In films people ask for there mothers during death scenes. But it is not dying that draws out the plea. It is pure fear. I know before I have experienced that fear twice in my life.
The first time it happened I sharing a dorm with a bunch of Isreali lads who were about to return to serve in the armed forces. This was back in 1999 in Australia. I was woken but I could not move. I had the overwhelming sense of an awesome power being around me. I wanted to cry out but my gaping mouth made no sound. I was completely paralysed. I felt utterly frozen to the spot. I felt like the air was being sucked from my lungs and as if a dark spirit stood over me. I thought I was going to die. And then I uttered the word, ‘Mama,’ and a tear rolled down my paralysed cheek. Then the silence faded, I could breath and I sobbed quietly, afraid of waking my dorm mates and totally in shock. It felt to me as if I had been visited by a malevolent force, by the angel of death…
In 2004 I think, I was woken from my sleep in my old bedroom at my parents’ house by the tremendous sound of air rushing out of the open bedroom window, the sound becoming more concentrated and narrower, as if a gap were closing. Again I was paralysed. I could feel the air being sucked from my lungs and I was stunned into inaction. I had woken at the tail end of something awesomely powerful, because the room was filled with bright white light and the curtains were whipping in the air outside my bedroom window and then it was dark and the curtain hung limp and still. I shed a tear and uttered, ‘Mama’, though I only ever referred to her as mum. After a while, I forced myself out of bed and closed the window. I turned on the light and left it on. I was 29 years old and petrified by this experience.
Were these isolated dreams? Was it the action of my synapses firing wildly? It seemed too real, real enough to make me more scared than I have ever been at other time in my life, scared enough to make me regress for just a single stunned moment…
