Ascher does not focus on the many theories as to what causes sleep paralysis (stress, interrupted REM sleep). The theories come up, but only through the voices of those who experience the phenomenon. There are no official talking heads from the scientific community, showing us diagrams of sleep cycles or brain waves. Instead, "The Nightmare" is filled with people from different regions of the country (and the world) telling their stories, accompanied by creepy re-enactments of their sleep paralysis nightmares. Using a horror-film color palette (the shadows are "Lost Highway"-thick) and horror-film camera techniques, Ascher plunges us into the actual visions that sleep paralysis creates: the moving silhouette figures, the darkness, the static. The sense of terror is palpable.
The people telling their stories are filmed in their own homes, but with off-kilter angles, and extremely low lighting, making their surroundings look grim and dark. The shadows encroach on all sides. One guy stops telling his story and peers behind his shoulder, freaked out for a second. With one interview subject, Ascher has placed the camera in the next room, peeking through the doorway, an abyss of blackness in between us and the subject. The overall effect gives the sense of a sleep disorder so overpowering that it has changed people's lives forever. One guy admits that one vision was so frightening that "I immediately stopped being an atheist." Some have come to the conclusion that the terror will eventually get so intense that they will die from it. They all look haunted and obsessed. They try to draw pictures of what they saw, scribbling images out when it doesn't look right. They are not believed when they tell their stories. These are not "bad dreams," they are something else entirely. The quotes accumulate throughout the film, bringing with them a sense of dread all their own: "I thought I was having a stroke." "I felt a presence next to me trying to take my soul out." "And that is when the Shadow Man came towards me." "If I could describe what Death would feel like - it's icy-cold, dark, evil, and it's watching me."
Many of these people have been "visited" (they describe it as such) since they were babies, and for a lot of them a sleep paralysis nightmare is their very first memory. One guy describes two figures made up of television static leaning over his crib, grinning maniacally, reaching in for him. People suffer in isolation, thinking they are the only ones. When the Internet started to rise in importance, one woman decided to see what would happen if she put "shadow man" and "nightmare" into a Search box, and suddenly she found message boards with people sharing similar stories, and also a label: "Sleep Paralysis." She felt exultant, crying to the camera, "It's a thing!" Others found similar moments of connection and recognition, sometimes from very unlikely places. A couple of people describe seeing "Nightmare on Elm Street" for the first time and feeling like it was a documentary as opposed to a horror-film. Freddy Krueger was the shadow man they saw in their dreams, and he wore a hat, too, as the visions often do. One guy describes seeing "Communion," with Christopher Walken, and recognizing the faces of the aliens as being similar to the barely-perceived faces on the figures he saw at night. He wondered if a lot of alien abduction stories were actually sleep paralysis. "Insidious," too, brought flashes of recognition: That's what it is like!
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