Sleep Paralysis and dreams

Hmm, something that seems like sleep paralysis:

This morning, I was in my bed and there were three bees hovering above. I kept calm and got up. I realised they weren't there at all.

edited 22nd Mar '11 4:28:56 AM by Shichibukai

I feel like we're misusing the definition of "sleep paralysis" here. Sleep paralysis is the phenomenon of our bodies shutting down during the process of sleep while we dream. When dreaming, our brains are working overtime thinking many, many thoughts, so our nervous system shuts down so we don't fulfill all these thoughts. In short, if you don't undergo sleep paralysis on a daily basis while dreaming typically end up sleepwalking. Sorry, not trying to derail the topic or anything, but we talked about this in Psychology so I felt the need to share.

That being said, waking up while in the process of sleep paralysis is probably what we're talking about, which is an unusual but not incredibly rare occurrence. It's never happened to me, nor do I ever really remember my dreams at all.

I've never actually opened my eyes while under sleep paralysis, but whenever I realize I'm dreaming, I immediately panic and try to wake up. I can't do it, so the dream sort of twists like I'm a rabbit caught in a snare. If I'm lucky, I dream I wake up.

I think I got it once when I was about 8.

I woke up in the middle of the night and saw some witchy woman in a black cloak walk into my bedroom. At first I thought it was my mom, so I tried to call out to her, but I found out I couldn't move or speak at all. Then she turned to me, and her face shot up with electricity or something and I could see her skull. Then she just faded away into thin air.

The worst part was, I didn't find out about sleep paralysis until I was about thirteen. Until then, I just thought my house was haunted.

That was fun...

edited 5th Apr '12 12:56:45 PM by TheMightyHeptagon

I wake up with sleep paralysis relatively often. It's not a big deal for me, especially since I do not experience hallucinations or feelings of danger with it (apparently they are relatively common with sleep paralysis, but for some reason I just don't have them).

I just wake up and go "Um, apparently I cannot move yet. Well, let's wait a few seconds... all right, I can move now. Time to get up!".

This sort of thing has never really messed with me. When I'm comfortable I sleep on my stomach with my arms cradled around my pillow, so there isn't a good range of movement anyway. When I'm in the field, catching a catnap, or pretty much any non-standard type of sleep that doesn't involve taking clothes off and jumping in bed for several hours, I almost function like one half of my brain is still awake, and I sleep on my back in a half-awake "resting" cycle.

So I'm either so comfortable that I'm completely and utterly dead to this world, or I'm just uncomfortable enough to where I don't catch any deep sleep.

This happens to me about once a month or so. Less often than it used to. The first couple times it happened were scary (in part because I didn't know it was a thing), now it's more like "dammit, not this shit again" and I just kind of twiddle my mental thumbs in mild irritation until my body decides to switch back on.

A couple times it's come with a hallucination of someone breaking into my house though, and one particularly memorable time I got disemboweled by said. Not fun times.

edited 5th Apr '12 4:38:31 PM by Pykrete

Try having that while Kwai Chang Caine (David Carradine's Character) says you owe him something. That's what happens to me once.

I've never had sleep paralysis nor do I usually have very interesting dreams, but once when I was a very little child my subconscious decided to mess with me.

You see, when I was 3 or so, I was in the habit of waking up in the middle of the night and going through the corridor in our apartment to my parents bed and sleep between them. It was actually a habitual thing, I was a little bit afraid of sleeping alone I guess, but not terrified.

Then one night I wake up, I get up and I start walking through the corridor only to feel something grabbing a hold of my leg, pulling my feet from under me and as I try to crawl towards my parents room I feel it pulling me back and I hear: "LOOK BEHIND YOU! LOOK BEHIND YOU! LOOK BEHIND YOU!" In a monstorous voice.

Then I woke up again... I did not dare to make the trip through the corridor that night.

And sometimes later when anxious I found myself muttering to myself "I won't look behind me. No I wont."

EDIT: I actually remembered another very peculiar dream from when I was quite little (probably about 5 or 6 or so). I was at my grandmothers house with my family and cousins. Everything was absolutely normal, except that there seemed to be a leak of water from one spot in the ceiling and drops of some sort of liquid hitting the floor from time to time. Now at some point we found out that whoever touches these drops of liquid actually gets turned to stone. And I tried desperately to explain this to my foolhardy cousins but they just laughed and I guess they wanted to live on the edge. So they put their hands under the leak. One of them got turned to stone, and as a funeral we flushed his cold stone body down the toilet. Yes.

Then I got a drop on me and started turning to stone too. I ran around asking for help but found that everyone was actually quite indifferent though my mother did say: "Go find your dad, hes got bear hands, he'll fix it."

I don't remember much else, but it was very peculiar and it WAS a nightmare at the time.

edited 12th Apr '12 3:05:00 AM by Yachar

I get it a lot. Particularly when I've had a case of the can't-sleeps for a while (or the wrong medication, in one very, very memorable period of my life). I find it the first rule of managing sleep paralysis: catch up on that sleep-debt (and stay away from the screen for a few days... don't ask me why)! You stay awake, afraid of it, and you're only going to get it worse!

I do hallucinate quite a bit: but, meh... I'm used to it, now. I even quite enjoy the 'rocking bed' feel I get. I always know they're not real, and sometimes welcome them — it means I'm dreaming (I don't spend enough time in normal REM sleep without tricyclics, and I now can't take even them any more). But, when I was a kid? All this scared me silly. And, yes: I've had this for almost as long as I can remember. It took me into my 20s to get it diagnosed as part of my Chronic Fatigue Syndrome package. And, if you think sleep paralysis is bad, try dropping off to sleep all wired-up in a sleep-centre.

Even when I'm visited by a long-dead cat curling up near my head... or on it (like she used to do, anyway), I kind of like it. In a 'gosh, I miss her' kind of way. Even while it's happening, and I can't move a muscle, inside, I'm smiling. But, when I was 12? That wouldn't have been as sweet. (Uh... suddenly remembered the spiders-and-ants skin-crawl combo I had then. Oh, that was fun! Note: I lived in South Africa at that time. The spiders I dreamt of? They bite you, you know about it.)

In short: once you know what it is, no matter what weirdness your brain throws up, you can take it without a worry. You might not be able to roll onto your other side and try for a better dream, but you can do that on the inside. Even if the spider-and-ant combo visited me again, I'd take it in my stride. This time.

edited 17th Apr '12 10:44:31 PM by Euodiachloris

I've experienced sleep paralysis a few times in the past 4 months.

They've been terrifying.

I've seen creepy things. Heard creepy things. And felt creepy things.

The worst was the first time. I was being dragged across my bed and I saw a creepy man behind my door. Also, lots of footsteps. And he was talking to me.

I couldn't move anything besides my head. Anything else was too tough too move.

Creepy "waking dreams" I've had:

• Giant albino spiders running across my ceiling
• Grey-faced alien peeking its head through my door
• A pile of clothes coming to life and moving around
• The curtains over the large window in my room turning into a sort of looming cloaked humanoid creature.

All while paralyzed due to brain thingies, mind you. Fun times.

My friend talked to me about sleep paralysis once. I had no idea what he was talking about since it never happens to me. The conversation went something like this: "You know how sometimes..." "No." I guess it happened to him regularly?

After thinking about it a bit though, I think I've experienced minor forms of it. Like, I wake up lying on my side and somehow I know that if I don't turn over and look behind me then I'll die or something. It takes a bit of willpower, but I manage to turn over eventually. That kind of thing?

This is how it is with me, too, except that I've had the scary version a couple of times, too.

Once I had this but it was more or less the opposite of the way it usually is. I was very badly depressed and hadn't yet started taking medication for it, as I hadn't yet had an appointment with a psychiatrist. I had had therapy, but that was with therapists, not psychologists with the authority to write a recipe for medicine.

Anyway, I was lying in my bed, sleepless - or so I thought - on my right side, with my face facing the wall. Then I felt someone get into my bed and lie next to me, on their right side so that their face was about level with mine. They then pressed against me and put their arm around me, and at that point I noticed that the "person" there was a girl of about the same age as me. (I could tell because with this dreamy stuff you always "know" some details you've no way of knowing.)

I lay there for a while with her body pressed against mine, and I knew it wasn't real and I thought that if I turned to look, or even if I would look down to see her hand around me, she would disappear. So I let the illusion last for a while because it felt really comfortable. I got an overwhelming sense of tranquility, the depression was gone and I felt great. I felt that everything was gonna be alright and that I was gonna get better and go on to live a happy life. Everything seemed clear.

Then she disappeared and I laid in bed for a while longer before getting up and making tea. The calm and happy feelings faded and my depression eventually got worse before I managed to properly start the process of healing, which took months. (It's been about 4 years since I last saw a therapist and almost 5 years since I last took an anti-depressant.)

I've often referred to that moment as my "religious experience," because I'm fairly sure that such moments described by people who have turned to religion due to some extreme emotional distress (like a terminal disease or very stressful situation etc) have been similar in nature. Even when it was happening, I thought that it was just a hallucination that my brain was conjuring up, possibly as part of some elaborate mechanism by which the brain can save itself in dire situations.

Of course, I don't really believe that the whole thing has anything to do with the supernatural, but the experience did stay with me for a long time and the emotions I remember having during it were very important for my recovery because knowing that I am capable of feeling such tranquility was great motivation to overcome depression.

Yeah, not exactly on-topic but it was a dream experience anyway, so I thought I might as well share it with you.

By the way, have you guys ever had lucid dreams? I have, but they tend to be over very quickly after I notice I'm sleeping.

There was this one time, when I was very little, I was having a nightmare about a vampire in our house. My father actually managed to kill him with a pair of scissors thrust through his chest, but a moment later the Vampire returned, perfectly intact. I crawled under my parents' bed and when I turned my head that vampire was there, too, when it couldn't possibly have managed to move so fast. I remember thinking "this is so ridiculous that I have to be sleeping. I wanna get up because this is more stupid than interesting." And then I woke up.

Occasionally. When I notice I am dreaming or suspect it one of two things happen. I wake up or I begin to enter one of my recursive nightmares where I wake up into another dream and then do this again and again and again until I finally really wake up still not sure if I am awake or not. I tend to hallucinate for a bit after waking from those and need a while to calm down.

I'm never able to exert any control over these dreams. And really I rarely know for sure if they are dreams or reality which is part of why they scare me so bad. The hallucinations when I finally do awake don't really help either.

Needless to say I hate it.

Lucid dreaming is something I picked up somewhere in my late teens. But, I did it without training. If I wish, I can use it to control the dreams down to the last comma and full-stop (so to speak), but I usually don't bother to.

This is useful during sleep paralysis inspired episodes of the truly bizarre, but has had the side-effect of squashing them before they get really odd, I think. So I rarely have to step in, now.

I think I picked it up in response to the sleep paralysis, to be honest, so it's just a knack. As soon as I really try to concentrate on how I do it, I mess up.

I can remember what the dream in normal sleep was about if I do control it in the main, but not if I just control enough to ditch it, wake up and then get back to sleep. Or if I just noticed I was dreaming in the dream.

I've had one lucid dream, without intending to. I suddenly realized I was dreaming, so I bit my hand just to be sure, in case I was really awake and did something dangerous. It didn't hurt, and my reaction was "awesome, lucid dreaming is just like virtual reality!" Then I woke up. -_- The one time I have a lucid dream and I don't even get any time to enjoy it. Thanks a lot, brain!

edited 18th Apr '12 6:38:04 PM by Talby

I think most of this stuff I hear about 'sleep paralysis' is bollocks. Half-awake and unable to move? It's sleep paralysis. Having a freaky dream? Sleep paralysis. See something out the corner of your eye as you wake up? Sleep paralysis. No cookies in the jar? Gotta be that sleep paralysis.

It's like nobody considers the possibility that they might be tired or just dreaming. I always find it hard to move in the morning because I've, you know, been mostly immobile and asleep for the past six or seven hours. People read too much into this, if you ask me.

Lucid dreams? Yeah, I've had those. Who hasn't? They don't mean anything; they're just dreams. You're not ascending to become a higher being or drifting outside reality.

I take it you've never experienced sleep paralysis yourself, then? It's not the same as simply being tired after waking up.

Also, nobody said there was anything supernatural about lucid dreams. They are fun, though.

I don't have sleep paralysis but rather sometimes right when I'm on that thin line of being asleep and aware, when you're kind of both, I sometimes hear really loud noises, like explosions, except its constant and it jolts me back awake as I wonder if the world is ending or my house is collapsing or something. For that reason I need music to go to sleep and I frighten myself otherwise.

I've yet to have a fun one sadly. Lucky people who've had fun ones...

Dreams potentially being supernatural for lack of a better word at the moment is something I place a slight belief in. However I also believe that cases are hard to judge for oneself and in most cases they probably aren't significant. I suppose that beings of other sorts could contact you through them if they wanted. Gods and the like.

Looking into lucid dreaming I learned that apparently training oneself to perform it and various meditations during it is a part of Tibetan Buddhism. Which is intriguing. One of these practices exists to keep the mind wakeful and alert even when asleep apparently.

Anfingrimm, it really, really isn't just what you might think if you've never had it. I managed to stay rooted to my bed during a fire alarm at boarding school once. If the fire had been actually real... <shudders> I got punished for that, by the way. A 2,000 word essay on "How long is a piece of string?". It was nowhere near as scary to me as what actually happened (at the time, I didn't have a clue there was a condition called "Sleep Paralysis" and the school nurses didn't believe me when I told them that I "just couldn't move".

I've missed job interviews, and lost jobs 'cos I was stuck in stasis for an hour or two. Lying there, trying to get up, hearing the alarm beep itself down to the last beep... this is not me! (But, it was hardly scary those times: I knew what the problem was by this point.) And, I once managed to wet the bed, even when I desperately wanted to move (the feeling of damp actually snapped me out that time, which wasn't much consolation).

I've also had a paralysis attack hit me when fully awake in a restaurant (I'd been on the wrong meds — anxiety was not my problem). I went down like a sack of potatoes, couldn't move, but it wasn't a narcoleptic fit, as I was fully aware the whole time: including of the fact that my knickers were showing (blasted summer dresses: should have worn tights). I desperately wanted to move to prevent that! I was like that for a full ten minutes, with my parents' friends concerned faces looming over me like balloons. The ambulance wasn't needed, as, when it finally showed up, it was over. (And, I was hugely embarrassed.) This was one of the incidents that finally got me a fully-intensive set of investigations that tied down what was wrong, by the way (Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, slight indication of POTS, persistent irregular Stage 3 sleep patterns not limited to sleep paralysis... and not anxiety or depression).

Seriously: it is not imaginary. It's also quite visible on ECGs and other neuroimaging techniques when it happens, as the patterns of brain use are just significantly off from standard REM dreaming (Stage 3) or deep sleep (Stage 4), due to the awareness factor.

EDIT: Oh, and about that fire alarm incident? Every year, a very small percentage of house fires throw up incidents where the fire alarm was working perfectly, but somebody still died in their beds, without evidence of drink or drugs in their system. One of the theories? Yes: sleep paralysis might have contributed to that person dying of smoke inhalation, when they might ordinarily have made it outside. However, there is no concrete way to explain it... as, well... they died. And, weren't hooked up to monitors at the time.

Now: really think about that. You wake to a horrible beeping and work out what it is, but can't move. Then, you're choking on something acrid. You know you're choking. You know exactly what this means. You still can't move... Trust me: if you could move, you'd be motoring.

edited 19th Apr '12 6:39:25 AM by Euodiachloris