Sleep Enough

Sleep paralysis seems to be quite an intriguing aspect of sleep that generates a lot of fear and confusion (and a load of theories) as to what it is. While common enough, not everyone seems to experience it, and yet others do on a regular basis. Sleep paralysis has been described as a temporary condition in which a person is aware of his/her surroundings, but is unable to move his/her body at all, and is frequently accompanied with a sense of fear or dread of some malevolent presence nearby.

The phenomenon occurs when the mind inadvertently awakens from the REM stage, while the body is still in a paralyzed state. You could liken it to an in-between stage when the person is neither asleep nor awake in that sense. About 20% of the world’s population has experienced sleep paralysis at least once in their lifetime.

I myself have experienced sleep paralysis before, but I can only recall one episode. The only time I can clearly recall having experienced sleep paralysis was when I was 16 or 17. I remember I woke up during the middle of the night, but could not move any part of my body, even though I was sure I was awake. There was a buzzing, droning hum that I could hear as well throughout the entire time, and a feeling of being watched by some unknown, dark entity close by. I could feel the wind from my room fan blowing on my skin, and I could even look ahead of me (but I’m not sure if my physical eyes were open or not). The whole affair lasted for less than a minute, after which I was finally able to move my physical body and fully “wake up.”

It was quite frightening at that time, but over the years, I’ve come to learn sleep paralysis is a fairly common phenomenon that happens to many people, at least once in their lifetime. It has been a long time since I last had this sleep paralysis episode, because I think I’ve sort of developed an “alarm” during my sleep to realize if I’m having an unpalatable nightmare, and to wake up/snap out from it. That probably lessened the chances of my being caught out “awake” while in the REM stage, but it also keeps a lot of potentially nasty nightmares at bay (yay)! Yep, this is coming from someone who could at one time (aged 12), wake himself up at more or less the correct time to catch the bus to school – Without using an alarm clock for that entire year!

Sleep paralysis is linked with narcolepsy, as a fairly common accompanying symptom (one of the four major narcolepsy symptoms); however, both are mutually exclusive in the sense not all narcoleptics have it, and many people experience sleep paralysis without ever having narcolepsy at all.

One of the odd aspects of sleep paralysis is the alien/demon visitation theory. Some people are convinced that aliens or some demon is visiting them and in some cases, trying to abduct them. I’m not so convinced that anything that fanciful is going on, but then again, who really knows? Sleep paralysis accounts are as varied and different as each one of us is, but my take on this is that it is mostly a manifestation of our vulnerable subconscious mind that is easily impressionable, and highly apprehensive, of the world around it.

While being suppressed by our conscious waking mind during the day, it surfaces during sleep and we get caught out in this state of mind while experiencing a sleep paralysis episode. In the vulnerable state of sleep paralysis (of being neither asleep nor awake), our inner subconscious fears all seem to be magnified much more than while we are awake during the day. But of course, I concur that some accounts of sleep paralysis are not so easily explained away and may have an added dimension to it (which some people are adamant are demons or aliens from another realm out to “get” them).

I do believe there may be ways to willfully induce sleep paralysis, but it requires a lot of practice, and you may just wind up waking up prematurely, most of the time, while you’re at it. Also, it would probably mess up what would be a good night’s sleep if one failed to attain sleep paralysis, so it’s not something I would be attempting to do just yet. Such attempts would involve sleeping in a supine position, “notifying” yourself when you’re entering the REM stage, and to attain a gentle waking “awareness” when that happens. As you can gather, it takes a whole lot of practice, and neither does it work all the time. I for one, am letting nature dictate the course of things.