How to get a sleep study and avoid the demonic

“What brings you in today?” the nurse said.

“I’m doing a sleep study,” I replied. I was sitting on the table with the sheet over it, dangling my legs.

The nurse was a Black woman around my age who hadn’t shown a hint of emotion from the moment she walked in and asked me my date of birth.

“Are you doing your study here? Or at home?” she asked.

“At home!” I snapped.

She jumped, startled.

“Sorry, I had a bad experience,” I said.

“So you’ve had a sleep study before?”

“Yes, ma’am, they said I needed a CPAP machine,” I said.

“But you don’t have one,” she said, looking at my chart.

So I told her this story:

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In 2016, I’d had sleep apnea for a while, but I refused to go to the sleep doctor. It was almost certainly caused by my weight, and I live in the eternal state of “starting my diet next week.”

I was so miserable that I finally gave in. I could fall asleep … once the bedroom ceiling fan stopped clicking, the temperature dropped below 67 degrees, the planets aligned, and I popped my feet out from underneath the covers to ensure proper ventilation. Then, if I could get my brain to be quiet, I might go to sleep. But then, because of sleep apnea, I’d shoot awake 20 minutes later feeling like I’d swallowed gum and was going to choke to death.

I was living alone on the Missouri side of Kansas City, and seeing too many 4 a.m.s made the isolation worse. I found a sleep center nearby and scheduled a sleep study for the next month.

Because of the depth of my issues, they suggested I take a full sleep study and a latency study, which involved staying the night and the entire following day.

Whatever, I just want to not fall asleep reading a book at a coffee shop.

I arrived at the office at 7:45 p.m. It was December, so the sun was long gone. The parking lot was empty save for three cars.

Standing in an empty parking lot holding my pillow and my quilt, looking up at a dark office building, felt like a milestone moment for not having family around. It’s not like my mom would take me to this appointment if I was in Tennessee. I was 25. But no one had dropped me off with a “Good luck, bud. Hope they figure something out.”

The streetlight started to flicker. I shuddered as a cold Midwest wind gust sent me scurrying for the door.

I was lonely, and I was worried. I need help falling asleep at home. How am I going to get my brain to shut up here?

The office was stale, beige, and lit by lamps. I could hear white noise machines fluctuating from everywhere inside.

“Mr. Scott? Welcome! Good to see you! We have your bed right back here.” I hadn’t even seen the pale, blonde-haired woman behind the desk. She was tall, not quite comparable to an Amazon, but she seemed like one of those people who freakishly don’t age. Her eyes popped wider, and she was always smiling to show as much of her teeth as possible. We will call her “Smile Lady.”

The room Smile Lady showed me was for one of two purposes: sleep studies, as she claimed, or for illegal experiments on unwitting humans who conveniently had no one who knew where they were for the next 24 hours.

Imagine a doctor’s office—you know, all the stale fluorescent accouterments and that bin with the plague-looking symbol on the side—but they’ve added a bed with a Costco lamp on a bedside table.

She took my blood pressure and explained how to put the brain sensor on my head. Yes, you have to sleep with a device that measures your brain waves (or implant mind control software. I’m not sure, but I bet RFK knows).

“The TV has Netflix!” she said, smiling with her gums. “So what issues are you dealing with?”

When I talk to doctors, I tell them everything. Everything. Because I want them to fix me. I need them to know the exact specifics of what is going on with me so they can acutely diagnose my issue and fix it.

So I told Smile Lady about my sleep troubles. All of them, including that I have a condition called sleep paralysis. It feels like my brain wakes up, but my body doesn’t. I can’t even open my eyelids. I can feel myself trying to force them awake, and I’m stuck in the dark until I finally snap out of it. Other people have it worse, though. They hallucinate like they’re on psychedelics and will see stuff from their nightmares, but they’re unable to move. It’s a real thing. Look it up.

When I mentioned the sleep paralysis, she stopped writing and looked up at me, smiled, then ran out of the room.

When she came back, she handed me a book. On the cover was a swirl of blue dream clouds and mythical creatures, all crudely drawn by a novice illustrator trying to impersonate medieval art.

“I wrote this and published it. I have the same thing,” Smile Lady said. I didn’t have time to see the title because she flipped it over and pointed at a shadowy man on the back.

“Have you ever seen him?”

It was a hazy outline of a charcoal shadow man in a wide-brimmed hat like you were looking up at him out of the water.

“I haven’t,” I said to the floor, trying to look like I was looking at the book while not looking at the book.

“I used to see him sitting at the foot of my bed when I was hallucinating, and it was horrifying,” she was staring as far into my soul as my eyes would let her. “But I learned to talk to him. Now he helps me make life decisions!”

“You can keep that book if you want,” Smile Lady said.

My usual course in life is to just go along with what people want so they will stop talking to me. Rejecting people to their faces is worse than dying.

“No, thank you. I’m good,” I said, throwing the book to her. “I’ve got too much to read already.”

I could feel my pulse in my temples. The room itself started to feel like something in a Stephen King novel. I couldn’t leave this place for 22 hours and I was trapped with, at best, a psychotic woman and, at worst, a servant of the devil.

When she left, I prayed over the walls, I asked for protection in the name of Jesus, and I might have crossed myself — I’m not even Catholic.

I put the mind control device on my head and tried to get comfortable reciting, “Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil. I will fear not evil. I will fear no—”

I heard Smile Lady’s voice. Audibly.

“Alright, Samuel. I’m here if you need anything,” she said.

There was a speaker in the brain device.

THIS WOMAN CAN SPEAK INTO MY BRAIN WHILE I’M SLEEPING.

“Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil for thou art with me,” I recited the NIV, I recited the KJV. I even got out my phone and read The Message.

I don’t know if it was the repetition, the Spirit of God active in his Word, or just exhaustion, but I fell asleep.

The next morning, a different nurse was much nicer and showed me how to get the Netflix to work.

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“They called me a week later and told me I needed to come back to get a CPAP machine and set the pressure. I told them no,” I said.

“Uh uh, don’t play with demons,” The nurse said. Her eyes were as wide as plates.

She helped me get set up for a home study, then I got a mask and now I sleep great.