The lady on the wall.
Sleep is weird.
In the middle of a summer night in 2017, I awoke to Pennywise the clown standing in the corner of my bedroom. Not 2017 Bill Skarsgård Pennywise. It was 1990 Tim Curry Pennywise. Way scarier, in my opinion.
I’d been having a funny dream that I woke up giggling from. For some reason, Pennywise was there laughing with me. He held a deflated mylar balloon. He was happy and angry at the same time. I jolted awake from shock, ramming my palm into my desk and bruising it.
It kept happening for several nights. Sometimes it was the Bill Skarsgård Pennywise. Sometimes it was the Tim Curry Pennywise but horrifically morphed. Sometimes he’d be eight feet tall. Sometimes my bedroom would have floating filming equipment.
Two things were consistent:
It only happened if I woke up in darkness.
Every time, I’d get up and try to punch Pennywise in his dumb clown face.
Some bruised knuckles later, I admitted defeat and went back to sleeping with the lights on. This went on for three years.
I was utterly confused. I have no clown phobia. I hadn’t even seen or read Stephen King’s It. I’d overcome my fear of the dark years ago, yet this accursed clown was forcing my nights back into the light.
A cursory Google search labeled it as hypnopompic hallucinations, or sleep-related hallucinations that occur during awakening, almost like extended dreams.
In 2020, I started trauma-focused therapy. I made quick leaps and bounds from simply having someone hear me out and talk me through the ins and outs of my life. I told my then therapist about my Pennywise dilemma.
“So, what does Pennywise represent?” he asked somewhat rhetorically.
“Oh. Well, shit,” I replied, dumbfounded.
Pennywise represented trauma. Childhood trauma specifically.
I haven’t seen Pennywise since that revelation. To this day, it’s still crazy to me how that’s all it took for that hallucination to stop.
The trauma I unpacked at the time was all I had to bring to the therapy table. Time goes on, of course, and new experiences bring new hardships.
In early 2022, I woke up to my bedroom being suspiciously grey. It wasn’t bright, dimly lit, or pitch-black. I was watching from my own eyes, but also watching from a zoomed out, disembodied view. I felt like I was in the audience of a play and in the play itself.
I couldn’t see her, yet I could.
A monstrously tall lady with long, black hair draping over her face and down to her waist was floating in the corner of my room. She wore a hospital gown. She had horrific intentions. I could feel it.
I was lying on my side with my face to the wall and my back to her, yet I could see her so clearly. She floated over to my bed and latched on, crawling up the side until she made her way to me. She clung to my back and shook me, whispering awful, abysmal sounds into my ear. She was trying to force me to look at her. I didn’t know how I knew that, I just did.
I woke up sweating and panicking. I washed up and did my best to go back to sleep to little avail. I ended up dragging myself to work on maybe three hours of sleep.
Round two. I knew exactly what the cause was, though.
At the time, I was in an abusive, controlling, long-distance relationship of just over a year. She tracked my every movement through an app called Life360. When I was home, she kept me on camera through an Amazon Echo smart speaker that she could drop into at any time and see what I was doing. Every moment of my life, awake or asleep, was under her surveillance.
The lady on the wall was trying to get me to see more than her face. She was trying to get me to see the truth.
I broke up with her that March. It’s been 14 months since.
As I started unpacking all I’d endured from her, the lady on the walls came back. She doesn’t float anymore, but she does crawl. If I wake up in darkness and open my eyes to a black corner of my bedroom, she’ll quickly crawl into view and try to catch my eye. She often succeeds and I think she’ll continue to as I further unravel and heal from all the abuse, control, gaslighting, and manipulation that I endured from my ex.
But overall, I’ve slept easier since the breakup.
The lady on the wall is a welcome guest, albeit a creepy one.