Wake Up Paralyzed

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Reading the other topic about getting to sleep, it made me think of this one. Does anyone here ever wake up in the middle of the night but you can not move at all. Like I mean at all can't breathe or anything. It is terrible, I can't shout for help.. Only move my eyes around and hopelessly try to move my muscles.

This usually lasts less than a minute I'd guess but it feels like an eternity.

Finally when it does end it feels like the weight of the world was lifted off your body and you can finally move.

After that happens I usually can't fall back asleep.. most likely because I am scared it will happen again. This hasn't happened to me in like a year but I think about it before I go to sleep like this could be the night.

Can anyone relate?

Sleep paralysis. Known phenomenon--scary but not harmful.

Your brain cuts off muscle control while you're dreaming so you don't act out your dreams. Sometimes it forgets to give you muscle control back quickly enough so you wake up aware of being unable to move. It's a sort of glitch and resolves itself after a little while.

Yeah. Happens to me a lot. In my case it also comes with another classic symptom -- a feeling as if something threatening is nearby. It's like a waking nightmare, and I struggle just to make a sound, and once I can make a sound then it's over. But she's right, it's harmless, aside from really scary.

Ah yes, sleep paralysis. It is closely related to narcolepsy. I have never experienced this but my wife has.

Had it many times when younger. It's also called hypnogogia. Mine is usually accompanied by intense auditory halucinations. Not fun, but as others have said, not harmful.

This used to happen to me every day in my childhood too; it was terrifying at first but once I understood the process it became not nearly as frightening. It's strange though, as I figured out later that I can actually trigger hypnogogia at will through a certain kind of meditation technique.

A couple years ago I had sleep paralysis. I actually stayed calm because I knew what it was since I had heard about it a number of times before. I couldn't open my eyes or move my body but I tried to stay calm because I knew it was supposed to wear off.

I also sometimes get what I think is hypnogagia. It's happened a number of times in the middle of the night but not lately. It's disturbing but also interesting too after the fact.

But what's really cool is that often while falling asleep I hear music. I can't think of how it sounds right now but sometimes it's like symphony. I'm half way aware and think how I can't understand how such music could come from inside myself. I'm not musically talented and don't listen to symphonies but it sounds amazing. I wish I could turn that on anytime I wanted to.

Is that during the paralysis, or in a fully awake and functioning state? Would you mind expanding on that?

Sure: I can enter it from a fully functioning state; I lie down and do a series of progressive relaxation and meditation techniques (a pastiche of things I learned from yoga/tai chi and some experimentation) until eventually I can get to a point where my external senses shut down, the most notable of which is hearing (there is sort of a whoosh and then all ambient sounds disappear completely). Around this time is when I can feel the urge (for lack of a better word) for my body to shut down creeping up, it feels like I'm lying on the surface of a pool of water that wants to suck me down, and all I have to do is let it. If I do let it, then I enter the hypnogogic state which is exactly the same as the unintentional version described above. As with the accidental kind, I can bring myself out of it with what seems like a herculean force of will. When I was young (when this happened accidentally) I was terrified because I was not sure I could escape; now I know that I can do so, and thus my fear of it is somewhat diminished. I am exploring the state as a tool for deeper meditation and as a potential launching point for out of body projection (if such a thing is possible), but I am still in the initial phases. One of the major issues I'm having is that I can no longer sense myself breathing in this state, and the panic this causes breaks me out of it prematurely.

I've found that it usually happens when I take an afternoon nap - too much sleep messes up the system I guess. It's often enough that I know what it is when it is going on; rather than fighting it I try to relax back into full sleep and try again to wake up - a sort of reboot of the program, if you will.

I used to get this occasionally when napping during the day.

Your skeletal muscles are normally paralyzed when you are in a state of light REM sleep. This is totally normal. If fact it is what prevents you from physically acting out your dreams. It's just not normal to be aware of the sensation of not being able to move. This scary but harmless phenomenon is caused by the mind partially waking up before the rest of your body. It can be thought of as the reverse phenomenon to sleep-walking (which occurs when your body "wakes up" while you are still dreaming).

The sensation of having a weight on your chest and/or not being able to breathe is a hallucinatory phenomenon. In a lot of places this scary sensation of suffocation is colloquially referred to as the "Old Hag". The myth is that the "Old Hag" (or a demon of sorts) sits on the paralyzed person's chest and/or strangles them. In reality this is just a frightening hallucination. You are still breathing even if you can't quite feel it.

I think it's interesting that sleep paralysis explains a lot of mythology, including out-of-body experiences and alien abductions. The worst thing I ever experienced was the sensation of my bed being pushed across the room and the sheets being pulled out from under me. I really thought there was an intruder in the house attacking me. When I finally managed to pry open my eyelids and sit my body up under the greatest effort, I saw that everything was still in tact and my bed hadn't moved an inch. Even so, it was so terrifying and seemed so real that I couldn't convince myself that I had dreamed the whole thing.