Sleep Paralysis

Sleep paralysis alledgedly occurs in 30% of the general population. In it you wake up in bed, feel paralyzed, and tend to sense a terrifying presence in your room. Sometimes you see something; sometimes you hear noises or even feel electrical shocks throughout your body. I have personally seen a small humanoid during one occasion of sleep paralysis; during another, more recent one, I saw what looked like a dog in my room. Others see ghosts, vampires--whatever they have in their minds or are particularly afraid of. Deceased relatives and loved ones are particularly good candidates for showing up during bouts of sleep paralysis.

But what's really happening here, according to Harvard psychologists Richard McNally and Susan Clancy, is nothing out of the ordinary. Rather, REM sleep--the phase of sleep in which most dreaming occurs--is simply malfunctioning. In a phone conversation McNally even likened the situation to getting a case of the hiccups.

Our bodies are paralyzed while we undergo REM sleep, and for good reason (lest we act out our dreams and injure ourselves). But in some small number of cases we can actually start to wake up before paralysis wears off, and yet still remain in a dreaming state. What results is hallucination, often of some extremely scary stuff. It appears that humans have always experienced sleep paralysis and sought to explain it, resulting in well known stories of incubi and succubi--demons thought to sexually attack people in their sleep--as well as related tales from other eras and cultures.

It is an unusual condition where, at its most simple, it is period of inability to perform voluntary movements either when going to sleep or when waking up. Sleep Paralysis can happen when you are falling asleep (known as Hypnogogic or Predormital form) or when waking up (known as Hypnopompic or Postdormital form).

The symptoms are easily described, usually the sufferer of an episode of Sleep Paralysis will report that they felt an inability to move any part of their body whilst falling asleep, or immediately upon waking up - the whole body feels paralysed.

The sufferer is fully aware that they are awake, but have great difficulty moving. The experience can produce great anxiety and fear, as the sufferer will struggle to "wake up".

One theory of a cause is that when you are asleep your body secretes hormones which relax certain muscles and prevent you from acting out your dreams. This is your body's safety mechanism to protect you from injuring yourself.

If the hormone kicks in too fast when you are going to sleep, you may feel paralysed although still conscious. The process of waking up is paralysis in reverse, where the hormone doesn’t wear off fast enough as you wake up. Thus, you remain paralysed though conscious.

In a vast majority of cases sleep paralysis is not harmful. The after effects may include a period of fright, followed by a period of restlessness. Occasionally, you may fear going back to sleep by worrying that it may occur again, but this can pass quickly.

Sleep paralysis is a common condition characterized by transient partial or total paralysis of skeletal muscles and areflexia that occurs upon awakening from sleep or less often while falling asleep. Stimuli such as touch or sound may terminate the episode, which usually has a duration of seconds to minutes.