Paralyzed in your sleep? This is why.

Have you ever had the horrible feeling of being held down in your sleep? It is a frightening experience! You wake from sleep discovering that you cannot move, cannot scream for help and worse still sleep paralysis is accompanied by a deep feeling that there is a ‘presence’ in the room with you. It can vary from a few seconds to a few minutes.

It is a terrible but interestingly very common phenomenon. Think it is spiritual? Think again!

Sleep Paralysis as it is known medically is a BIOLOGICAL event. It does look spiritual especially because of the frequently accompanying hallucination (feeling of a presence in the room with you). These hallucinations can include strange sounds and even smells, along with sensations of falling or flying and worse still because you have lost control – it looks like some thing or someone else is in charge.

There are 5 stages of sleep. 1,2,3,4 and REM (Rapid Eye Movement) stage. Sleep paralysis occurs because of difficulty moving between these different sleep stages, especially moving in and out of REM sleep stage.

During the REM sleep stage, the brain produces some chemicals to paralyze our body. This is known as REM atonia. This is normal because it is during the REM sleep that we dream and this paralysis prevents us from acting out physically what we are dreaming. Imagine you are dreaming that you are running, without REM atonia you would probably get up from your bed and start running literarily (lol)

The hypothesis is that sleep paralysis occurs when REM paralysis spills over into the other sleep stages.

Things that can help if you have sleep paralysis:

1. Don’t Struggle- This only make it worse. Struggle will trigger the emotional areas of the brain and make it worse. There is need to control the fear.
2. Concentrate on your breathing to calm down. Take deep slow breaths.
3. Talk to yourself that it will soon pass.
4. Try to use your facial muscles to smile or frown
5. If you have company tell your partner to watch out and wake you if heavy and irregular breathings are noticed.
6. Finally sleep paralysis is not harmful!