Novelist Bella Pollen had always been a bad sleeper. She was regularly awake at 4am, too early, she says, to start the day and too late to take a sleeping pill.
And it was 4am precisely that she heard the tread of unfamiliar footsteps coming up the stairs.
‘I was alone in the house which was still a building site. My bed was pretty much the only piece of furniture in there. I remembered thinking, somewhat irrationally, that there couldn’t be an intruder because I’d locked all the doors and windows.
‘Yet something was climbing those stairs. The door handle moved and almost immediately I felt the bed dip and a pair of arms encircle me from behind.
‘On some level, I knew I must be dreaming, that I was below the level of conscious reasoning, because instead of being terrified I found it strangely comforting. I felt safe, cherished even.’
Swiftly she realised her error. ‘Every time I breathed out, the arms seemed to squeeze me tighter and tighter to the point where I could not get enough air into my lungs.
‘I began to panic. I tried screaming but no sound came out. I tried fighting but my limbs were paralysed. Eventually, I mustered enough strength to break free.’
Author Bella Pollen (pictured) has written about the effects of her unusual sleep paralysis in her memoir Meet Me In The In-Between
Bella leapt violently out of bed and went to the bathroom to wash her face, believing it had been nothing more than a particularly vivid nightmare.
She slid back under the duvet, reassuring herself that she was now awake. ‘I could see the minutes ticking past on my bedside clock. How could I not be?’ she asks.
What happened next would be provocative enough were it a chapter in one of her bestselling books.
Bella, 56, a mother-of-four, and married to David Macmillan of the Macmillan publishing empire, felt the entire scene repeat itself.
‘The bed dipped, the same arms gathered me in. It was a male figure, featureless but very strong.
‘The pressure built. I began to choke, but suddenly, unexpectedly, rippling up through the terror, I felt a savage, almost primordial arousal.’
The following night over dinner the novelist told her husband and friends about her visitation.
Her guest, the late writer A. A. Gill, immediately identified it as a paranormal phenomenon called an incubus. ‘I looked it up,’ remembers Bella.
‘It said an incubus was a demon who lies upon sleepers, especially women, in order to engage in sexual activity with them, and that it was a phenomenon recorded in every corner of the globe.
‘In Ecuador there’s a dwarf who particularly likes hairy women and serenades them with a guitar.
‘In Brazil there’s a dolphin disguised as a handsome man who drags women to the river with a hat covering his blowhole. German folklore describes a winged goblin.
‘I had a man who I can best describe as being made out of iron filings magnetically held together. By comparison, it was not so weird after all.’
Behind all the demonic folklore lies a more earthly medical issue.
Folklore: An 1800 painting by Nicolai Abraham Abildgaard depicting an incubus
As Bella was to discover, she was in fact suffering from a classic case of sleep paralysis, a neurological disorder where rapid eye movement (REM) sleep continues after a person has woken up.
In a REM cycle, the brain has vivid dreams but the body is paralysed to prevent people trying to act them out.
‘Only the eyes and the muscles needed to breathe are fully functional.
When this state extends into wakefulness, hallucinations, such as Bella’s ‘demon’ are a common response, as is an overwhelming fear.
A sense of sexual arousal – and satisfaction – is also a normal symptom.
Neurologists cannot explain sleep paralysis, other than to say it is part of the brain and body’s confusion at being simultaneously awake and asleep.
For Bella, knowing what it was did not prevent it happening again.
In the days which followed, the demon returned twice more.
Bella has written candidly about the encounters in her acclaimed memoir Meet Me In The In-Between.
‘Each time,’ she writes, ‘the presence returned a few minutes after I had initially broken free, to push into the empty crevices of my body, take me to the edge of the sexual abyss and then carelessly drop me over, adding a frisson of shame to what was already a profoundly frightening experience.
‘I was being defiled, brutalised. The creature had worked its full will upon every inch of my body, and yet, yet… I was taking pleasure in it?’
She was as baffled as anyone by the visitations from what she now archly calls her ‘demon lover’.
It first appeared when she was sleeping in the family’s rural new home, an Oxfordshire rectory which had suffered bats, rats, rot and flooding. She already considered it a candidate for a haunting.
‘It was next to a graveyard and I thought I had inherited a ghost along with the woodworm and the mould,’ she laughs.
‘After the building project was done, I resolved never to stay in the house alone again.’
But she then suffered further night-time visitations in the American Mid-West and at an Outback hotel in Australia.
‘I had travelled to Australia to finish a novel and had not thought about my ‘demon’ for months.
‘I was north of Adelaide in a roadside motel when I woke to the same sense of heightened unreality and a presence between my thighs.
‘I reached down to protest and felt the unmistakable iron filing fingers close over my hand and push it away. It was a bad moment because only then did I understand that the ‘demon’ didn’t live in a rambling house in the Cotswolds – it lived inside me.’
Bella’s husband David teased her about ‘possession’, suggesting she saw a psychic or an exorcist, but they knew what she needed was help for the stress and emotional baggage causing her increasingly disordered sleep.
‘I am calm and pragmatic during the day, but when I sleep that control leaves me and all my anxieties surface,’ she says.
‘These encounters happened during a super stressful phase of my life. I was suffering crippling writer’s block, running behind on my book, juggling children and a two-year refurbishment of our family home. I was having a life crisis, a professional crisis, a crisis of confidence.
‘Sleep paralysis was a manifestation of my life paralysis. Getting stuck in life is fear-based so I figured I’d better revisit my past to find the source of that fear. I chose to write my way out of the problem.’
The result is her tragi-comic memoir. It is her sixth book, following five novels including the bestseller Hunting Unicorns.
Meet Me In The In-Between documents Bella’s fractured childhood and first marriage to the son of a Mafia godfather, as well as her long relationship with David Macmillan from whom she has recently separated.
At its heart is the story of an innate restlessness which confounded her longing to put down roots and build a family home.
Bella, who now lives in West London, is the daughter of former Sotheby’s New York chairman Peregrine Pollen and his wife Patricia.
When she was 12, the couple split up and she traded her arty, unorthodox early years in Manhattan’s Upper East Side for the rigours of an English boarding school.
Aged just 19, she founded 1980s fashion label Arabella Pollen, best known for bright, sharply tailored pieces which promised to take women from the boardroom to the bar.
Princess Diana bought several outfits off the peg, propelling the brand to fashion fame.
The supermodel Margaux Hemingway was another star fan. And it was Bella who created the iconic scarlet uniforms which Virgin Atlantic air stewardesses still wear today.
These were the years when her sleeping patterns first went awry. In her early 20s, she already had two small children and was commuting between London, Tokyo and Paris, building her business empire.
She often managed no more than four hours in bed a night and relied heavily on Valium.
The legacy was insomnia layered over the ultra-vivid nightmares which had plagued her since childhood. Then, a decade ago, the sleep paralysis began.
Today she recognises the sensations which precede the arrival of her ‘demon’ sufficiently to wake herself up.
She may never be rid of him but at least he’s more of an old friend than a demon lover.
‘As I gained control it became a purely platonic relationship,’ she says. ‘These days, when it tries to frighten me, I just say, ‘Oh please…’ and it has the grace to look sheepish.
‘Recently, it perched on my bed and said, ‘You do realise I’m married, don’t you?’ which made me laugh.
‘It still appears when I am stressed or anxious, for example on the night my mother died.
‘I knew it would visit because I was already in that strange netherworld of grief. Sometimes I don’t stop it visiting because I am curious to see what happens next.
‘We’ve been through a lot together, my demon and I. I’m almost waiting for the day it brings me a cup of tea and a boiled egg for breakfast in bed.’
She is fascinated by what she describes as her brain’s ‘gymnastics’.
‘I’m so curious about how it tries to make sense of the in-between world in which it finds itself, a place where it is both awake and asleep at the same time.’
So has she made sense of the sexual element of sleep paralysis?
‘Not really,’ she confesses, ‘but given that the brain is deliberately playing tricks on you, perhaps it feels bad about its underhand behaviour and adds in the sexual aspect as a sweetener.
‘It’s not a theory I’ll ever get past a neurologist, but it works for me.’