Oh, I've had two or three episodes of sleep paralysis. It especially freaked me out the first time, before I knew what it was. However, my personal variety always includes a hallucination, basically a dream while I'm awake, well, a nightmare. For me, it's always that someone is trying to break in and has incredibly malevolent intent. The first time, I almost called campus security, because I didn't realize that aspect was a dream until I spotted a discrepency between it and reality which made me realize it couldn't have been real.
The advice I've read for trying to break yourself out of sleep paralysis is to try to move a very small muscle, not an arm or a leg, because they are too big, you won't be able to, and it'll just add to the terror. Something really small like just moving a pinky slightly or an eyebrow or your tongue a little. If you can get a tiny bit of motion then it will help your body start the process of breaking out of the sleep stage it's stuck in. I haven't actually managed to try this out though, so I don't know how well it works. But it seems worth passing on in case it does work.
Sleep paralysis nightmares are much scarier than normal ones, even when the topic is less scary. I am convinced this is because there is a part of my brain that is screaming, you are awake thus this is real that doesn't happen dur9ing nightmares, no matter how bad. Unfortunately, it's wrong and it's just the sleep mechanism being broken. :/
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Date: 7/26/09 10:26 pm (UTC)From:The advice I've read for trying to break yourself out of sleep paralysis is to try to move a very small muscle, not an arm or a leg, because they are too big, you won't be able to, and it'll just add to the terror. Something really small like just moving a pinky slightly or an eyebrow or your tongue a little. If you can get a tiny bit of motion then it will help your body start the process of breaking out of the sleep stage it's stuck in. I haven't actually managed to try this out though, so I don't know how well it works. But it seems worth passing on in case it does work.
Sleep paralysis nightmares are much scarier than normal ones, even when the topic is less scary. I am convinced this is because there is a part of my brain that is screaming, you are awake thus this is real that doesn't happen dur9ing nightmares, no matter how bad. Unfortunately, it's wrong and it's just the sleep mechanism being broken. :/