Episode 05
Elsewhere Weather
A married woman's sleep-paralysis episodes are diagnosed, textbook-perfectly, as the “shadow at the foot of the bed” — but the abrasions, soil, and burns she wakes up with don't come from anything visiting her bedroom; they come from somewhere her body keeps actually going, six nights a week, for six weeks, while her husband sleeps an arm's length away and a hospital polysomnograph insists, on paper, that she was never asleep at all.
Angela tells the sleep-paralysis story the way you're supposed to tell it: a heavy chest, a shape at the foot of the bed, five minutes of stillness before it breaks. It's a good story because it's common, because it's textbook, because her husband Paul — who sleeps through all of it, every time — has never once seen anything to contradict her. She's always been a restless sleeper. None of it seemed worth worrying about.
Then she wakes with a scraped forearm, grit worked into the wound, and washes it down the sink before it occurs to her to look closer. Then it happens again. She starts photographing the injuries, less out of fear than out of the practical instinct to show a doctor a pattern instead of a memory — and notices, only once she has enough photos to compare, that every mark appears exactly where the blanket would have covered her.
A sleep study is supposed to settle it. Instead, it gives her something worse than an answer: eleven minutes of the night where her brain reads wide awake and her body, on camera, never moves at all. Somewhere in between those two facts is a version of what's happening to her that has nothing to do with a shadow standing at the foot of the bed.
Spoiler-light synopsis — the rest airs Tuesday and Friday nights.