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The not breathing never recurred.

I think I actually must have stopped and then my subconscious mind was trying to figure out why. The answer was smoke was choking me. I must have been not breathing for a pretty long period.

I used to try to time myself when I was around 18, as to how long I could hold my breath. I eventually got to around 3 minutes but when I began to breathe again, I recovered immediately.

After I awoke, I began to suck in air as fast as I possibly could. It took a pretty long period, and I was in panic the whole time, before I began to catch my breath.

That is my guess.

There are two chemicals, glycine and GABA that paralyze your skeletal muscles when you're in REM [dreaming] sleep, which keep your body from acting out your dreams, and potentially causing you to hurt yourself. The interactions between large muscles and involuntary systems are complicated when you're on the verge of being conscious, and your conscious mind -- which tries to make sense of everything, even things that don't make sense -- will attempt to interpret your asphyxiation as something happening in the external environment.

The combination of these two things: paralysis of large muscles and confusion as you emerge from consciousness leads to very weird effects; it's one theory for why some people believe they've been abducted by aliens. One of my roommates in college was struggling to breathe and could neither breathe nor move for almost five minutes, all he could do was make increasingly frantic "humming noises" as he lay there helplessly in bed. We finally decided to throw very cold water on him, which actually brought him out.