Revealing the Roots and Behaviors of Addiction
The Monster Under the Bed
All I ever had to do was forgive myself — Dryuary Day 8
“Even in our sleep, pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.”
Quote by Aeschylus: Borrowed for content by William Peter Blatty for The Exorcist, 1971
The thing is, there can’t ever be another me, so at some point, I must be fully revealed, which can’t be done unless I am willing to remove all of my shells, one by one, like a nesting doll.
I sat up in bed in the dark. A radio report crackled that a man had been eaten by two sharks. My closet door flew open, and two maneaters elbowed their way through the narrow door, swam across the room, and exited via the bedroom door. I turned my eyes to the right, and he was standing at my bedside.
He was decapitated and tipping over my bed. He was barrel-chested, in overalls, and wearing a red plaid hunting shirt. I remember screaming as the corpse was falling, horrified that his putrid flesh would smother me, that my cotton nightgown and frizzy hair would stick out from under his lumbering body.
My curdling screams echoed through the house.
At breakfast, I was frazzled. I remember eating cold cereal across the counter from my mom, not wanting to go to school. I was in fourth grade. No one spoke of what had happened, or at least, I don’t remember.
In a long line of night terrors that I had suffered through my early childhood, this was the last one, and the only one that I would remember into my adulthood. My mom later told of these nights, when she’d be awakened by my screams. I was hallucinating; she knew it because I’d be blanched and staring at something that wasn’t there.
The paradox of my mom played out. In the wake of these nightmares, she put me in a tub of cool water and helped to soothe the sobbing and hyperventilating, yet I’ve come to consider if it was her own spastic parenting, the unpredictable bouts of physical and verbal abuse, which brought about the phenomenon in the first place.
The last night terror had recognizable media sources: Jaws (of course), and a lesser known movie called Futureworld. Futureworld was a big deal in our house. It was filmed in Houston at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, where my father worked. There was a buzz of excitement around its release, and my parents even got to go to one of the post-filming parties. They had cocktails with Peter Fonda and others in the film, like Stuart Margolin, who played a character named Harry.
In the movie, there is a scene where Harry was taken from behind and stabbed to death with a long knife. Blood and guts flowed out of his shirt like marmalade. I was just a little kid, and I was traumatized by this scene.
Upon going to YouTube just the other day to prepare to write this piece, I found this scene and let it play out. Even as an adult, I was nervous about what I was going to see. Well, the scene is violent, as far as murder by knife goes, but all that blood and gore? It wasn’t there.
My mind processed the scene and stored it with blood and guts that didn’t exist on the set and hadn’t been added in during the edits.
It was never there.
I had imagined the whole thing, and had remained frightened by it for years. In the scene, Harry is wearing a red plaid hunting shirt. He is the man falling over my bed. Mystery solved.
The whole room distorted. The lamp was now drawn away from me as if pulled back on a bow. I jerked my head to look up, and the ceiling was right above my nose. The presence was upon me, and I couldn’t move. I shoved hard breaths out of my lungs until I could scream.
Once the night terror chapter closed, I continued to have vivid, lucid dreams and horrible nightmares. I used to read in bed to stay awake. I didn’t want to be drowsy. I didn’t want to fall asleep.
Within a few years, this became an excellent excuse to get high. Staying up all night was the obvious cure, and this put me on a quick path to experimenting with speed, cocaine and hallucinogenics. With mushrooms or LSD, I could have an out-of-body experience without needing to be asleep. Mostly, I loved the ultimate freedom from inhabiting myself. No bogeyman.
Until there was.
Near the end of high school, I was living with my mom in Clear Lake, Texas. School was ok, and the parties were wild. I had carte blanche to take anything I wanted because everyone else was doing the same.
Of course, there were many normal, sober nights at home. And on one of these, I went upstairs to bed. I awoke in the middle of the night, paralyzed. There was a crushing weight on my chest, and a malevolent presence in the room. I used all of my strength to extend my left arm to the table lamp, when suddenly the whole room distorted. The lamp was now drawn away from me as if pulled back on a bow. I jerked my head to look up, and the ceiling was right above my nose. The presence was upon me, and I couldn’t move. I shoved hard breaths out of my lungs until I could scream, and scream, and scream.
I woke up. To my new nightmare.
I had this experience for the next seventeen years: being tossed across the ceiling of a friend’s apartment, pinned down on my bed, watching hooded figures enter my dorm room, and in later years, being dominated by some evil force even while my husband snoozed only inches away.
In 2003, Anthony and I had a double house on Bernard Avenue in Cleveland, Ohio. We had a closed-in porch with nothing but a queen size bed in it. It was great for lounging, napping, whatever. We also had Ella, our bright and bouncy two-year-old daughter.
One night, my friend Annette came over. We plopped onto that bed, slid open the wide windows, and uncorked a bottle of wine. I told her about the dream I’d been plagued with. I was so exhausted from it, I just dumped it all in her lap. I couldn’t stand this horrible presence attacking me anymore. I was thirty-four years old. I was at a complete and total loss.
“There’s no demon, honey,” she said, moving closer to me. “There’s no curse, no monster, no outside force.”
I knew what I was about to hear. I just started sobbing.
“The monster is you, Jos. All you have to do is forgive yourself. Reach in deep and forgive — “
I just fell into her arms with such relief and despondence. I couldn’t believe I had never seen the obvious. She helped me that night to learn how to forgive myself — for being a weak kid, a careless person, a reckless friend, an unconscious wrecking ball, an open sewer for others to drain their tendencies, their desires, their resentments, for wearing the skin of a monster that concealed the little girl screaming on her bed.
I never had that dream again. Oh sometimes it creeps in, but there is research now to describe what was happening to me.
What Causes Sleep Paralysis?
During sleep, the body’s motor functions are suspended. During sleep atonia, or sleep paralysis, the motor suspension continues even after the person wakes up.
These conditions increase the risk of experiencing sleep paralysis: – Increased levels of stress – Irregular or insufficient sleep – Use of hallucinogenic drugs, or withdrawal from these substances – Having a sleep disorder, especially narcolepsy or insomnia – Having a mental health disorder, such as schizophrenia, anxiety, depression, or PTSD (these individuals are twice as likely to have sleep hallucinations)
I realize now that I’ve been on a healing path for years, grabbing the pertinent stars as they shoot by, removing my disguise one eyelash at a time. The thing is, there can’t ever be another me, so at some point, I must be fully revealed, which can’t be done unless I am willing to remove all of my shells, one by one, like a nesting doll.
I am conscious that I gloss over the physical, emotional and sexual abuse from my childhood and make light of the exhibitionism and the drug use of my past. It’s a shield so I don’t have to go there. It’s a shield because I don’t want to feel the memories.
I know now that drugs and alcohol have always seemed safer than turning my flesh inside out so all the world can rake my raw nerves. As these writings progress, I think that turning myself inside-out is indeed what I am doing.
Josie Elbiry, 2021
Thank you all for reading installment 8 of Revealing the Roots of Behaviors and Addictions, a journal I kept during a month of abstention from alcohol. These short memoirs are being edited for clarity and included as a series here in ILLUMINATION.
You can catch up on memoirs 1–7 here:
