Freaky Sleep Paralysis: Being Awake in Your Nightmares
By Alexis Madrigal


[http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/wiredscience/2009/08/sleep-paralysis.\
jpg]

You wake up, but you can’t move a muscle. Lying in bed,
you’re totally conscious, and you realize that strange things are
happening. There’s a crushing weight on your chest that’s
humanoid. And it’s evil.

You’ve awakened into the dream world.

This is not the conceit for a new horror movie starring a ragged
middle-aged Freddie Prinze Jr., it’s a standard description of
the experience of a real medical condition: sleep paralysis. It’s
a strange phenomenon that seems to happen to about half the population
at least once.

People who experience it find themselves awake in the dream world for
anywhere from a few seconds to 10 minutes, often experiencing
hallucinations with dark undertones. Cultures from everywhere from
Newfoundland to the Caribbean to Japan have come up with spiritual
explanations for the phenomenon. Now, a new article in The Psychologist
suggests sleep researchers are finally figuring out the neurological
basis of the condition.

“This research strongly suggests that sleep paralysis is related
to REM sleep, and in particular REM sleep that occurs at sleep
onset,” write researchers
<http://www.thepsychologist.org.uk/archive/archive_home.cfm?volumeID=22&\
editionID=178&ArticleID=1545> Julia Santomauro and Christopher C.
French of the Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit, Goldsmiths, at the
University of London. “Shift work, jet lag, irregular sleep
habits, overtiredness and sleep deprivation are all considered to be
predisposing factors to sleep paralysis; this may be because such events
disrupt the sleep�"wake cycle, which can then cause [sleep-onset
REM periods].”

In other words, you experience just a piece of REM sleep.



As David McCarty, a sleep researcher at Louisiana State University
Health Sciences Center’s Sleep Medicine Program, explained it,
humans tend to think about the elements of the different stages of sleep
as packaged nicely together. So, in REM sleep, you’re
unconscious, experiencing a variety of sensory experiences, and almost
all of your muscles are paralyzed (that’s called atonia).

“But in reality you can disassociate those elements,”
McCarty said.

In sleep paralysis, two of the key REM sleep components are present, but
you’re not unconscious.

Narcolepsy, which can be linked with sleep paralysis, has a similar
pathology. For narcoleptics, some of the elements of rapid eye movement
can “come out of nowhere,” he McCarty said.

Sleep paralysis was first identified within the scientific community by
psychologist Weir Mitchell in 1876. He laid down this syntactically
old-school, but accurate description of how it works. “The
subject awakes to consciousness of his environment but is incapable of
moving a muscle; lying to all appearance still asleep. He is really
engaged in a struggle for movement fraught with acute mental distress;
could he but manage to stir, the spell would vanish instantly.”

But the condition lived in folklore long before anyone tried to subject
it to even semi-rigorous study. The various responses have fascinated
some researchers and they were cataloged in the 2007 book, Tall Tales
About the Mind and Brain
<http://books.google.com/books?id=JfH_ZaaU0ucC&lpg=PP1&dq=tall%20tales%2\
0from%20the%20mind&pg=PA381#v=onepage&q=&f=false> . In Japan, the
problem was termed kanashibar. In Newfoundland, people called it
“the old hag.” In China, “ghost oppression”
was the preferred nomenclature.

A study released earlier this year found that more than 90 percent of
Mexican adolescents know the phrase “a dead body climbed on top
of me <http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/122401046/abstract>
” to describe the disorder. More than 25 percent of them had
experienced it themselves.

Having an element of REM sleep mix with your consciousness is scarier
than it sounds. I experienced sleep paralysis on several occasions when
I was in college. I can testify: It’s run-to-your-mama scary.

In my case, it would happen right as I was falling asleep on the two
twin beds that I had taped together. The most vivid time, I “woke
up” with the uneasy feeling that something awful was to my left,
on the border of my peripheral vision. I couldn’t really see it,
but I knew that it was evil and coming closer to me. I felt true terror,
like you experience when you are about to get in a car crash. I was sure
it was going to hurt me.

After a few minutes, I could finally move and took the opportunity to
run across campus to a friend’s house and asked to sleep on the
couch. With the lights on. It happened a few more times.

Then, it just stopped. It hasn’t ever happened again.

The good news, McCarty said, is that my experience is actually pretty
standard. Sleep paralysis rarely persists or causes serious life damage.

“It’s very common, way more common than people realize,
but usually it doesn’t recur,” he said.
“It’s not frequent enough to make people come in and ask
the doctor for help.”

via Mind Hacks <http://www.mindhacks.com/blog/2009/08/sleep_freeze.html>

Image: John Henry Fuseli, The Nightmare




http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/08/sleep_paralysis/





[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]