My experiences with sleep paralysis.

     Amongst other things, I suffer from bouts of sleep paralysis.  Sleep paralysis is when your brain wakes up before your body.  I have had many varied episodes and can give an account of them.  Firstly, my sleep paralysis occurs when I am waking up, and usually lasts somewhere between ten seconds to two or three minutes.  Those longer episodes are the more frightening (I will get to why shortly).

     Often these episodes are accompanied by hallucinations.  These can take the form of out of body experiences, feeling as though someone or something else is in the room with me, or some other vivid dream like experience.  When I am having a hallucinatory episode involving something else in the room, I am often filled with a great sense of dread, as though whatever is in the room is going to try and hurt me.  Sometimes this is accompanied by the sensation that something is on my chest making it difficult to breathe.

     While this is occurring I try to move my arms and legs but can’t.  It is as though some unseen force is pinning me down.  I usually also attempt to scream, but cannot.  The most frightening of all is when almost all of these things occur simultaneously; that feeling that something in the room is trying to harm me, while choking the life out of me, as I try to scream to no avail.

     These episodes often leave me feeling very tired for the rest of the day, and when one occurs it is very likely more will as well.  This makes napping a very “risky” choice.  If I fall asleep during the day, there is a good chance that I will have another sleep paralysis episode making me just as tired as I was before the nap.

     I do not remember having an episode until I was in my early to mid-twenties, with no particular trigger that I can remember.  This is not uncommon.  According to webMD, these episodes are supposed to be fairly common with people who suffer from mental health conditions such as anxiety, bipolar, depression, and post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).  It is also associated with some physical conditions, particularly narcolepsy and sleep apnea.  Despite all of this, by itself sleep paralysis is not considered a major debilitating condition.

     Have you ever experienced sleep paralysis?  What are your experiences with it?  Or, even better, if you’ve overcome it, how?

--JJM