Navigating Night Terrors with Michelle Collins in 7 Lamb’s Paralyzed Podcast

What would you do if the shadowy figures that came to you in a sleep deprived state manifested in a physical form?

Spoilers ahead for major plot points and characters.

Conceptually, Paralyzed explores this idea in great detail. Night terrors literally existing, even after you wake up. The dreamer unintentionally creates something of a “nightmare radius”, an environmental change around them and the people in their vicinity. In season 1, as an example, the setting is a group of friends’ annual camping trip in a cabin.

The nightmare radius encompasses their surroundings. Rain starts to pour ferociously, blocking off roads. Phones inexplicably don’t work. Vicious creatures with guttural screams surround them in the woods around the cabin. Even though it’s one person’s nightmare come to life, the people around them experience it all the same. And the creatures don’t immediately barge into the cabin to tear people apart.

It’s like they want you to stay.

When your friends try to escape, they’re picked off one at a time. They’re not allowed to leave. And interestingly, as the season goes on, there’s talk of “seeing your friends eyes” in the creatures as you look at them. And to that point, sometimes it’s not just creatures, sometimes the nightmares manifest in the form of people you know, people who died; seemingly giving you ominous warnings.



We’re introduced to my favorite character in the entire series, Michelle, in season 3. The events of this season take place on an Alaskan cruise. This time a man named Shane is the dreamer, and Michelle is among his friends. She’s there as a surprise to Shane’s girlfriend, Erika.

Shane describes Michelle as abrasive, rude, and loud. Some who curses as a front to appear tough. She complains a lot, insults people, and is even dismissive of and cheats on her boyfriend Roger, who seems to be with her out of desperation for not wanting their relationship to fail.

In quiet moments she does offer her friends some (rough) advice, but you get the sense that her behavior is designed to either push people away or test them to see if they’re actually willing to stay. We learn in a later season her father hasn’t been a particularly supportive figure in her life, so it’s possible the neglect she feels at home gets reflected back onto the world outside.

Sometimes her combativeness is intuitive and pries honesty out of people. She gets Shane to open up about things he thinks might make him sound crazy. The things he sees, the things, that it turns out, are foreboding for the people around him.

Shane, as the dreamer this season, unintentionally creates the nightmare radius that pervades the ship. It’s something akin to the Otherworld in Silent Hill. The overwhelming majority of people on the ship survive just fine, but the people within Shane’s radius are experiencing the world around them as if they’re the only 7 people left on the entire ship. It’s apparently barren, with all the hallmarks of horror found at the cabin as mentioned above.

Creatures are roaming. There’s no outside contact. And there’s no reasonable form of escape. And this is where we get to see what Michelle’s really made of, when the chips are down.

Despite all of the negative things that have been attributed to her up until this point, she’s the first person to go on the offensive and attack the creatures on the ship, which in this season start to appear as “men with deer heads”. Her and her friends try to get around as best they can, but one by one they’re lost. Whatever force is behind these nightmares continues to win. Erika, gone. Shane, gone. Roger, gone.



Michelle, in her desperation to live, jumps ship. She’s miraculously able to drift to shore as the sole survivor. Fortunately, the nightmare radius tends to stay in the isolated area where they’re created. If you’re somehow able to escape, the nightmare environment dissipates after a while with nothing to feed on.

One of the things I love most about Michelle is she’s not “supposed to” be the survivor. In horror movies we explore the concept of the final girl, the main character who lives and carries on. But narratively, Michelle wasn’t the main character. She’s the obnoxious, drunk friend. In a movie she’d traditionally be one of the first people killed. And it’s a testament to Robert M. Lamb’s great writing that he chose to go down a different path with this character.

Through the transformational nature of Michelle’s trauma, we get to see a deeply flawed, very human character struggle, be humbled, and continue to grow as a person. I think her richest story arc comes in the season following the ship’s events.

After washing ashore, she stumbles across an old factory, from which she subsisted on expired canned goods making her way back to society.

She lives with her parents, they’ve had to move twice and in the aftermath of the cruise she’s received threats.Because the events of the cruise were so extraordinary, she was mocked, laughed at, and harassed. Who would believe her story? She was inebriated when she was found, which made people believe her testimony even less.



One piece of lore, and something that’s still being expanded upon in the story, is that news of phenomenon such this tends to stay in local news and doesn’t spread, so you get the sense that larger forces are keeping events like these quiet.

Because nobody’s willing to help her or believe her, she has to find it within herself to stay up late and browse the internet for clues and bread crumbs about what happened, either in regards to this event or people who’ve shared similar fates. She becomes haunted by visions of her own. Feelings of abandonment, flashbacks to the ship, thoughts of her family saying things they never would. Particularly her mom, who she has a close relationship with. She even hears Roger’s voice, telling her she wasn’t supposed to make it off the ship.

As the listener, these figures are stand-ins for self doubt. Our negative self talk in our weakest moments, and narratively it manifests in the form of people we care about.

Several years have passed since her time on the cruise, and over time, she’s able to build somewhat of a new foundation for herself. She goes to therapy, her mom is supportive but her dad is frustrated with how long it’s taking her to recover. She works at a bookstore, which keeps her busy but is also solitary enough that she doesn’t get overwhelmed by the people around her.



She made a friend at work, a woman named Tiffany, who tries to get her to come out with Tiffany’s other friends. And here’s the kicker with that; a real sign of growth. She sees Tiffany’s other friends as obnoxious and she doesn’t have the energy to spend time with people whose personalities are like the way she used to be.

I can’t end this without acknowledging the incomparable Ariel Hack, who brings Michelle’s voice to life in the podcast with a performance that feels deeply authentic and fully lived in. You can feel the weight of every experience in the story making the character feel more empathetic over time. 

Michelle’s story continues in season 5 and onward. With significantly more trauma and connections made with other people to follow. There are even things I’ve left out up to this point. But for the purposes of this character deep dive, I’ll leave you with this:

When it comes to a work of art, such as a podcast like Paralyzed, so much of the listener's relationship with the work is symbiotic. Authorial intent dances with listener interpretation, and ultimately what it means to you is what you take from the material and see within yourself. I believe we all have our own version of the shadowy figures and deer men to contend with. Sometimes it’s an internal struggle, sometimes it’s shared with others. But like Michelle, I would always like the chance to wash ashore and keep going.