Suffocation is a unique pathway to fear. Just the merest hint of it causes an automatic physiological reaction; CO2 levels in the blood rise, even just a little bit, and pH levels in the brain’s memory and emotional center, the amygdala, drop and there it is, terror.
That’s a good thing, really. A change in the air doesn’t otherwise have the same stimulus effect as, say, the point of a knife on your skin or scalding heat. That is to say there isn’t pain in the conventional sense; as CO2 goes up past critical levels, in the absence of fear or panic, the body will try breathing harder or faster and, eventually, you’ll pass out. And if the whole situation doesn’t improve while you’re lying there on the floor, death.
So, terror is like pain for suffocation, like being psychically stabbed or burned, albeit with some help from body chemistry. Your body is capable of simulating suffocation in one highly bizarre and accidental circumstance known usually as sleep paralysis. It’s a sensation-slash-circumstance potent enough to generate enough folklore throughout human history to fill volumes, most of it gravitating towards the victim being tortured by witches or demons. In a human history full of flayings, scaphism, and other wildly creative ways to induce misery in others, sleep paralysis remains even beyond our reach: the realm of demons.
SLEEP PARALYSIS ITSELF FEELS LIKE JUST-DEATH OR THE CRUX OF THE DYING PROCESS
For whatever reason, the witch or demon left me alone for about 10 years. Between 2000 and 2003, they were after me every night, sometimes several times before morning, and I thought for sure that eventually I’d wake up once just in time to die for real. The distance between what sleep paralysis felt like most times and actual death felt to be about three or four heartbeats and one terrifyingly labored breath. Although that’s not totally accurate.
The distance often didn’t feel like anything at all. Sleep paralysis itself feels like just-death or the crux of the dying process, or what you might imagine it to feel like when you’re being afraid of dying. I never actually died for very long via sleep paralysis, but I did spend many, many hours lying in dark rooms in a state of just-dead. And the other morning, bathed in a particularly sickly dawn orange light, I woke up just-dead again. The feeling lasted for an eternity, and then passed.
“Being ridden by the witch” is the southern Americana folklore term for sleep paralysis. There are many more folk legends worldwide. In Fiji, it’s kana tevoro, or being eaten by a demon. It’s sometimes cultivated there with shouts of kania! kania! (“eat! eat!”) from persons watching the victim in an effort to prolong the experience and enable communication with the dead. In Turkey, it’s the djinn (another demon) strangling you in your sleep and is only remedied by reading passages from the Qur’an. In parts of China, it’s a mouse stealing your breath. In Catalan folklore—of pooping Christmas log fame—it’s a giant dog or cat that enters your room and sits on your chest while you sleep. (Catalan folklore is the best.) But, usually, it’s some variation of witch or demon suffocating and otherwise torturing the victim.