger lurking in the corner of your room. Paralyzed and short on oxygen, you now have an unexpected guest in your room. Have you been drugged? Oh dear God, you've been drugged.

You see more movement from the other corner of the room. Odd, alien like groans pierce your heart and your ears as you desperately try to move and breathe. Suddenly, out from the shadows crawls a Necromorph. This can't be real. You must be dreaming. Yet, no dream has ever felt this real. It begins crawling towards you. Slowly it makes its way up your wall and onto the ceiling. Tentacles from its back are swirling around its head as it crawls on all fours towards your helpless body.

It won't stop squeeling. It won't give you just a second to think this through. Your head goes fuzzy, as if someone had just hit you with a baseball bat square in the forehead. The only thing that you can quickly take comfort in is that you will probably die of suffocation by the time this monster kills you. You stop fighting to move. You stop gasping for air. You close your eyes, and you feel your leg move. You pounce out of bed, knocking over your alarm clock and hit the light switch. It takes a second, but you finally understand what just happened: sleep paralysis.

Sleep paralysis is a disorder that affects the way your brain moves through the different stages of sleep. You go through many stages before finally hitting the REM sleep stage. REM is the stage of sleep that allows you to dream. Your body is actually closest to being awake at this stage of sleep, and to prevent you from acting out your dreams in real life, your brain will paralyze you. People who sleep walk have similar problems. Their brains malfunction in REM sleep, and don't paralyze them correctly.

People with sleep paralysis, like me, awake at the very moment your brain paralyzes you as you enter the REM stage of sleep. Basically, your brain is sleeping, but your body is awake. This means you bring your dreams into reality. If you are dreaming about waterfalls and experience an episode of sleep paralysis, you will bring that waterfall into the room you are sleeping in. Your eyes are wide open, but your brain can't tell the difference between your dreams and the real world around you during these episodes.

You normally dream, at least for a little while, about the last thing you did that day. Everything I wrote above actually happened. Last week, after finishing a few hours of Dead Space 2, my brain malfunctioned, and I was almost eaten by a Necromorph.

How was your night?