He knew he had been asleep. He knew he had been dreaming. But he was no longer dreaming. He was staring at the completely static image of a woman with yellow skin. She was an old woman, Caucasian, and her skin looked horribly diseased. All he could see was her head. This was no dream. He could see her too clearly; he was too aware of everything. He could not move. He was paralyzed. He knew that only seconds before he had been dreaming. He even remembered his dream. He had been dreaming that he was in some sort of store and had gotten into an argument with the clerk. The clerk seemed to hate him and he didn’t want to be hated; he wanted to be liked, and yet he himself hated the clerk. This had been just a silly dream. But where he was now, perfectly still, staring at the old woman, her image as clear as waking life—this was no dream. Had he died in his sleep and was he now a ghost? The thought of being a ghost terrified him; from the time he was a little boy and first heard about ghosts he had feared becoming a ghost after death. He was never afraid of seeing a ghost. Seeing a ghost would be like some light show, but more rare and wonderful. It was becoming a ghost after death that frightened him. What would it be like? A dream? Would he go over the circumstances of his death over and over for hundreds of years? That would be like being in hell. As an adult he always believed in ghosts. He wasn’t a doubter in anything, but said to himself, "Of course there are ghosts. People talk about them all the time; I know what a ghost is; everyone does. If someone had merely made them up, no one would have believed the rumor, and it would have died long ago." So now he found himself staring at that frozen image of the old woman; this had gone on some time, and he really started to panic. He tried to lunge forward at her, to make her move, to claw at her, to do anything to break this spell. He found that some force was holding him back; his arms were heavy and would not be moved; he could not so much as turn his head. He heard other people in the room talking about him. Now it is certain that I am dead, he thought. He was terrified. He screamed over and over, "Wake me! Wake me!" He found that he could, after all, scream; but it did him no good. Then his alarm clock went off. He could hear it just as clearly as if he had been awake, sitting right next to it. He thought, "Now, certainly, if I am merely asleep, my alarm clock will wake me." It did. All of a sudden, with no intermediate state, he was lying on his side, on his bed, his panic gone. He could move; he could turn his head: he was awake. The old woman had turned into a round, yellow stain on the edge of his desk. It had been a foot from his face. He had been sleeping with his eyes open. That had never happened to him before. There was an explanation to the experience after all. But he knew that there didn’t have to be, but that he could have remained there forever, staring at that old woman with disgusting skin, unable to look away, unable to escape.