She woke up with a tickling sensation along the base of her spine. Well, you can’t call it waking up; she wasn’t able to move a muscle. The tickling was almost unbearable and she was reminded of her childhood days when her dad tickled her pink when he was in a good mood. Initially she would come over with a case of giggles but when her dad kept up the pace of the action she would start feeling scary, that he wouldn’t stop vellicating and that she’d definitely laugh to her death. What would start off as an effort to humor her dad in his occasional good moods would morph to one of mortal fear; a feeling that her dad was still being mean but as people mistake a laughing child for a happy child would go by without rescuing her from his clutches. A novel method to satiate his meanness perhaps.
She wanted to swat whatever it was that was troubling her. She was almost sure that she had been dreaming of some astral being in her room. As she usually slept on her side, it wasn’t long before she made the connection between the being and her current predicament; that it was some poltergeist that took pleasure in tickling people to death. She had read somewhere that when a person sleeps his soul or life - or whatever tosh you want to call the state of being alive - apparently leaves his body and floats at about 3 feet above the same. It rushes into the body when the person shows some sign of awakening. This, they said, explains why a person wakes up with a jerk at times. Let alone a jerk, she was not even able to speak. That horrible sensation of hypersensitive nerves telegraphing the brain about their current state of uneasiness, the brain trying to move a muscle or two so that she could turn around and squash the eager torturer underneath or at least make some noise in order to give some auditory let up to her fear, she could picture it all. Yeah, she thought too much!
She wasn’t much of a psychology buff but she had read Freud’s dream theories - his postulation that dreams are a way of expressing your repressed longing - never sat well with her. Most of Freud’s theories were centered about sexual desires and symbolism. Well, she had never wanted to make love to a ghost and even if she had she couldn’t think of her current quandary as ectoplasmic copulation! So, at least Freud’s offhand comment that “Sometimes, a cigar is just a cigar” ought to hold good now. She had been reading something about a spooked house or something; this must be an aftereffect of that! Funny how in broad daylight you can laugh at the spookiness of a story or a movie but at the dead of the night you are paralyzed with fear at the slightest sound or a shadow flitting across the walls of your room, a shadow that breaks the pattern tattooed on those walls by your streetlights. She decided then and there, although she can’t keep off horror books, nothing can stop her from having some comic handy; she would read the comic when her eyelids get heavy so that she would go to sleep with the picture of Cacofonix strung from a tree or Hobbes wondering about his tail. Yes, that should do it.
Following such tangential thoughts it took her awhile to realize that she could move now, no more tickling, no more thoughts about “rigor mortis”, dreading that it had set in with the exception of one of the foremost criteria still left unfulfilled – the loss of life! She immediately turned on her back to squash the bug, ah! Now it seemed more likely, yes, an industrious bug or beetle rubbing its mandibles about her back, yuck, yes, but definitely not as mortifying as a spirit!
Eventually she made another sojourn through the world wide web to find out that among the various stages of sleep, during the REM (rapid eye movement) sleep which principally means that the person is dreaming at the moment, a sort of amino acid, glycine, is released which paralyzes a person lest he or she starts carrying out the activity that they are currently dreaming about. Well, she attributed her episode to some such over enthusiastic glycine release that had paralyzed her for a moment even after waking up. Yes that did sound logical, logical of course till her next encounter with the malicious tickler!
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