Lightning and Nightmares

The place:  A bunkbed in a college dorm room in West Lafayette, Indiana
The time: Fall 1988
The characters:  KR and JZ

A few weeks into college, I was finally settling in: getting along well with my roommate, getting used to being away from home, falling into a routine, etc.  Then, one night, I was awoken from a deep sleep by a very creepy voice calling my name: "Kehhhhhn".  It sounded like some weird combination of the devil coming to get me and a desperate cry for help from someone who had just had surgery on their jaw.

Disoriented at first, I thought it was a nightmare I was having, but then I heard it again while awake, and it was coming from directly below me: "Kehhhhhn".  Pretty confident that my roommate was being possessed by evil spirits I leaned over in the dark and called him "John!".  He sat up instantly and he awoke from his own nightmare with his face only inches from mine.  He yelled in surprise and I yelled too as I yanked my body back to the top bunk in fright.  Several minute later, I timidly asked "You awake?" and he said "Yeah - what just happened?" So I told him how he was creeping me out.

He then figured out/ remembered that he was having a nightmare in which he was paralyzed but knew he was sleeping, a condition known as Sleep Paralysis.  He was trying various ways to wake himself up when he thought of calling out to me to help him wake up.

Turns out he had had several of these incidents since being stuck by lightening the summer before.  He was camping with his brothers when the tree he had pitched his tent under was struck by lightning.  Apparently some of the lightening went through a root under his tent and went into his body at his shoulders and out through his feet.  He woke with his body making a arc in the air, pelvis thrust skyward, grounded by shoulders and feet.  When the electricity had passed his body fell back to the ground and he was actually temporarily paralyzed.  (I suppose all the muscles were completely messed up and had to re-establish ionic equilibrium or something).  He and his brother thought they were dead at first but they slowly regained control of their muscles starting with their necks and they eventually got control back over all their muscles over a period of a few hours (or maybe minutes, he wasn't really sure).

I decided that story was worth the fright and luckily he didn't have any more incidents of sleep paralysis (at least that I knew of!). Little did I know that someday I would be a physics teacher and this story would become an integral part of the "an amp is a coulomb/second" lesson plan...