30 years of fighting 'demons': Fred Gori's long road from sleep paralysis to mental health advocacy

For most of his life, Fred Otieno Gori believed he was fighting demons. Every night, as sleep pulled him under, he felt as though something was pinning him to the bed. He could hear children playing outside his window and conversations around him, but he could not move, could not speak, and could not fight back. In the morning, he would rise hollowed out, ashamed, certain that a demon had visited him in the dark and left something broken behind.

He was around five years old the first time it happened. He is 47 now. It took him three decades, eight job changes, a stint on eight different medications in a single day, and a near-decision to declare himself legally disabled before anyone told him that he was not actually battling demons but sleep paralysis. Over the years, the sleep struggles led to high blood pressure, compounded by depression and anxiety so severe that, by his own account, it nearly ended his life.

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Today, Gori is trekking from Migori to Nairobi on a mental health awareness walk, determined to ensure that no one else endures what he did.

Gori was born in Obere, then part of Homa Bay County, to a mother who was the third of four wives. His father held a modest civil service job with the Ministry of Public Works, not enough to comfortably support such a large family. The co-wives and their children lived crowded together on the same compound.

His mother bore the brunt of the household's hostility. She was, in Gori's words, "extremely unpopular," accused of witchcraft whenever misfortune struck the village. By the time Gori was old enough to notice the whispers, his body already carried two scars: a burn across his left shoulder from a paraffin lamp that toppled onto his bed while his mother stepped outside, and the memory, told to him rather than remembered, of nearly drowning in the Kuja River as his mother carried him across on the way to hospital.

"It was against this backdrop that the night terrors began," Gori says. "When I tried to describe to the adults in the compound what was happening to me in my sleep, I was told plainly that demons were attacking me because of the terrible things my mother was doing. My mother came to believe it too. How we interpret things in a village where people are very poor, where there's not much education; everything is caused by witchcraft."

He grew up believing the story. And medically, he says now, the symptoms fit the folklore almost too well. Sleep paralysis is often described by those who experience it as a presence pinning the sleeper down, a struggle to move, and a sense of being watched or attacked.