You have probably had a nightmare like this: a dark, menacing figure is chasing you through your home. You try to run away, but you can't run fast enough. At the climax of this dream, when you’re cornered or when the figure catches you, you wake up, sweating. This is a common experience. Some people, however have experienced or will experience something more real and frightening than any nightmare, something called sleep paralysis.
What is sleep paralysis? Tudor Gagea, a student at Toronto University and a close friend of mine, describes his encounter with this phenomenon.
I was lying in my bed half-asleep, when suddenly, I felt the urge to open my eyes and look around. I felt like I was in a dream, but I couldn’t move any part of my body; all I could do was look around my room. I looked toward the end of my bed and saw a dark, humanoid figure, with no distinct facial features. Slowly, it grew and began to loom over me. Also, I began to hear a faint, static-like sound. The dark figure continued to grow, as did the static noise. Throughout all this, I was unable to move or speak and could only look around. I began to panic as the noise grew louder and louder, to the point of cacophony. I was terrified.
According to WebMD and Wikipedia, sleep paralysis is caused by a faulty disconnection between the brain and the body. It happens as a person is moving into or out of REM (rapid eye movement) sleep, the deepest phase of sleep. During REM sleep, the brain releases a chemical that paralyzes the body; this is because during our evolution, those who weren't paralyzed during sleep could have involuntarily hurt themselves or aroused predators during the night. Sleep paralysis results when the brain releases the paralysing chemical when you're still awake, or when you make up while the chemical is still active. It is most common among teenagers.
WebMD notes that one section of the brain that becomes widely active during sleep paralysis is the amygdala (ah-mig-dela), which is involved in the formation of many fear responses, including freezing (immobility), tachycardia (rapid heartbeat), increased respiration and stress-hormone release.
In a waking state, the amygdala allows us to react to threatening predators (i.e. by making us scared so that we run away). When people awake in a paralyzed dream state, however, the amygdala is triggered in an unnatural way, causing the victim to experience extreme fear. Sleep paralysis is particularly scary because of the vividness of the hallucinations it causes. Individuals often hallucinate frightening human forms. Many of these forms take the shape of a human, resulting in a humanoid figure. Many of the times they are unnatural and shadowy entities.
Here's another incident of sleep paralysis:
Anonymous -
I have had sleep paralysis a number of times, in most of them I see a black figure on top of me, and I cannot move. In my last experience of sleep paralysis, I saw a dark figure climb on to my bed and I could literally hear the bed shaking as the figure crawled toward me. The figure had long hair, which slapped on to my face and the figure clung on to me and shook. I have these experiences about three times a week since I was 7. I am now 28. I call them devil dreams. I hear evil laughing or my name being whispered. 20 years of this shit and it still scares me. If I hold my breath or bite my cheek I can usually wake up.
Sleep paralysis is usually not harmful and within minutes, it gradually or abruptly passes. The episode can often be terminated by a sound or a touch on the body.
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