Someone Watching Me Sleep

I have had a few 'unexplained' occurrences happen to me early in life, mostly during teens and later on college, that were scary at the time, but forgotten the morning after. Now I am much older, I think back on those 'events' and think - yeah, that was definitely spooky and unexplained. I am a big horror movie fan and tend to watch almost all of them - mostly the supernatural/occult ones - I leave the slasher ones for times when I am really scraping the barrel.

So this particular one has been etched in my brain for the longest time I can remember and at the time it happened, I was not the least bit scared and did not even know what I had seen. It was only much later, maybe twenty years or so later, that I realised I don't have an explanation.

We were a family of expats living in the Middle East, which is where I was born and brought up, along with my two sisters. Both my parents were working (as most expats families in the Middle East do) and we lived in a two bedroom apartment. Nothing fancy, a simple clean flat.

I think one fine day, Dad and Mom decided that our flat was in need of a good paint job and had commissioned two local painters to start work over a weekend. The workers too were male expats (not sure from which country, but it is not relevant). All our stuff was covered in bed sheets, most of the kitchen was closed off and we had to, all of us, sleep on the floor in the living room, as the rooms had fresh paint and we had to leave the windows open. As it is a very hot country one cannot sleep with out an air conditioner and that was why the living room was chosen as it was to be the last room to be painted and the air condition was connected and we could close the windows at night.

Anyway, we all laid on the mattresses, settled in for the night after the painters had left. My sisters and I (we were about 4, 6, and 9 years) slept on two mattresses and my parents at the far end of the room on two other ones.

Sometime during the night I, half asleep, turned to sleep on my side and there in the dark I saw a very dark man, wearing workers' clothes (a vest, loose cloth around the waist and a cloth around his head, like a sweat band), sitting against the wall (I was closest to the wall) with one leg folded under him and the other kept up, bent at the knee, upon which his hand was resting and he was watching me. I, with very bleary eyes, looked at him a few moments (he just kept watching me) and went back to sleep, thinking it was morning and that the workers had returned.

At that time, I didn't think anything of it (oh the joys of childhood innocence!) but as I grew older, the image has always remained firmly entrenched in my mind and I know now that it was something definitely spooky that happened to me. Sometimes, I freak out inside when I think about it.

Post then, I have had various situations where I have had some strong forces sitting on my back when I am asleep and I am unable to turn or scream. Really scary. But nothing since I got married and started my family.

Are our psychic powers more active when we are children? I don't know, I have thought about it of course, but don't have an answer.

PS - Apologies for typos and grammatical errors, I was typing this out quite fast.