I wish I'd learned to sleep on my back, if learn is the right word. Maybe "gotten used to" is better. I never did, at any rate, and now it seems every other morning I awaken with one or more stiff, numb, or twisted parts. Can I blame someone for this? Surely my parents were remiss in not providing me with a comprehensive "beducation." That term sounds too sexy, suggesting the tender lessons of a warm-hearted prostitute.

When I try to sleep on my back I have the air of a nervous patient stiffly entombed in a CAT scan machine. Maybe I should be grateful I never got the hang of it. To sleep on your back exposes your vital organs to stabbing weapons and ceiling cave-ins, and makes you vulnerable to the shock of sudden ghostly apparitions, leaping ghouls, and maniacs advancing on you from the shadows of the darkened room. You're just as exposed to these very real dangers while sleeping on your side or belly, but you don't see them coming so your fragile veneer of protective denial is more easily maintained, and anyway it's common knowledge that willful personal vulnerability actively summons malevolent forces. Now, I'm not saying that if I had slept on my back all these years I'd have been stabbed repeatedly by a knife-wielding incubus ages ago, only that sleeping on your back makes such an attack more likely. Incubi, as everyone knows, sit on your chest or otherwise straddle your paralyzed supine form. If you're female it might also rape you I suppose, but that's not my problem. These demonic intruders might have sex on their minds but really, I should be so lucky. I suppose there might be incubi with a taste for mansex flitting about the spectral realms but such accounts are scarce in the literature, or maybe such lurid testimonials are just underreported by squeamish researchers. I think they mainly assault Victorian ladies for some reason, or anyone possessing a chaise longue upholstered in velvet, and anyway if a cackling goblin is gonna steal your soul a little rape is the least of your problems. One must prioritize one's woes.

When I was younger I suffered from sleep paralysis occasionally, night terrors, the whole nocturnal guerrilla toolkit. Such indescribable dread. I'd sense a mysterious malign presence near my bed, experience eerie auditory hallucinations, sinister whispering near me, the sound of wind or the sighing abyss. I was also a sleepwalker. So I was either immobilized by terrors or wandering around while unconscious. What dramatic evenings. Now I wake up in the middle of the night and feel bored and read Vanity Fair.