I’m about to drift off to sleep, when suddenly my body convulses once. Sometimes it’s quite startling, sometimes nonexistant or slight.
What is that & why does it happen?
Cecil’s column on this:
Hypnogogic myoclonus. Cool phrase, cannot for the life of me remember where I read it.
One reason why I don’t sleep on planes during a trip…it happens very frequently with me. I afraid I may kick the chair in front of me so hard I’d send the passenger into the cockpit!!
Having read Cecil’s column, it looks like no-one really knows.
Is that right? That column is from 1981, any new news since then?
This happens to me more frequently on aircraft and trains than it does at home. I fall asleep very easily on a plane because the gentle roar of the engines seems conducive to sleep, but often when I’m half asleep, the engines will become deafeningly loud and I’ll wake with a start. I look around, and the other passengers are completely unaware of anything unusual. The same thing happens in trains with the track noise becoming suddenly loud. I don’t know why my brain is doing that.
Personally, I’m more afraid that I’ll fart.
I should probably start a new thread, but I’ll start here since my experience is on the topic of the OP.
This is interesting, as this has been happening to me for at least five years now. I have half-jokingly attributed it to being abducted from my bed by aliens at night, mainly because the “jolt” is always accompanied by a distinct buzzing sound like an electrical discharge as well as the physical sensation of a jolt of electricity. I occasionally see a flash of light. My body’s reaction to some sort of tractor beam? Hmmm. In one instance, I positively knew that I sat bolt upright and bashed my forehead into something metallic. There is nothing over my bed to bash my head into. Interestingly, these episodes only happen if I’m lying on my back, and at night.
This paragraph by Cecil interests me:
Hallucinations would obviously explain my abduction idea. The bit about vivid dreams, however, brings me to another bizarre thing that has been happening to me very frequently in recent months.
When I take naps during the day (usually late morning or early afternoon), I dream that I’m experiencing either a heart attack or an inability to breathe. The dreams are very frightening, and realistic, in spite of the fact that I seem to know it’s a dream while it’s happening. The specific dream is different each time. Some examples:
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I’m sitting at my computer when the “attack” comes. Then I’m on the floor, desperately trying to crawl to the door to open it and call for help.
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I’m at my mother’s house when the attack comes, and I’m on the floor reaching toward my stepfather for help.
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I’m on the floor next to my bed, struggling to pull myself up while trying unsuccessfully to draw a breath.
I can remember each “dream” vividly afterward. They’re very short, and I usually seem to consciously wake myself from the dreams by violently shaking my leg. Perhaps it’s the leg shaking that is actually triggering the dream, though I don’t know why the subject matter of the dreams is the same every time (same emergency, different scenario each time). At this point, I’m still calling these experiences “dreams”. When I awaken, I never feel even the slightest chest pain, and I’m always breathing normally. Once or twice my heart rate has been slightly elevated, but that’s it. I’ve made trips to the doctor a few times in the last year, for other reasons, and aside from slightly high blood pressure, she has never noted anything odd about the sound of my heart.
One peculiar bit about these “dreams” - they only happen when I fall asleep face-down, and only during the day. Nothing unusual happens when I sleep face-down at night. And if I fall asleep face-up at night, I have the alien abduction experience rather than the heart attack experience.
Very strange.
Hmmm, interesting. I suggest it might be that you’re experiencing a WILD - Wake Induced Lucid Dream. That is, you’re entering a dream directly from the awakened state. What are you are possibly feeling is the sleep paralysis taking over. This in turn is manifested in your dream in the way you describe.
This is very common when waking up (dreaming of a heart attack, being tied down, sat on, etc.), but I’ve never really heard about it happening while falling asleep.
Once or twice my leg has jerked involuntarily just as I was about to fall asleep. It’s so rare for me (literally, maybe twice in my life) that I can’t begin to look for any kind of pattern.
Cecil’s column is outdated in at least one aspect: scientists have since discovered that our skin has sensors for irritation, that are distinct from our pain sensors. So itching is not a form of pain.
I read about this maybe a year or two ago.
I believe Carl Sagan said in Shadows of forgotten ancestors that it was probably due to our recent life of living in the safety of trees for many hundreds of years. ( an instinctual fear of falling off the branches)
When I sleep face down, like Phase42, I go through some strange hallucination/dream that makes me get up and change my sleeping position. It’s probably due to the fact that the body is uncomfortable when you’re sleeping face down and so you go through unpleasant “dreams” to wake you up. This phenomena USED to happen to me. Now, when I sleep face down I no longer go through the nasty dream bit. Instead, I produce some loud enough hum (sounds like “hmmmm” but louder) that disturbs me and wakes me up. So I change my sleeping position. It’s weird.
I’ve been twiching as I fall asleep for years. I see a neurologist because I’ve had seizures in the past and he says that it’s quite normal.
This Christmas as I was flying out of town, the guy next to me on the plane fell asleep on my shoulder and then kept twitching.
It was not that endearing.
This is because of the aftereffects of the alien technology used on you when you were asleep.
I hate sleep paralysis. I get that occasionally upon waking up.
But the jolting feeling I get all the time! I always have it with a dream that I’m flying and then I crash. When I crash I wake up. It makes me wonder if this is how “falling” asleep got its name? Because of the common sensation of falling when it happens?
Soon after drifting off to sleep, I often have a dream that I’m stepping off a step or something and it’s a much larger step than I anticipated, and the vivid sensation of pitching forward is the falling sensation that jerks me awake.
I’ve also noticed very small sensations in my diaphragm region as I’m falling asleep, which are a similar to the violent jerks but on a very small scale. If I stay very mindful of my body as I lie in bed, I can feel them, and it’s reassuring because I believe it means I’m about to fall asleep.
Years ago I had a combination of the myoclonus thingy and the beginning of a dream wherein somebody threw a punch at me. In the dream, as well as in reality, I flung my arm up to ward off the blow and punched myself in the nose hard enough to bloody it. Very weird and painful.
The exact same thing happens to me, and fairly often, too. Like yours, it’s almost always a step.
I experience both of these on a regular basis. When the twitches or jerks happen, it’s always because, as I fall asleep, I have this very vivid feeling of falling off the edge of the bed… except we sleep on a futon pad on the floor, and I’m up against the wall, so there’s nowhere for me to fall down. This happens to me with varying frequency. Sometimes it doesn’t happen for months, and sometimes it happens twice in a week. I’m always instantly awake with my chest heaving and the adrenaline rush that happens when someone or something scares you out of sleep.
About the abdominal jerks, I have something similar to this. As I’m hitting that point of deep relaxation, prior to actually falling asleep, I can feel the muscles in my diaphragm tighten and relax, usually several times in a row, and in a way that I can’t duplicate when I’m fully awake.
~mixie
Me three, except I can’t really call it a dream, not a visual one, at any rate. I get the sensation that I’m walking, my foot slips, and that’s when I do the foot kick that jerks me half-awake. I even get the feeling of relief that one gets when they actually are walking and almost trip, but don’t. Which is funny because the part of me that’s awake knows I’m lying there in bed and can’t fall. This has recurred for as long as I can remember.