My legs are numb, my fingers are limp, and I feel paler than a ghost when I wake up in a cold sweat.

My heart continues to race as my eyes adjust to the dim room, illuminated by a single night light that brightens the darkest corner of my apartment. My sensibility arrives, and I recognize my closet door, ajar to reveal my finest shirts and dresses that solemnly hang upon stray hooks.

My clock reads 4:23. I realize that it’s been no more than an hour since the last nightmare; I’ve had such an abundance of nightmares tonight that I can no longer tell my horrid dreams apart from my grim reality. This might be sleep paralysis, might be insomnia, might be both—the problem is that I have no idea.

My dreams begin with myself in bed, unable to move and in my own room, as normal sleep paralysis victims usually experience. I hear bangs and footsteps, running at me, approaching me, and I don’t know what direction they’re coming from. I keep my doors closed, but they still get in. I see them crawl out from under my bed, their needle-like arms, seeming to glitch in a void of black, and their dark hands, darker than the night’s blackest shadows. They reach for me, slowly sliding their slender arms towards me, while their white, expressionless eyes stab into soul.

And just before they can reach my face, I fall through the world. The bed disappears from under me, and I try to scream at the top of my lungs, but I am voiceless—as if someone has severed my vocal chords.

Now, this is the point where the normal dreams of sleep paralysis victims end. Mine continue.

Tonight, I fell to my university. The dream starts sunny and bright, except there are no people throughout the college, but the school itself is so accurately realistic that sometimes, I forget I’m asleep; I forget until the demons return.

The atmosphere grows dark and I hear a series of knocking. A wind I cannot feel chills my bones. Then, there’s footsteps. There’s chittering and whispering, and I feel a thousand eyes on me.

Then, they surface. The demons climb in from everywhere, surrounding me like flies to a rotting carcass. They slide in from windows, they jump out of the ceiling, they reach through the floor and pull me under. And suddenly, at that moment, I cannot run or scream or cry, and I must let them engulf my being as their hundreds of soulless white eyes watch me suffer.

And then, I wake up in a cold sweat.