Sleep Paralysis

[arjue]

For those who don't know about it, basically, your body paralyses its self to stop you from hurting yourself while you sleep, but this can carry over to conciousness. Its often coupled with halloucinations and sheer terror. It can be so full on that its thought by many to be the reason for alien abduction and out of body experience claims.

It happened to me a few nights ago. I woke up, and I couldn't move. I felt like a balloon full of golf balls, and if I tried to move, it felt like the balloon skin would get tighter and nearly burst. It was fucking wierd, but luckily it wasn't scary at all, and rather etheral.

Have any of you experienced sleep paralysis? any cool hallucinations as a result?

[cka]

I used to get it a lot. Sux. No cool hallucinations, but it was fucking freaky.

Falling asleep to shows like Sightings didn't help much, either.

[Mzo]

This girl I used to know would say that she'd wake up and see me still asleep, but wouldn't be able to move or ask me for help. It happened twice, I believe.

I offered words of encouragement like, "You're fucking weird."

[Mode7]

I used to lucid dream quite a bit -- one time I was going about my business in the dream unhindered, but could feel the muscles of my actual body paralysed as I was doing so. That is to say, my dreaming mind was conscious of my unconscious body. A bizarre two-places-at-once sensation.

Surprised to hear it's a frightening experience for most, though -- kind of struggling for words to describe it, but unpleasant definitely wouldn't be among them.

[AstroBlue]

This is from another topic, in context it was about how fucked up I was when I was around 6-8, when this and syneathesisa came at the same time :/

Another thing, was that I would wake up but only my mind was awake. I would be completely paralysed and my senses would be blarring. I'd smell and taste something like burnt wood or toast, I'd see flashing lights, and I'd hear a low hum. But the problem was, being a kid I didn't think it was because my brain was physically fucking up, I thought that it was all actually happening. My only explaination was that "aliens were messing with me, and they smelt like burnt toast". It's incredibly funny now, but all I can remember was how deathly scared I was.

It very rarely happens nowadays, like once every two years.

[cka]

Surprised to hear it's a frightening experience for most, though -- kind of struggling for words to describe it, but unpleasant definitely wouldn't be among them.

When you wake up in the middle of the night, unable to move anything except your eyeballs, and you have a feeling of both compression on your body (what your brain interprits as the inability to move) an evil presence just out of your vision range you'll understand why it's a frightening experience. I sometimes had it wear off almost instantly after I awoke, other times I had to do shit like what Uma Thurman did in Kill Bill to regain movement of her legs. Sit there and keep attempting to twitch until it finally moved, then having the restoration of my muscle moving capabilities flow through the rest of my body. Not very pleasant...

[Ragnarok the Red]

This has happened to me once in a blue moon, was especially frightening when it happened to me as a small child while we were on vacation. I woke my mom up about it and she just mumbled for me to go back to sleep

[Mode7]

When you wake up in the middle of the night, unable to move anything except your eyeballs, and you have a feeling of both compression on your body (what your brain interprits as the inability to move) an evil presence just out of your vision range you'll understand why it's a frightening experience.

Weird. For me, it was more of a calm, almost detached experience. I guess in no small part because I understood what was happening -- I'd have likely flipped out properly otherwise.

[Dolemite]

Nope, never happened to me. However, I fell asleep once on my back with my right arm hanging off the bed- I rolled onto my left side, my arm went up and over and I smacked myself in the face. It took me a munite to figure out what the fuck had happened.

[46 and 2]

This has happened to me a lot of times. Its like my mind is awake but my body just does not move. Its really scary when you can here people talking and going about their business and you can here them but no movement comes.

I usually tell myself to wake up a few times. Then my body sort of responds.