Posted on 06/07/2007 11:22:38 PM PDT by gpapa
Q: What causes sleep paralysis? Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and I can’t move or speak. It feels like someone is holding me down. Finally I just go back to sleep.
A: Sleep paralysis is caused by a timing delay between our brain and body. It leads to an awareness of being awake, yet is accompanied by a frightening inability to move our arms or legs, utter a single word or cry out for help. It may be accompanied by unexplained sights and sounds, or even a feeling that someone else is in the room. Needless to say, it is a frightening condition that gets one’s attention.
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The doctor said that the near death experience - going through a tunnel, coming out at the end with bright light and people waiting for them was a simple re-living of the birth experience. The tunnel = the birth canal, the bright light = the delivery room, the people waiting = doctor and nurses.
I hope the doctor is wrong.
You don't have to see the walls of the tunnel to have the sensation of traveling through it. Climb on a childrens slide and slide down with your eyes closed - you still know you are travelling even though you can't see it. Same thing with the baby - he doesn't have to see the walls of the birth canal to sense the movement.
Me too, and it is rather panic-inducing when it happens. You’re awake, but still experiencing or remembering something that makes you want to move, but you can’t. Not pleasant at all. Never happened to me until the last few years, and only a few times since then.
It happens to me occasionally, and it’s almost the opposite of sleep walking,which I also suffered when I was a child.
I’ll partly wake up, I can’t move, and I think there’s someone in the room. Sometimes the paralysis leaves, and I’ve thrown pillows at the “person” in the room before, before my brain’s cognitive part wakes up to rational thought.
Hopefully if there ever REALLY is an intruder, I’ll do something more useful than throw pillows. But this is one reason I’ll never keep a loaded gun around :-)
It’s a real phenomonon, believe it or not. Happens to me on occasion. Was a little scary at first, but once you know what’s goin’ on, it’s no big deal.
I've had some similar things happen too. There's not much else you can do other than to be patient and wait until it stops; or as happened to me one morning, wait until someone else gets annoyed enough at the alarm clock to come in and wake you up.
That was another strange one. I dreamed that my alarm clock went off, but the snooze button wouldn't work. I'd had dreams like it before where I destroyed the clock trying to get the stupid thing to stop screaming. This time, I realized that it was a dream. Normally, merely saying the words "wake up" in a dream will wake me up. Not this time. I tried several times, but nothing worked. Finally, I decided to get up (in the dream, of course), go into the den, turn on the TV, and wait for someone to wake me up. After a few minutes, my dad came in and woke me up. (This dream, BTW, was the one where I realized that I dream in color rather than black-and-white. There was a bowl of Cheetos in the den and they were distinctly orange.)
At other times, I've had the odd noises. Mine didn't oscillate; it was more like a sudden, very loud crescendo. (The best way to describe it is like a very loud, sudden sound being played backwards.) These happened more often when I was just about to fall asleep. You can imagine how annoying this could be after the fifth or sixth time you've almost gotten to sleep.
And now that I think about it, I remember other dreams when I was little where part of my room looked real, but other parts were clearly a dream. All of these half-waking dreams have fallen off in frequency as I've gotten older. The Attack of the Phantom Arm was over ten years ago.
Both of my kids had a nasty virus a couple of years ago (they were one and three), and waking them up to take their temps was disconcerting to them, to say the least. Imagine -- you're asleep, in your warm bed and it's dark -- until someone turns on the overhead light and jams a thermometer in your rump! Traumatic, indeed.
It is pretty wierd, when you are asleep, and someone sits on the edge of the bed.
Waking, you look, and there is no one there. But you can still feel the depression on that side of the bed, the covers pulling, like someone is sitting there.
I usually just roll over and cuddle with you.
Or the dog, whoever is handy.
;)
stop creeping me out, man. lol!
Fortunately that is an autonomous function. As for the rest, try to move a voluntary muscle, even just take a deep breath, and you will wake up and the rest will come online right away.
Good one!
Seriously, I had this happen to me about a half dozen times when I was somewhere between 7 and 12 years old. It scared the **** out of me, because I was convinced that there was an evil, vaguely female presence with sharp nails or claws holding me down and breathing heavily and warmly on my neck in the darkness of my bedroom. I imagined it almost exactly as an "old hag", a recollection which shocked me only last year when I read a clinical description of this phenomenon for the very first time.
As a child, I recall that I could neither move nor cry out, but I did learn that I could "escape" by trying to wiggle my fingers, which apparently caused me to start waking up.
Since those episodes many years ago, I have occasionally awakened into a state of sleep paralysis, and have remembered to try wiggling my finger(s), and I have quickly awakened each time.
These illusions do not tend to be “pop from darkness into light” or “it’s getting brighter and brighter.” A growing bright spot is seen in a dark surrounds. “Near death” visions also share this characteristic. You resort to much hand waving to try to explain how this could happen during birth with closed eyes.
Well, Jesus said “You must be born again” for a reason you think? “Must” here is not meant in the sense of inevitability but rather in the sense of a responsibility or a prerequisite for reaching a goal.
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