Observations placeholder

Opening Heaven's Door - Patricia Pearson

'It began in my early twenties" she told me "It only happened when I took naps, and if I was lying on my back. The first time it happened, the room got very cold, and very dark. I could hear my husband in the kitchen [but] I was suddenly aware of a hideous, unspeakable evil in the room. And then I was aware that it was on my chest.

It was so real, and concrete. And I couldn't move or call out. Suddenly, as if waking up, it would be gone."
Twelve or fifteen years later, it started again, also during a nap. "I had my eyes open. I hadn't gone to sleep yet, and the temperature changed again, and the evil presence was back. It's the complete opposite of bliss, or of the feeling you have with a newborn baby. This evil was deeply old. It wasn't the evil of a brand-new psychopath. It was evil that had been in the world since time immemorial - a wise, experienced evil.

It gave me access to an idea of evil that I hadn't had before. It was dirty-and old-and sexual.

[Experiencing] it was a fate worse than death."

Gowdy went ro research what was happening to her in the public library, although there was scarcely any information available. Until the late 1970s, the sensed presence in sleep paralysis was considered to be a rare side effect of narcolepsy.

"I saw artists trying to caprure the evilness, but no one could quite capture it. until you've had the
experience, you can't know it."

Desperate to avoid her tormentor, Gowdy stopped having naps.

For years she managed to evade the ineffable terror. "But then it started happening again. This time, it whispered, low and growling, in my right ear: 'l am the wolf."'

Fed up with being terrorized, Gowdy abruptly and angrily surrendered. "Well," she replied, "do your worst."

At this, "the hallucinarion popped and disappeared and never came back. That suggests to me that I actually took on my own subconscious and, by fearlessness, I beat it." she also wonders whether it wasn't a deeper, collective unconscious she was tapping, or as she put it 'the memory of pain, the memory of evil"