The Importance Of Sleep Paralysis

Imagine falling asleep and having your nightmare come to life. Being attacked by a huge black figure is scary enough, but imagine not being able to move or scream while it is happening. Your only choice is to helplessly lay in bed and hope that what you are experiencing is only a dream. Sleep paralysis is a phenomenon that affects a small percentage of the population, myself included. Sleep paralysis is the inability to move or speak when you are either falling asleep or waking up. When a person experiences sleep paralysis, their brain knows that they are awake, but their body does not. The inability to move or speak comes from our bodies becoming paralyzed during the rapid eye movement stage of sleep in order to prevent us from acting out our dreams during sleep. Sufferers usually experience unpleasant hallucinations. The most common hallucination is experiencing some type of evil presence in the room, but having feelings of floating or flying is also common (Davis). I first experienced sleep paralysis last summer. Instead of experiencing hallucinations, my body started to vibrate. I remember listening to the hum of the vibrations and not being able to do anything about it. This was the first time that I ever experienced

I was not expecting “vibrating body” to be such a popular search. Much to my surprise, hundreds of websites showed up on my screen. I read several stories on Yahoo Answers and Reddit, and they were shockingly similar to mine. I was immediately relieved to know that what I experienced is not rare. However, I became uneasy when I discovered that the causes of sleep paralysis are out of our control, and the experience is not easily preventable. I was afraid to fall back asleep, and I knew that sleep paralysis was something that I never wanted to go through again. Little did I know, sleep paralysis would become a normal experience for