Research Notes — Dr. N. Sorel
Sleep Disorder Clinic, Lyon
Ongoing patient cohort: parasomnias / sleep paralysis presentations
[Internal document — not for distribution]
Week 1. Fourteen patients presenting with sleep paralysis episodes this month. Standard symptom picture in the majority: hypnagogic hallucinations, sensation of presence, muscular atonia on waking, acute distress during episode, full resolution within minutes. Nine of the fourteen describe a figure. This is not unusual — the sensed presence is among the most commonly reported features of sleep paralysis phenomenology, well-documented across clinical literature. What is slightly less usual is the degree of specificity in the accounts. Nine patients, none of whom know each other, are describing something that has enough in common to warrant a separate notation.
I am noting it here before I have decided what it means.
The figure, across nine accounts: present in the room, not performing any direct action toward the patient, not threatening in the way sleep paralysis figures are often described as threatening. All nine use some variant of the word “interested.” Interested in what varies. Three patients describe it as going through their belongings — opening drawers, looking at objects on shelves, reading papers on a desk. Two describe it as moving through their memories, which they represent as images in the air around them. One patient, a retired librarian aged sixty-seven, describes it as “looking for something it hasn’t found yet.”
None of them feel it is looking for them. This is the consistent element. The figure is in their space, present in a context that is entirely intimate, and it is entirely indifferent to the person lying paralysed in the bed. It is there for something else.
Week 2. Three new patients added to cohort. Two more figure-reports, both consistent with existing pattern. I have now cross-referenced all eleven accounts and identified four recurring descriptors: tall or not-quite-tall (six accounts); not looking at me (nine accounts); going through things or a close variant (seven accounts); looking for something (five accounts). The descriptors vary in their specifics — the figure is tall in some accounts and indeterminate in height in others; the things it goes through are physical objects in some accounts and memories or thoughts in others — but the functional impression is consistent. It is searching.
I want to be careful about the confirmation bias risk here. I am conducting qualitative interviews with patients who are already primed to describe abnormal experiences, and who may be sensitive to cues in my questioning. I have reviewed my interview transcripts and I do not believe I have introduced leading questions. But I am noting the risk.
Week 3. Patient M., a forty-one-year-old architect, came in for a follow-up session. She described a new episode in which the figure — which she has now experienced on three occasions — appeared to be reading something. She could not see what it was reading. When I asked whether it was holding a book or document, she hesitated and then said no: it was reading something that was in the air, or in the room, and the reading did not require a physical object. She found this difficult to describe. She said it was like watching someone read a page that was everywhere at once.
I am noting this without comment for now.
Week 5. I have submitted a protocol to the ethics committee for a controlled self-study. My reasoning is as follows: the eleven accounts now in my file are all reporting from a state — sleep paralysis — that is, by definition, one I can enter under controlled conditions. I will use standard protocol: monitored sleep in the clinic sleep lab, polysomnography running throughout, wake-state monitoring. If I experience sleep paralysis — which is not guaranteed, since it cannot be induced reliably, only created conditions conducive to its occurrence — I will document my experience with the same rigour I have applied to my patients’ accounts. The ethics committee approved the protocol on Thursday. I begin on Monday.
Week 5, night 1. Standard sleep architecture. No paralysis event. No anomalous experience. Good quality data on REM transitions. Nothing to report.
Week 5, night 2. Standard sleep architecture. Slight fragmentation in third REM cycle, which is common under observation conditions. No paralysis event. No anomalous experience.
Week 5, night 3. Standard sleep architecture. No paralysis event. I slept well, which is slightly frustrating. The technician on duty tonight is a young man named Thomas who makes very good coffee and is studying for his qualifying exams. He asked if I was finding anything interesting. I told him I was still in baseline collection. This is true.
Week 5, night 4. I woke at 3:17 a.m. according to the monitoring equipment. I was aware of the room — the ceiling, the monitoring leads, the small red light of the camera in the corner. I was fully conscious. I could not move.
The figure was in the corner of the room, beside the camera. It was not occluding the camera, which struck me as strange, given that it appeared solid. It was of indeterminate height — it was difficult to judge proportions in the dark, with only the small red camera light and the dim edge of light under the door. It was doing something with its hands in the space in front of it. The space appeared to contain nothing. It appeared to be reading.
I estimated the duration of the paralysis at between ninety seconds and three minutes. During this time the figure did not look at me. It did not acknowledge me. It continued what it was doing. I felt the characteristic acute anxiety of sleep paralysis — the inability to move, the presence, the close-quarters stillness of the air — and underneath that a separate quality I had not expected and which I found harder to categorise: curiosity. I was curious about what it was reading.
The atonia resolved. I sat up. The corner was empty. I spoke into the audio recorder: “Night four. Paralysis event, approximately 3:17 a.m. Figure present. Duration estimated ninety seconds to three minutes. No direct engagement. Figure appeared to be reading. Curiosity noted.” Then I lay back down and eventually fell asleep.
Week 5, night 5. Second paralysis event. The figure again in the corner. Again reading. Again not looking at me.
I studied it more carefully this time, with the deliberate attention I bring to all clinical observation. It was reading something that was approximately where my notes are. My research notes — this file, or a version of it, or something that functions the way this file functions. It was moving through pages I could not see, in a space where pages cannot be. It seemed to have been reading for some time before I woke. It gave the impression of someone deep in a text — absorbed, purposeful, methodical.
I lay still for what I estimated to be four minutes. Then the atonia resolved and I sat up and the corner was empty and I recorded my observations in the usual way.
I did not sleep again after that.
Week 6, final entry.
I reviewed the polysomnography data from nights four and five with Thomas this morning. The data is unremarkable — standard paralysis architecture, nothing anomalous. He asked if I had experienced anything interesting during the episodes. I told him I had experienced standard paralysis phenomenology. This is true.
I have been trying to write an objective note about what I saw on night five. I have written several drafts. The difficulty is the following: on night five, I was able to read, over the figure’s shoulder, a small portion of what it was reading. The light was poor and the text was not physical and I cannot be certain of what I saw. But what I saw appeared to be a description of me.
Not a description from this document — the phrasing was different, the detail more precise, the observations more thorough than anything I have written about myself. It was a clinical record of a kind, but the subject was Dr. Nadia Sorel, sleep researcher, and the observations in it were accurate in ways that my own records are not, because they covered things I had not documented and would not have thought to document, and they extended — I am fairly certain of this — past the present tense.
I am not going to speculate about what this means. I am going to complete the study, write up the patient cohort data, and submit for peer review in the usual way. I am going to conduct myself as I have always conducted myself, with rigour and without prejudice toward outcomes I did not predict.
I note, for the record, that I have not been sleeping well.
I note also that when I work late in the clinic, I have become aware, in the corner where the camera is, of a quality of attention I cannot account for. Nothing visible. Nothing that would appear on any instrument I have access to.
Something reading.