Sign Up to our social questions and Answers Engine to ask questions, answer people's questions, and connect with other people.
Lost your password? Please enter your email address. You will receive a link and will create a new password via email.
Please briefly explain why you feel this question should be reported.
Please briefly explain why you feel this answer should be reported.
Please briefly explain why you feel this user should be reported.
Sleep paralysis is a temporary inability to move that occurs right after falling asleep or waking up. Individuals remain aware during episodes, which frequently involve troubling hallucinations and a sensation of suffocation. It is a brief loss of muscle control.
Some people are more inclined to this than others. Personally I was not and had to create the conditions in order to allow this to happen. Certain mental and physical states will induce this to happen more easily.
If this is happening when you first go to bed at night it is because you have allowed your body to go to sleep whilst wrestling with some problem in your mind. When you eventually stop all this thinking and relax to go to sleep you are in the ideal state to slip into a catyaleptic trance state or sleep paralysis.
If this happens on awakening it is due to the conscious mind becoming more active prior to the body awakening. By stopping ones thoughts for a brief period whilst remaining still immediately after awakening one may more easily pass into this state.
If you are in a state of sleep paralysis you may by an act of will easily separate out your non physical body. The easiest but to separate first is the hands. Just imagine rubbing your two hands together and suddenly you will be. Standing up is easy after that.
There is a complex program running while you sleep. In short simple form, paralysis is there to aid and assist the physical body while you dream. If you watch a sleeping body you can see that they lay quite still during the dream but begin to stir when the dream has ended. This is because there are inhibitors in place to keep you stable and “paralyzed” so that you don’t act out your dream. Once the dream is over, the inhibitors break down and disappear immediately.
There are triggers in your body that say, “Okay, your done”. And occasionally there can be a malfunction in which the body continues to produce the inhibitors. Then the sleeper wakes up, can’t move, and panics. This panic is counterproductive because this is the exactly what the inhibitors are made for; to effectively keep you still!
What a person intends to do during the event of waking into sleep paralysis is to tell your system, “I’m awake now.” This can be encouraged by movements of the facial muscles. The small muscles of the body are the least affected by the inhibitors. So, movement of the small muscles in the face and neck will send the signal to the body that the dream is over.
Staying calm during this event can be very helpful especially if this is recurring.