Of course I’ve had sleep paralysis before. But I was asleep at the time.
Now and then I wake up unable to move for a few moments. It’s never been scary though. Occasionally I’ll have very vivid and realistic dreams while just waking up or falling asleep, dreams that incorporate reality. Those can be frightening, or not, but they rarely involve paralysis.
tl;dr
There are two related things going on:
Paralysis
Night Terrors
The two episodes of paralysis (which I did not know existed. lived alone. You want scary? No one will ever know I am dying of thirst) occurred shortly after dawn. I decided, since I had damned few options, was to try to go back to sleep. It worked
As the name suggests, night terrors are very different - yes, you are also paralyzed. but you have the sense of a malevolent entity about to attack you/attacking you. In the case of women, it is a rape scenario.
Luckily, I had read up on this before it occurred, and was able, with great effort, to recognize what was going on and managed to awake. These were both in the middle of my sleep cycle - probably near REM sleep.
I’ll take a nice, light dose of paralysis every time. Damned, those terrors were terrifying.
Lucid dreaming, otoh, can be quite pleasant. Have had the a few dozen times (I’m 64)
Not sleep paralysis, but something I’m sure is closely related. There was a period of my life in which “lucid dreaming” wasn’t just common, but typical. I can’t do it anymore, but almost every night as a teenager I had dreams in which I was aware that I was dreaming, and could control the action.
One time I “woke up” (meaning the dream went from normal to lucid) underwater, while I was drowning. That was a terrifying nightmare that turned out to be pretty cool once I realized I was dreaming, and could just breathe underwater.
The reason I think lucid dreaming is very closely related to sleep paralysis is that both conditions involve being partly conscious while dreaming. I was aware of my real body laying in my bed, and occasionally I would try to manipulate my real body by shouting as loudly as I could in my dream, or flailing my arms around. Sometimes I’d hear my real body make a stunted groan, or feel a small twitch from my real body’s arms. That was somehow extremely satisfying to my dream-self. Usually I couldn’t make my real body move or make noise, though.
Yeah, I’ve had plenty of sleep paralysis episodes. Usually only happens if I fall asleep lying on my back. I can open my eyes and I’ll see lights floating around the room. Sometimes it feels like my head is vibrating and I’ll hear a loud buzzing sound. It used to scare the hell out of me when I was a kid, but now it’s just annoying. I try my hardest to roll over on my side and it stops.
It’s funny, my experience with SP has been somewhat similar. At first, the episodes were very frightening. I don’t know if I actually cried out, but I certainly remember trying. I didn’t have readily available internet at the time, so I couldn’t put a name to what I was experiencing but I did have an epiphany one day and I realized it was just a nightmare except one I happened to be very lucid in. After that, my SP episodes stopped being scary. The fear was still there, but indistinct and at a remove. These days it’s just irritating. Like an ant bite, harmless on the whole but occasionally irritating to the point of distraction.
I, too, getting the buzzing. Oddly, it’s the worst part of the SP episode for me. The paralysis isn’t no big deal, really. But the buzzing, that’s how I know I’m about to experience an episode. And it can be really intense sometimes, to the point of pain. Except not pain exactly, per se. I really don’t know how to describe it. It just sucks.
“snake issues”-- curse you! you brought to mind my centipede phobia… now I’m afraid I’ll think of it during an episode of sleep paralysis and have them crawling all over me. Just when I thought I had things under control…
I’ve posted this before, so I will make it brief. Happened once, accompanied by an out-of-body experience. I was looking down on myself, seeing me lying on a hospital bed with my leg in a cast, thinking that this was all a practical joke played by some friends. Then I woke up and realized I was lying in a hospital bed with a broken leg. No practical joke.
Yes, a few times, but not with being able to look around or with hallucinations. I have been awake but unable to move. It is scary. Thankfully it never lasted too long.
I don’t think it is a hallucination or an actual dream. The body actually is largely paralyzed while we dream, otherwise we would be acting out dreams out. Presumably, sometimes the dream itself and the paralysis can get a bit out of sync, so that we wake up (fully or partially) but are still paralyzed. (I suppose if there are hallucinations the dreaming itself is not entirely over.) There was a French neuroscientist, Jouvet, who lesioned the part of some cats’ brains that is responsible for the paralysis, and they acted out all of their dreams (mostly pouncing on mice, I think). The cats eventually dies from exhaustion. Poor animals were not getting any rest even when they were sleeping.
What the OP is describing is not a night terror nor a dream but rather a hypnopompic hallucination. Hypnopompic referring to the moments preceding being fully awake. And hallucination rather than dream as it was experienced with his eyes open and not in full REM sleep.
Should a person have the experience as he is falling asleep it would be called a hypnogogic hallucination.
Night terrors generally occur in young children and involve awakening in a state of horrified agitation.
I’ve experienced it a few times. It was terrifying. I’ve even felt like my body was possessed, my brain wildly searching for prayers to break the hold this unknown thing had over me. I quickly learned to concentrate on getting one small portion of my body to move because success immediately broke the feeling. I discovered that what seemed to bring it on was a pinched nerve from the position of my wrists if they were jammed underneath me. I began to wear wrist braces and haven’t experienced the paralysis in years.
Do NOT show this to a child.
Those under 12: you have been warned
I happen to love this - Attn: Bill Watterson
I remember one experience that happened sometime in the past year or so. I was lying in bed and woke up in the middle of the night, and I desperately but fruitlessly tried to fall back asleep though I was too tired to consider trying to roll over or move in any way. The room was dark but enough light from the streetlights made it through the shades that I could see the white ceiling.
I could also make out a dark shape hovering about two inches above my face. I was already feeling disconcerted so I reassured myself that it was just the silhouette of my blanket. Yeah, just my blanket, blankets are nothing to worry about, they’re supposed to be on me while I’m sleeping. Wait oh my God the blanket is lying flat on my neck WHAT THE HELL IS THAT THING! Then I woke up with an aborted scream of terror and definitely couldn’t get back to sleep for a while, but at least I could move and read a book or something. I love having nightmares, so in hindsight I really enjoy having had that experience but man it was horrific at the time.
I have a relative who refuses to believe that any of her problems could be neurological and refuses to have a two-sided conversation about them, but I get the strong impression that she has or had sleep paralysis pretty frequently. One time there was someone standing outside her window who shot her with a Tazer through the closed window. I’m really glad that I have the ability to comfort myself with the knowledge that it’s just a hallucination, because thinking these experiences are real would be horrifying.
And man, armedmonkey, your marionette sounds incredible and I’d love to have an experience like that. I’m not saying that out of ignorance of how terrifying nightmares can be either, because one time I had a nightmare where (spoilered for being really gross) I was a Frankenstein’s monster created in a high-security military base from aborted fetuses, which I knew because I saw latex-gloved workers picking them up out of a pile on the floor, scooping the eyes out of them with their fingers, and putting the eyes in a bowl. I was escorted to my “mission” at the top of the tower, where they opened a door and shoved me out of the side of the building, and I fell tens of thousands of feet to my death. Whoops I screwed up, and get to fall to my death again and again until I get it right! It was pretty cool in hindsight.
In a way what you say is true by the definition of the words, but what the OP (and others) describe is not what is usually meant by hypnopompic (or hypnagogic) hallucination. Usually those terms refer to a succession of often bizarre (and sometimes unpleasant looking), but essentially static mental images that are sometimes experienced at those times, but are rarely taken to be realities. Unlike dreams, there is no “story”, just random “pictures”.
The experiences I describe in my earlier post did not involve hallucination at all, just paralysis (and there is every reason to believe that such temporary paralysis is quite real).
This is not accurate, although it is true that the expression usually refers to a condition experienced by young children. My daughter used to get them sometimes in her crib as a toddler. She was most certainly not awake, although she was moving and crying as though terrified of something. My wife and I would turn on the light and come to her crib to try to comfort her, but she clearly did not see us. Night terrors seem to be more like sleepwalking, or the opposite of sleep paralysis, where the child remains asleep but is no longer paralyzed, so she begins to act out events in her dream, rather like the brain-lesioned cats I described in my earlier post. (Fortunately the incidents never lasted long, and she only had them occasionallyover a fairly short period, but it was quite distressing for us as parents, seeing her apparently terrified but being unable to do anything to comfort her.)
I had that nightmare once. The nightmare was that I had woken up and could not move my body.
Well to start with I was feeling I could not move my body. But then there was a pain from somewhere, and while concentrating on trying to move, I also thought "so there is a pain too ? what is that ? " . Concentrating on the pain it becomes a clue … “the calf muscle !” The feeling was I was paralyses but for the calf muscle which was hurting. So I try to “tension and relax”, “tension and relax” that calf muscle, but it fails and the pain becomes extreme. There’s a feeling of panic as the muscle feels like its tearing itself to bits. I am trying to yell in pain, but I don’t hear the yell.
Then I suddenly get my body back, but its heavy and slow , just like it is when I wake up… 
… With a calf muscle in spasm, which which hurt for days afterward.
It happened to the other leg weeks later, and that’s years ago now and it didn’t happen again.
I think I was waking up due to having a spasm of the calf muscle. This has been described as being caused by potassium deficiency, or caffeine overdose, or something, which my have been true.
So my idea to add is that often when you have strong real world influences to your dream, the dream can involve those influences. Such as dreaming about water (eg having a shower, or drowing, or wetting your pants )when you need to go to the toilet.
Seems I was having a nightmare that I could not control my muscles, because I really had lost control of a single muscle (the calf muscle spasm.) Due to that I had the paralysis nightmare in the lucid, memorable way. But then I woke up and fixed my leg by exercising it.
Here’s what Cecil has to say:
Well possibly that is what was happening in the case you are talking about, but, as I said, actual paralysis during dreams is not only possible but normal. This is a well established scientific fact, and the brain locus responsible for the paralysis is known. If you are not paralyzed when you are dreaming, you have a problem (one that killed Jouvet’s cats eventually). Furthermore, as the experiment with the cats shows, not to mention my daughter’s night terrors, the paralysis can be disassociated from actual dreaming sleep. It seems perfectly plausible to me (as well as being in accord with what I have experienced) that sometimes they might become disassociated in the other direction, leading to a brief continuation of the paralysis after one has actually awakened from a dream.
Sleep paralysis is NOT a dream - it is a matter of awakening while your body is still in “dream” mode - paralyzed.
You really are awake - what you can see is what is within your field of vision - you are not able to move your head or any other part except eyeballs and eyelids.
If you can move your head and look around, or see things that are not as they really are, you are dreaming.
If you have a night terror, you will know the difference between it and a nightmare. The presence of a malevolent beast (the “Hag”) (See http://www.lastwordonnothing.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/incubus.jpg for a common vision) pretty much confirms it. Awaking if horror beats continuing the terror.
I use two different sleeping pills (heavy duty 'script) - one is quite prone to nightmares, he other isn’t. Clonazepam and Temazepam for those studying benzodiazepines.
You know what? This may sound like heresy, but I just don’ t trust Cecil. His first thought on this phenomenon was a sleep disorder. His second was epilepsy. Just no.
I hate to say it, but Cecil is more frequently wrong than he is right.
In what respect do you think he is wrong about this one?