My Support Forums - View Single Post - Sleep Paralysis

seesaw · Oct 17, 2018 at 03:10 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by xiximmxi

For those of you who are not familiar with this -
Sleep paralysis makes you "wake up" in the middle of your nightmare. You can see everything that's around you, just the way you remember it when you went to bed. You can't move your body at all, and you just feel the presence of something terrible or you hallucinate monsters or ghosts or whatever you're afraid of. You scream from top of your lungs and no one hears you.

I usually experience this when I'm extremely tired, or feeling anxious about something, and falling asleep on my back.
I've lived with this for so long now that I usually know when it's happening; all I can do is try to fight the scary feeling and move my fingers to try to wake myself up.

Is anyone else dealing with this?
It gets to the point where I have to take Ambien or else I'm scared to fall asleep altogether.

If you search the forum for it you will find there are numerous threads on sleep paralysis. I suffer from sleep paralysis myself. It's caused by the brain not turning on the neural pathways to the body upon waking, which are typically shut down so you won't move while you sleep and hurt yourself. Sleep paralysis happens when you become awake before your body does.

It can be a symptom of narcolepsy. It is not the same thing as being in a nightmare and not being able to wake up, which many make the mistake of associating. It's actually when you are already awake and cannot move your body.

I hear you on being afraid to fall asleep because of it. I have had many sleepless nights because of it.