FAQ- Sleep Paralysis

 The FAQs of Sleep Paralysis

 

Yo followers, thanks for your continued support. This post is about Sleep Paralysis, which is something that has affected me for a few years now. Creepy/Interesting shit y'all.

Q. So what actually is sleep paralysis?

A. In one line, it’s like your mind has woken up but your body has not.

Q. So you can’t move?

A. Not whatsoever. You feel completely paralyzed. It is a genuinely scary thing when you put your entire mind into turning your body over, but just nothing happens at all no matter how hard you ‘think’ about doing it.

Q. But you can see everything?

A. The seeing part is odd. It is like you are looking at your room in a dream-like state. It’s like your eyes are only ¼ concentrating on the job of looking around you, so when you finally come to your memory of what your room looked like is hazy and you have no sense of time for how long you were ‘paralyzed’ for- but you can definitely ‘sense’ everything in it. Oh, and then there’s the hallucinations.

Q. Hallucinations?

A. Oh yes. I have heard of people getting visual hallucinations, and indeed they seem pretty common. People have seen things moving in the darkness, reflections of things on mirrors, even things sitting on their chest- just in the corner of their eyes. It’s not trippy colours or anything like that- it’s more like your dreams (or nightmares more often) spilling over into your room.

I in particular get aural hallucinations. Whispering, voices, things moving, even heavy breathing right in my ear. When this is coupled with the feeling of things touching you, it can get pretty damn scary. It is usually for me a sudden burst of this sense of fear that snaps me out of sleep paralysis, and back to being awake.

Q. Hang on, when you are ‘paralyzed’ surely you know what has happened, you know you will be ok, and you know what you see/hear/feel isn’t real?

A. It doesn’t work like that perfectly in practice. I can vaguely remember the first time sleep paralysis happened to me, and it was honestly horrible and shocked me for the rest of the day (I was about 15). Now though I do have a vague feeling of control over the situation, but that never stops the slight feeling of panic that is always present. When the hallucinations begin though, this feeling of panic goes into overdrive- there is very little I can do to stop that bit. Waking up covered in a cold sweat is commonplace.

Q. Sounds shit bro.

A. That’s not a question.

Q. Is it that shit?

A. Well, nah I suppose I can deal with it better than that last bit reads. It can be scary, but it’s similar to when I was 5 and had nightmares in terms of scariness.

Q. Is it ever pretty cool? Like you lying there and just watching someone?

A. Well as I say, I’m never really 100% ‘watching’, because my brain is sorta half asleep I guess. It’s only cool in a sorta ‘now I know what it’s like to be totally disabled and a shut-in way’. That and the ‘I can now write a fairly cool blog post’ type of cool.

Q. Ever think of ghosts?

A. Actually I watched a film a bit ago about some woman who kept getting raped by ghosts (classic date movie), and a lot of what happened to her could be put down to sleep paralysis and the touching hallucination bit.

EDIT: Film was called ‘The Entity’. Actually it was fairly cool. Ghosts getting’ girls, chillin’, bein’ trapped in ice etc

Q. When does this happen then?

A. For me, usually in the morning. It has happened a couple of times when I wake up from a dream in the middle of the night.

Q. And how frequent?

A. Often I get it when I am sleeping in a bed for the first time, have a bad sleeping pattern, and sometimes when I have a dream about sleep paralysis, it immediately merges into it and becomes real at the end.

Q. Daddy or Chips?

A. Give a man chips and he will eat for a day. Give a man Daddy, and his chips will be supplied to him regularly.

Q. What the fuck was that last question?

A. Ask it to everyone. There were riots in the UK because of it. Chips went uneaten, Daddys became lonely. Do research.

Q. What the fuck is this post even turning into?

A. That is all. Goodbye.