What is sleep paralysis?

You can call it a phenomenon, a sleep disorder, but essentially it is a (temporary) inability to move, speak and in some cases even open your eyes, while you are completely aware of everything happening around you. Your body is sleeping but your brain is awake. It happens while person is falling asleep (hypnagogic or pre-dormital sleep paralysis) or waking up (hypnopompic or post-dormital sleep paralysis) , it lasts anywhere from few seconds to a few minutes.

Sleep paralysis usually tends to hit young adults and teens and the experience itself is unpleasant and can cause a great discomfort. Some people never experienced it but to some it happens regularly, up to few times a month. The main problem is that the episode happens suddenly, when the person is relaxed and most vulnerable and it usually ends on its own, so it leaves you with a feeling of fear and helplessness.

Sometimes having other people talk to you or touch you can end it, or you can focus and try to move on your own.

A lot of people had said that while they were “paralysed” they had a feeling of something heavy sitting on their chest and blocking their breathing, or felt presence of someone in the room while they were completely alone. The hallucinations are also very frequent. We might say that the worst part of it is not the temporary paralysis but the weird and scary sensation that the person is going through.

For people that are experiencing this phenomenon it is of a great help to understand why it is happening and to have a logical explanation for the symptoms. In some cases it can be a sign of a greater health problem like narcolepsy, so if this is something that quite often happens to you or you have some other symptoms it is recommended to visit a doctor.

Sleep paralyses on it’s own is seen like an isolated, harmless episode and it’s not treated as a disease or chronic disorder.

What causes sleep paralyses?

In the past it was believed that the sleep paralysis is a “work of a demons”. Scientific explanation is that the sleep paralyses is a disruption of sleep stages. We simply wake up at the “wrong” time, a bit earlier than our muscles.

Hypnagogic (predormital) sleep paralysis happens in the beginning of a sleep cycle, in NREM (non-rapid eye movement) stages when we are just starting to fall asleep and our brain activity starts to slow down and muscles become relaxed. At that point we are less aware of our surroundings and don’t notice the changes around us or inside our body. However if we do become aware we can notice our inability to move or speak.

Hypnopompic (postdormital) sleep paralysis occurs when we become conscious before the REM (rapid eye movement) phase has finished. The REM sleep is a stage when we have dreams during which our brain is very active to a level it works when we are awake, but our muscles are paralyzed. Immobility of our limbs is actually a good thing because we can’t get up and act out the things we are dreaming of. So if our mind wakes up before our muscles in that stage we might experience sleep paralysis.

Stress, sleep deprivation, alcohol and drug abuse are known to be the triggers, and it also can be linked to other sleep disorders, from snoring to narcolepsy. Some mental conditions including anxiety, PTSD and depression are associated with it and it often “runs in family” so if one of your parents has experienced sleep paralysis it is more likely to happen to you.

Sleep paralysis and hallucinations

Sleep related hallucinations often come with sleep paralysis. They are different from dreams because they occur in the space between being awake and sleeping. They involve your senses but usually are mainly visual in a form of vivid images without any external stimulants, for example you can see a person or animal moving in your room when you know you are all alone. They can be very complex and seem extremely realistic.

The person experiencing hallucinations knows that she is awake and if that occurs in a combination with sleep paralysis it can be very disturbing. People with narcolepsy usually experience this during the day. Also, sleep paralysis and hallucinations can be followed with sleepwalking and sleep talking during the same night or as isolated episodes in different nights.

We distinguish two types of sleep related hallucinations: hypnogogic and hypnopompic. Hypnogogic can be more unpleasant because it often goes with sleep paralysis and the person is making a transition from wake state to sleep so any type of hallucination at that stage is more frightening in difference to hypnopompic when person wakes up and can relate any hallucination with a dream. There can also be the sensation of falling or being watched.

Contrast between dream and hallucination is that the person after waking up clearly knows that she was dreaming while with hallucinations the line between dreams and reality is blurred so it can be very confusing. This phenomenon tends to happen to young adults and it’s most common between females.

Sleep paralysis stories – demons and shadow people

Even if you don’t have hallucinations as an addition to sleep paralysis, the experience alone is often disturbing and frightening.

There are a lot of weird, scary stories from the people who have experienced it, but usually the base is very similar: the pleasant sleep is disrupted by suddenly waking up to notice that you can’t move or speak and you are not alone. You have trouble breathing because something is pushing down on your chest, you can’t sit up or move your limbs, you feel a presence of some entity in the room that you can’t explain, there is an intruder or a demon. You become really scared and the panic grows, may even have an out-of-body experience.

There are a lot of scientific explanations for this phenomenon, the main ones are related to brain activity in REM sleep, overlapping dreams, hallucinations and humans fight or flight defense mechanism.

The thing is that we are most vulnerable in our beds, sleeping, so if you believe in demonic forces the science is not going to help you a lot. In some countries a part of the national folklore are the stories about the demons that steal your life at night.

In Fiji it’s perceived as the dead relative who came to finish some business; in Turkey it’s the demon who literally sits on your chest and takes your breath; in China it’s a ghost; in Iran it’s a demon who takes bodies and it’s related to a dark magic performed by someone who wants to harm you.

The one of the most popular entities to be blamed is the so called “shadow person” (shadow being, black mass), a human-like living shadow. Some people describe these dark silhouettes trying to jump on them and choke them, some say they are aliens. All of them agree that they want to do harm.

The common theme is that this is some evil-doing and you should be scared, but in the end nothing really bad happened to the people who shared these stories, except for the experience itself.

The hat man stories

The “hat man” phenomenon is similar to a “shadow person” with some differences though. It is an entity that usually appears during the night, always wearing a wide-brimmed hat, a long coat, slowly floating like it has no lower body. The stories describe the hat-man like a very dark shadow with no distinct facial features. It centers around basement, doesn’t attack people and usually manifest itself when there is some sort of dysfunction in the family.

Often when one person in a household see the hat man very soon the other members will see it too.

Some say it is evil some say it’s not, but it is believed that when it appears it means that there is a family problem that needs to be resolved asap. So we can say that the hat man is perceived not necessary as a bad sign but more like a warning. What actually he warns about is yet unknown.

How to prevent or stop sleep paralysis

There is no special treatment for sleep paralysis unless it is a symptom of some bigger problem. Usually it happens just a few times in a person’s lifetime so it’s not treated as a disease. Actually the best thing is preventing it from happening.

Here are some ways of dealing with it naturally that can really help you: