Betrayal of the Mind When Body Refuses to Follow

Lately, my thoughts keep spiralling around the same question: how did I end up living a life that feels half-asleep?
I feel lost, but not in the sense of losing direction. I know where I want to go, but the road has been closed for so long that even my sense of arrival has disappeared.

For me, summer’s ending has always felt bitter. Still, if I had an actual life to return to with the arrival of a new season, it wouldn’t have bothered.

My days are usually happy, but when night comes, my mind keeps asking the same question: what is there to hold onto?

Nothing to anchor, just days passing by.

Yet through all this despair, one night, a corner of peace whispered:
“Come, you can rest here.”

Maybe for the first time, my restless mind took up that offer. As I lay in bed, a warm breeze gently brushed my skin, and I closed my eyes with a subtle smile.

There was no need for my amygdala to ring its alarm bells then suddenly, I felt another presence.

My heart began to race, thinking a thief had entered.
Noises filled the space, sometimes close, sometimes distant.

I hoped for mercy, that the thief would take my laptop then leave—the only thing I owned worth stealing—and I would remain living.

Simultaneously, I felt bursting bombs in my chest, almost like thunder.

Everything shook; I heard screams, fire, explosions. My sight was blurred, but the flames were strong, and orange bloomed where the night felt wrong. I was certain war rumbled nearby.

With all there was, my problems were endless because there was still someone in my house. I heard them probing, disrupting the order around.

My guesses were they were there to kill me, maybe steal my supplies, or save me from the war raging outside.

I thought the weight of my body would dissolve by now but it didn’t. I began to think I was deeply sedated. Compared to my racing, restless thoughts my body lay in stillness.

Then a glimpse of light appeared in the distance. My heart raced when I realised a blue aura shaped like a human was approaching my corner.
I tried to speak, but no words came out.
With all the force in me, I pushed every inch of my muscles to move, but it was impossible.

I had only one taste in my mouth: fear.
The blue aura kept getting closer. My heart was pounding. The more I tried to speak, the more I felt myself choking.

My vision was blurred, yet my eyes could still trace the movement it carried.

With each step, the blue aura’s arms rose higher. I waited for the blow. Then something shifted. The energy in the room pulsed softer, almost sorrowful. As if it reached not to harm me but to hold.

‘Was it trying to soothe me?’ I thought.

When my heart was about to surrender to the storm, I opened my eyes, to a world that vanished back into silence: no bombs, no screams, no trace of a blue aura.

Words fell apart in my mouth. No language could carry the weight of my shock.

Minutes ago, I was awake but motionless. Pinned beneath the weight of myself, even oxygen felt like betrayal.

My mind kept replaying the moments when I tried to move, to cry out, to breathe myself back, but my body didn’t listen.

My terror came from both what I thought I saw and from what I could not do. I was convinced World War III had begun right outside my building at 4 a.m. in London.

I’m still shaken by what happened, but now I understand its meaning.

They call it sleep paralysis.

It begins with the smallest betrayal when the mind opens its eyes while the body refuses to follow.

In REM sleep, the body is held down on purpose, muscles switched off so dreams don’t spill into action. But sometimes the timing breaks; the mind rises before the body releases.

Then the room distorts. The air trembles, shadows whisper, and every silence hums like something sentient.

It’s the space in between, where fear takes every sense of control you once owned.
Caught in the borderland you find yourself in between, neither dreaming nor living.

My mind was not free of the thoughts that this experience brought, the next day either. I thought this experience cannot be undermined to a simple cognitive disorientation.

Following a deep reflection, I realised my paralysis signified more than terror; it was my body’s initiation into stillness, the sacred pause before my rebirth. An awakening disguised as fear, mirroring my world inside: explosions as my conflicting thoughts, the war as the purification of my former self, sweeping away the ruins I once called home.

My inability to move became a threshold, a liminal state where the physical yielded to the spiritual. In that paralysis, my soul learnt to listen to what my mind fears most: silence.

It’s been a while since I lost some of the major bricks in my life. Their absence doesn’t bring sorrow, but it leaves a hollow, a space that makes me question where my roots are grounded.

My existence lies in a pause while life moves forward in fragments. I’m caught between motion and stillness, shadowed by a quiet hopelessness. A dull boredom that seeps into every edge of my living.

Though it felt terrifying, this was not merely a nightmare but a visitation. An encounter between the conscious and the unconscious, between the self that trembles and the one that knows.

In Jungian terms, such a figure often appears when the psyche is split between despair and renewal. The blue aura, half human and half spirit, emerged from the depth of my shadow; it was the unseen guide that entered when my ego was no longer capable of holding its chaos alone.

The explosions and screams mark the death cries of my old structures collapsing within my psyche: identities, attachments, and ways of being that have reached their ending.

The blue aura approached as a messenger of integration. Its colour carried the vibration of calm, healing, and transcendence, yet it also bore the chill of the unknown. It reached not to harm but to remind that what felt like an ending was my psyche’s way of preparing for transformation. The blue presence asked for surrender, not escape. That’s why the paralysis shifted to a moment of calmness, and then I opened my eyes in a room full of silence.

The luminous emergence of a new self formed beneath the rubble of that battlefield, and the aura appeared as my guide, urging trust in what cannot yet be seen but, slowly shaping.1 The fire was the rebirth of my phoenix.

What follows is the slow awakening, the tender beginning after the storm.

I know I am not there yet, but I have learned that life only unfolds what it has stored for those who trust its process

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