Sleep paralysis and scary awakenings.
“When you wake up feeling a dead weight pressing on your chest and you can’t breathe and there’s a haunted feeling in the room, is there a ghost around?”
I was asked this question on a radio show this morning, and I realised, in what’s been a run of media interviews about dreams during Covid-19, that variations of this question keep coming up.
There are no ghosts in the room, no spirits to lay to rest, so let’s put your mind to rest instead.
Actually, the story begins with falling asleep, and one of the first things that happens is that your body is put to rest. Not just resting and drifting off to sleep. As you enter sleep, your brain switches on a mechanism that inhibits your motor muscles from moving much apart from the odd twitch. This is known as ‘sleep paralysis’ and its function is to protect you by preventing you from getting up and acting out your dreams. Your eye muscles are the only motor muscles that retain full movement, as you’ll notice when you watch someone sleeping through their REM (Rapid Eye Movement) phases of sleep.
Once you start dreaming, your mind is far from rest. It’s very active, processing your recent experiences and wrapping them up in dreams, but your body is very much at rest.
Under normal circumstances, when you wake, your brain switches off the sleep paralysis mechanism and by the time you’ve finished dreaming and opened your eyes, your body has recovered its full mobility, give or take the need for a bit of a stretch after laying still for much of the night.
But when you wake up suddenly, usually from a scary dream, or a noise in the room, or your alarm going off while you are deeply asleep, there can sometimes be a lag between your mind waking up and your body shaking off the sleep paralysis. So, you can find yourself partially alert but unable to move your body and, naturally, this can feel terrifying if you don’t understand what’s happening.
As you lay there, unable to move, wondering if you’ve had a stroke, you may begin to feel a heaviness on your chest and, if your mind is still half awake and half dreaming, you may perceive this sensation as a person, a ghost, or a heavy object holding you down. The more your fear kicks in, the more your body enters a state of physiological fear, and, given your likely interpretation that there’s an evil intruder in the room, or that you’re trapped, panic can ensue. Breathing can become laboured. All this can escalate in the few seconds before you fully wake up, mind and body. Or you might drift back off to sleep and continue dreaming the theme since the function of your dreams is to process your experiences.
But what if this is compounded by seeing a ghost or spirit in your room, or sensing its presence? Can you trust what you see and feel?
Let’s go back to the sudden awakening. If you are jolted in a dream into a state of partial wakefulness – partly awake, partly still dreaming – and you open your eyes, your brain may interpret your dream as happening in your room, not inside your mind. It’s as if your dream is wholly or partly projected onto your surroundings. This is known as hypnopompic sleep, a type of hallucination.
If you were dreaming of people – and so many of our dreams do include people – your brain may ‘see’ them in your room. They may appear hazy and ethereal because, of course, they are dream images, not totally solid, and because you are partly awake so not fully dreaming. Nevertheless, unless you understand what’s happening, this is totally scary!
It often happens that you have both experiences combined: the ongoing sleep paralysis combined with the partial awakening, eyes open, sensation of ghosts in the room horror.
This can escalate into ‘dreaming’ – or hallucinating – the ghosts or ghouls pressing down on your chest, holding you down, which can ramp up your physiological panic response.
The cure? For all of these experiences, knowledge is power. Tell yourself that there are no ghosts in the room and there’s no-one holding you down. Tell yourself that your sleep paralysis will release its hold within a few seconds. Open your eyes wider, moving into wakefulness to stop drifting back into dream. Your panic and fear will begin to resolve. When you can move again, get out of bed and walk around for a minute or so before going back to bed.
The experience can be even more terrifying if it was a scary dream that caused you to wake up prematurely, because your body will already be pumped full of fear and stress hormones. (When you feel fear or stress in a dream, your body is flooded with fear and stress hormones, so you are in a real state of physiological fear or stress.) If you still have the memory of what was happening in your dream, and you start to ‘see’ it playing on in your room, it can up the scare stakes.
Again, the cure is to tell yourself the sleep paralysis will release and there are no ghosts or evil intruders in your room. If you can, take deep breaths. If your chest is in panic mode, tell yourself that it’s easy to take some deep breaths.
There’s one angle we haven’t explored, and that’s dreaming of being paralysed, or dreaming of seeing ghosts.
I’m not talking about sleep paralysis or premature awakening. I’m talking about a normal dream – well, a normal scary dream – about being unable to move or about seeing ghosts or being haunted. If you’re not aware of your sleep paralysis doing its job and keeping you safe while you dream, these dreams are symbolic, and need interpretation as all dreams do.
It’s beyond the call of this blog, which is really about sleep paralysis and hypnopompic hallucination, but some ideas to explore if you have these kinds of dreams include: fears or feelings of being stuck and unable to make decisions or take actions, or feeling mentally or emotionally paralysed; fears and feelings and beliefs around being trapped or held back; feelings of being ‘haunted’ by whatever memories the ghosts represent. These are just a sprinkling of ideas. Every dream is unique and personal but you can learn the art and science of how to interpret your particular dreams.
So why have I been asked about sleep paralysis and seeing ghosts in the bedroom so much during these last few weeks? This Covid-19 period has brought up a lot of intense emotions, fears, and anxieties for most of us, and these are nightly processed by our dreams. Many of those dreams are scary, since they’re processing fear and drenching our bodies in those fear hormones, sometimes snatching us out of sleep so suddenly that we are stranded with sleep paralysis and ghosts in the room.
But now you know what to do if this happens to you.
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