unseen

Dozing on the couch this morning…

….I come into the room and see a baseball cap suspended in the air at about waist height, nothing apparently holding it up. It is not frozen in place,  immobile — rather, it drifts and bobs slightly, like a magician’s trick.

I reach out to grab it, try to push it down, but something unseen resists. Try again, but it is like pressing against a powerful helium balloon.

And then it has me.

An unseen pressure wraps around my forearm, climbing to my shoulder, tightening around my chest. I try to raise my arms but something forces them back down. I try to speak, to banish this entity with my words of power, with the names of my gods, but my jaw is held fast and my lips will only allow a burbling mumble to escape.

I push backwards to escape its grasp but it is like moving through taffy. It is all around me now, forcing my head down and holding my arms in an invisible half-Nelson.

It throws me against the wall and I try again to speak, to banish. Nothing but idiot sounds and whimpers escape my lips.

I raise my hands against it, try to snap my fingers or clap, anything to break its hold… But the unseen dread forces my arms back down to my sides, pressing me harder against the wall.

No, it’s not a wall. It’s the closed door of the room.

I wrap my fingers around the knob and twist, throwing myself backwards out of the room. But I can’t escape the grasp of this thing which now pulls me backward down the hall, upright and heels dragging on the floor.

In the family room, my wife sits up on the couch as I fall, stumble in slow motion through the room. Still captured, I stare at her and mumble my pleas for help as the unseen force slowly lifts me and proceeds to throw me around the room while my wife watches in horror.
I wake up, my arms tingling with pins and needles, still trying to speak… and failing.