Amara Diallo

Amara spent nine years on night shifts before her sleep broke and she had to rebuild it from scratch. She writes about the strange edges of sleep — paralysis, hypnagogia, recurring dreams — with the calm of someone who has been through them and read the studies since. Her entries always separate what's frightening from what's dangerous, which is almost nothing. Nursing taught her triage, and she writes the way she worked: assess first, reassure second, explain third. Her sleep paralysis entries follow that order exactly, because she remembers her own first episode — the weight on the chest, the certainty that something was in the room — and she remembers that what she needed at 4 a.m. was not a lecture on REM atonia but a steady voice saying this is common, this is temporary, this has a name. The physiology comes after, and she is careful with it, citing what the research supports and flagging what it doesn't. She keeps a particular soft spot for shift workers, new parents, and everyone else whose sleep runs against the clock, and her rebuild-your-nights pieces are written from her own year of doing exactly that. The recurring theme in all her work: the night is strange, and strange is not the same as wrong.

Writes about: sleep disturbances, recurring dreams, night routines.

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