046. Wake up and smell the global warming

Lost somewhere in the twilight between awake and asleep, Nick knew it had happened again. As the furnishings of his bedroom moved into dim focus, he fought to thrash his legs. His arms. Nothing. As the panic rose in his chest, he screamed for help. Silence.

He had done plenty of research on sleep paralysis, and there were as many explanations as there were sufferers. The Sumarians had rationalised the experience as a hag-demon sitting on your chest, while the Thai spoke about being phi um – ghost covered. Scientists had their own words - hypnagogic and hypnopompic hallucination – but they couldn’t say what caused it. A break in the REM cycle, perhaps. Or a failure of the brain’s neurons to remind the body it had woken up.

Nick had his own theory.

The first time it had happened in kindergarten. The teacher had sat everyone down to tell them that Biscuits, the class hamster, had moved to England to be nearer his family.

“That’s not what I heard,” Arnie Phillips had leaned over and whispered. “I heard the cleaner stepped on him while she was vacuuming.” Nick fought back tears while the other children moved outside to play tag.  An hour later we woke from his nap – dripping in sweat and unable to move.

Since then, there had been any number of triggers. Finding out, during a medieval history lesson, that a human head can remain conscious 15-20 seconds after decapitation, for example. Or the image of the 1/2000 human babies that are born with teeth. After reading that 300,000 mummified cats had been found in an Egyptian cemetery, he had laid awake for a whole night, not to mention the news that the Amazon was shrinking by more than 2000 square kilometers a year.

There was so much to know – like how giant squid have teeth in their suckers and how a black hole would literally stretch you in two. There were whole volumes dedicated to symptoms of awful medical conditions – and, late at night, he could imagine he had all of them.

Tonight, he lay awake while the weight of the 2.7 billion people who would experience water scarcity this year slowly crushed him. As the alarm clock flashed green against the bedroom wall, he imagined the 100+ different kinds of brain tumors out there. And how when his new girlfriend turned 35 next month, her chance of conceiving a Downs Syndrome child would be 1 in 400. 

Somewhere in the back of his mind, beneath the panic, he wondered if it might be time to stop reading the paper.