That night, when I opened my eyes into the black room, the front lights of the Bugatti on my calendar sliced the wall across my bedroom, as it spun around itself in mad circles. The noises from the motorway, one mile down the road, spilled through the curtains like someone was turning the volume up and down. I couldn’t move. I felt nauseous in a way that as an adult I have come to associate with a particularly bad hangover: vomit sloshing in the pit of my stomach. I looked up at the ceiling, hoping to find stillness there that matched my pinned body, but I found it was covered in neon signs, thick fluorescent gel travelling round in their glass tubes like a bloodstream. I considered that the liquid might really be blood and as soon as I formulated that thought I became sure that it really was.

I could hear the neon static crackling. I thought that I could see the heat from my body travelling upwards and condensing against the glass surface, as though the blood inside was impossibly cold. I heard the steam turn into water and drip back down on to the mattress holding my dead body. I don’t remember how long I lay like that or when I slipped back into sleep.

When I woke up the room was filled with grey light. I tried to move an arm and it responded to the instruction. I was really awake. I ran my hands down my legs and arms. They were dry. The bed sheets stiff. I had been asleep for hours, and my sweat had congealed in a white patch. I looked at the ceiling: it was the same egg blue it had always been, washed out in the breaking light. The black Bugatti marked the month of March, its custom tyres aggressively pushing at the corner of the image. The whole room was quiet and I was hard.

The feeling of having lived through something dark wasn’t unlike excitement. The visions became increasingly disturbing that year and even more so throughout my teens, more intricate too. From the age of fifteen to eighteen, the night paralysis kept coming back. I learnt how to recognize an attack, but it didn’t make me any better at dealing with it. I didn’t improve with time or with practice and it was all rather disruptive.