When the Nightmares come

So let us start off this year's blogging with something spooky. Namely, sleep paralysis.

So sleep paralysis is a phenomenon that occurs while you are dreaming. Usually, dreaming occurs in REM stage of the sleep cycle. You can read up more about the sleep cycle online. Basically, when you go to sleep and start dreaming, your body becomes paralysed, to stop you from acting out your dreams and potentially hurting yourself.

Sometimes, what happens is that you wake up (i.e. you're aware of surroundings and are no longer asleep) but your body is still under the effect of paralysis and your brain is still doing some residual dreaming, so your dreams are projected into the real world while you are unable to move.

This causes some problems because how many times have you woken up from a dream (that wasn't too outlandish) thinking everything that happened did actually happen? Same thing here, while you're unable to move, you may see, hear and even feel things in your environment, which are of course aren't really there.

Sleep paralysis is generally a bad experience, most of them are nightmarish. Although some people do experience pleasant ones where they wake to musicians serenading them in their bedrooms. Is that weird? Yes. But is it horrifyingly mind-bending? Not so much. My personal experiences with it weren't of the particularly happy kind either.

Sleep paralysis is scary because, as the name implies, you are paralysed (and also paralysed by fear, heh), you can see and hear your nightmares but most of all you can feel them. Want to try and scream for help? Take delight in the fact that your voice will get stuck in your throat. If you're lucky, one of the nightmare creatures may even try to strangle or sit on you and it will feel like you can't breathe.

It is thought that sleep paralysis could explain the myths of Dracula and other night-time spooky things. The classic image of Dracula standing over a sleeping or paralysed victim seems reminiscent of an experience of sleep paralysis. It is also thought to explain the succubus and incubus. Paintings and artworks describing sleep paralysis often depict a creature sitting on the person who is sleeping, accounting the visual hallucination of the nightmare and the feeling of difficulty breathing.

This all lasts a few minutes and everything will slowly turn back to normal but it is not easy to not be afraid in the moment. Some people who experience this have found that to overcome it, stay calm and try to wiggle your fingers or a single finger, as the major muscles are more affected by paralysis than small ones and gradually move your way from your fingers until you're fully mobile again.

Then, never go to sleep ever again. Heh.