Sleep Paralysis Treatment – Stop Feelings of Being Held Down at Night
Posted by Ryan Hurd on January 22, 2010
Sleep Paralysis is a troubling sleep condition that is deeply misunderstood in our culture. Experienced by millions as an incubus attack or being “ridden by a witch,” sleep paralysis (SP) has biological causes that are related to sleep hygiene, stress, and insomnia.
In SP, you are aware of the body’s paralysis that normally comes with REM (dreaming) sleep. This paralysis is what keeps us from acting out our dreams: a pretty important evolutionary skill that prevents us from injuring ourselves or our sleeping partners when we are dreaming about hunting tigers and bears.
This muscle paralysis is really frightening if you don’t know what is happening. It can feel like being pushed down into the bed, being suffocated, or like a heavy weight crushing down on the chest and throat.
And meanwhile, you feel like you are awake, with full thinking capabilities.
This is the original waking terror that inspired the word “nightmare” which is old Anglo-Saxon for “a crushing sensation at night.” The image above is Henry Fuseli’s Nightmare, painted in 1781, depicting an incubus demon sitting on a woman sufferer’s chest.
SP can also be a symptom of a more serious disorder, such as sleep apnea or narcolepsy. However, isolated sleep paralysis (ISP) is not a dangerous condition, despite how terrifying it seems at the time.
Sleep Paralysis visions have physical and emotional causes
About 20% of the time, ISP is accompanied by realistic, and often frightening, hallucinations. In my opinion, the underlying physical causes of ISP do not invalidate the psychological impact these visions can have on dreamers. Known as hypnagogic hallucinations (HH), these dreams are literally projected into the waking realm where we are laying down with open eyes. All over the world, across cultures and throughout recorded history, people have told tales of being sat upon by demons, ridden by witches, and haunted by spirits when they are in sleep paralysis.
A scientific worldview does not invalidate these claims, as medical historians and folklorists have argued for over 30 years. The night visitations of ghosts, monsters, vampires (and even aliens in many contemporary accounts) are psychologically real encounters, not simply stories that are fabricated because of a belief in ghosts and goblins.
In other words, the question is not whether or not if the demons are physically real, but whether or not they greatly affect the dreamer as an extraordinary experience.
Yes, they do.
These visions can be terrifying, and they can be equally life-changing.
Why demons won’t go away
So how do we cope with nocturnal spirit attacks in the 21st century?
Sadly, many people do not share their experiences, for fear that they will be laughed at, or that they are losing their sanity. Others try to forget these hallucinations in the daylight of reason, but stay up late at night afraid to go to sleep.
This problem has affected me too, as someone who has suffered from ISP/HH for most of my life. In fact, one of the reasons why I studied dream research in grad school is because I needed to find away to face these lucid nightmares that were robbing me of sleep and negatively impacting my life.
In the last five years, I’ve freed myself from unwanted nightmares, thanks in part to my nightmare reseach and dreamwork, and also to a supportive community and family.
A Holistic Approach to Sleep Paralysis
My solution is an approach that treats sleep paralysis and the accompanying visions in a manner that respects the physical, mental, cultural and spiritual levels of the phenomenon. This holistic approach to ISP/HH allows us to untangle the various influences on the experience.
In this way, we can work with each “thread” to reduce the nightmares, lose the fear of the unknown, and start getting better rest again.
With time, these unique visions can also become a reliable gateway to other extraordinary states of consciousness, including lucid dreaming, out-of-body experiences, ancestral encounters, and guided journeys to realms beyond our imagination.
Free Download – The Report
To learn more about sleep paralysis, I invite you to download my free Sleep Paralysis Report. This 13 page report discusses the symptoms, causes and hidden opportunities of sleep paralysis. The report also discusses how to wake up from sleep paralysis and how to prevent multiple occurrences in the same night.
You don’t need to give up your email or anything, just click here to get the Sleep Paralysis Report for free.
It’s a PDF; you’ll need Adobe reader or another PDF reader (like Preview for Macs) to see it on your computer. It’s also not copyrighted, which means you can share it with people you know who are looking for help with their sleep paralysis visitations.
Tags:hag-effect, hynagogic hallucinations, incubus, Nightmares & Dream Terrors, paralyzed sleeping, sleep ghost, sleep paralysis, sleep paralysis causes, sleep paralysis cure, sleep paralysis treatment, succubus, suffocation dreams, wake up paralysed, waking up can't move, witch-riding
Filed Under: sleep paralysis
I have actually saw a lady in my room one night, also hear voices and see images while I am sleep and the feeling of my arms and legs being pulled while I am in bed.. and I am plagued by nightmares and feelings of not being able to move or scream while I sleep
you’re not alone Trice!
I am suffereing from this scary sleep paralysis from my childhood, I suffer this twice a week. Do i need to consult psychiatrist.
MD,
If sleep paralysis is negatively effecting your life, then I do recommend seeking some kind of professional help. Therapists, psychologists and psychiatrists have different methods, but all can address your fears and concerns. Do what feels right to you. There no stigma with seeking help: this is one of the most profoundly disturbing maladies one can suffer with alone.
I have the help of a hypno-therapist who has helped me tremendously. I don’t have sleep paralysis, my mother has been plagued her whole life with it. I have bouts of insomnia and FEAR of sleep. I have learned to accept it and I sleep in the day time, not at night.
I’ve had many sp when I called for help when I had a encouter with aliens it seemed so real the flashing blue light that just illuminated my room completely and I just looked at my window in fear and disbelieve I literaly stood awake for more than 2 hours in sp then I closed my eyes and I really don’t know what happened after that but I know I didn’t wake up right away this has traumatized me and wen I ask my family if they saw the blue light they though I wa joking
my first sp attack was really terrifying i awoke in my dark bedroom and felt as if i forgot how to move my body. i was so frightened that i began to panic. it was the panicing which made my mind imagine things that made the attack terryfying. i had a really loud high pitch ring in my ear and that was it. but eventually the attacks started getting calmer, shorter and, quieter
Diego,
thanks for sharing — you obviously are not making this up as your account has all the familiar calling cards of SP with hypnagogic visions. Have you ever seen the pilot episode of the X-Files? Mulder’s experience is quite similar (except in that fictional tale, his sister is actually abducted). Even in medieval Europe, tales of fairies abducting children was tied to sleep paralysis. it’s a very old cultural myth. If you do feel traumatized, I recommend talking to someone who believes your experience, and work on ways to relax before going to sleep.
Joaquin, yeah, panic leads to more panic and can instigate nightmarish visions. sounds like you were able to wait it out OK. I have found that controlling your breath — regular breathing– makes a world of difference, as well as trying one of the ways to wake up from SP that are discussed in the SP Report.
One question I know I will have with dealing with SP and getting through the initial fear (which I do a lot now) and experience less stressful, peaceful dreams while in SP is… Is my body still getting the sleep I need? Even though I’m not scared, I’m still conscious of what is going on therefore I feel I’m still not getting any sleep? Therefore, this tactic only takes the fear away but I’m still in SP. Any suggestions?
SP is usually not long lasting enough to cause loss of sleep (unless you’re losing sleep from fear and by staying awake on purpose). on the other hand, if you are experiencing more than 10 minutes of SP a night every night, this could be a symptom of a larger sleep disorder, such as sleep apnea. Again SP is not a major cause of loss of sleep, but may indicate that sleep loss is happening that you don’t remember.
For me, this started about 7-8 years ago. It usually occurs once or twice a week, 2-3 times per occurrence. It will happen sometimes right after I fall asleep, but mostly just before I awake. Well, I wake up because of the occurrence. I have only experienced “halucinations” once, all other times I was laying in my bed, in my room. The most recent one, however, started with me standing in my bathroom, then being pushed out into my room against one of the walls, where I was then pushed to my bed. I cannot move any part of my body from my legs to my head. At this point, when it happens, I know that it is happening, try to fight it for a few until I can wake myself up. Ultimately, it is a really creepy feeling….
hi,
omg i thought it was just me,this has been occuring for many years the feeling of being wide awake n paralised but cannot see who or what is pinning you down,i scream for help relentlessly but no-one can hear me (so terriffing) then only last week i couldntsleep yet again drifting in n out,tossing n turning then whist trying to lay on my back n really try to get to sleep i felt a force gragging me from my arms/shoulders towards the bedroom door n then it went n i finaly fell asleep around 4.40 am.
are some people just really perceptive to energies or is ita problem with our brians (ie) mind body n soul?
thanks for listening.
any feedback would be great!!! these sleep disturbances are just the tip of my iceberg xxxxxxx
Hi ive been having reacurring dreams of a unknown angry presence. Its a dark shadow of a man or something. It attackes me physically in my dreams throwing me around or dragging me. This has been happening for years and I believe its trying to tell me something in my waking life but not sure how to go about it.
Kady:
Just reading your comment made me feel better about my own dreams. I too have been having the same dreams for years where I’m running from a presence or hiding from a dark entity who’s trying to hurt me. I too wonder, what am I not addressing in my real life that makes these dreams persist at night.
It’s likely completely anxiety related and I do my best to never go to bed stressed. Though earlier this week I had an experience of sleep paralysis that scared me, where I felt I was being pulled from behind by an unknown entity into the darkness and could not make a sound or move. It was very frightening.
You’re not alone.
I started experiencing SP after watching a couple of eposides from real paranormal experiences on TV. I sleep by myself twice a week since my husband works overnight. I had an extremely dramatic experience when I was 7 years old when my aunt committed suicide in my house by burning herself and I have always been afraid of the dark since then. I feel that my fears are increasing daily and I find myself being scared of falling asleep. I know it doesn’t sound good but I am glad it’s not a rare case and that I am not alone. Thank you all for sharing your experiences!!
Thank you for hosting this topic. I experienced SP for many years until I managed to avoid the experience through a subtle and hard to define shift in how I dreamt (my SP was almost always triggered by an opening of lucidity in the dream — if I went that way, I either had what some have called an OBE or, more often, ended up in SP).
I am not sure any of know fully what this state is. At one end of interpretation is the appropriately conservative concept that this is the mental equivalent of a “holodeck” that the mind creates as a projected reality when it cannot access actual reality — a realm of hypnogogic visions if you will.
At the other end is the concept that the SP experiences are in fact real (some type of reality) and that they must occur within or touching into some other dimension or aspect of reality that is not available to us in our normal human waking states.
There is a rationale for both poles of the spectrum (and everything between) and support can be garnered for either.
The only view that I tend to reject is that SP is some sort of pathology. It might be in some cases, but I think those are rare. Lots of people experience SP, and the weirdness of the experience leads lots of people to never talk about it — lest they be thought nuts. Therefore, it is in all probability much more common than we realize, and it may be a simple artifact of a complex process of sleep/wake where one simple step gets out of sequence — we should go into a sleep state before our bodies lock up during REM to avoid acting out our dreams, but sometimes we go into REM lock up first, or wake up mentally before we come out of REM lock up.
So for those of you who still experience SP regularly, I know how frightening it can be. It becomes even more frightening if you believe what you are seeing is real. (In part of my SP I often had people in the room, heard voices, and felt someone something was pulling on my legs hard to pull me out of bed — very frightening especially if you think you are the only one having these experiences and that it means something is wrong with you.)
Eventually I found that the easiest way to resolve the state was to relax, put my mind on other things, and fall back asleep. It would seem that as soon as I fell back into normal sleep, I would wake up “the right way.” Of course, it took time to get to the point of mastering the fear so I could relax. To get to that point, I had to conclude that I was not in danger of immediate death or some sort of unwanted “ejection from the body.”
At times, in my early efforts to wake up normally, I would make a supreme effort to move any body part even slightly. Rarely I succeeded, but when I did I would awaken with an alarming jolt to the system. So I recommend not fighting the state, accepting the fear for a valid fear, and trying to relax.
Part of what makes me conclude that there may be more to this stat than meets the eye is some of the other experiences I had that one could call OBEs. That’s another story. And there is also the interesting experience of pronounced vibrations when trying to wake up normally (subjectively, it feels like one is trying to get back “in” the body / reconnect with it, and a vibration keeps bouncing one back “out” — until, seemingly, something gets “in sync” and the jarring vibrations go away and one wakes up normally. It is easy to see how other cultural interpretations make sense — the various vibrations of the chakras needing to be realigned, an “astral body” needing to come back in phase with a physical body and so forth.
What have I myself concluded? I lean toward the conservative. The very least I feel certain of is that the in a very Buddhistic sense the world we think of as real is largely or wholly a mental projection that we live in — we literally live in a construct we have made from our sensory input, organized in countless ways during our childhood and on.
Once I asked a group if they had ever seen a snake turn into a piece of wood. At first I got puzzled looks. Then one face brightened, a woman raised her hand and said “yes,” and I asked her to explain. She said she had been driving down a road in Texas and saw a huge rattlesnake on the side of the road. It was a monster. It was so big she went back to look again. Then she saw it was just a sinuous shaped length of tree branch that had fallen. But for her, in those moments before she saw the branch for what it “was,” it was in fact for her something else that her mind had created. She wasn’t mad or nuts, just doing what we all do — creating a construct of the world and then navigating.
So bottom line, SP experiences for me indicate that there is a profound capability of the mind to create realities in a state that is not quite awake but subjectively is experienced as if we are definitely awake. To those of you who feel fear in the state, my empathy to you and my layman’s opinion that you are safe to relax and find comfort. You are not crazy in any sense and anyone who knows what you experienced — and there are probably millions of us — can assure you that you are not alone.
I have been suffering with SP since August 2007. Whist I have read that you cant scream or that many people scream for help but their partners say they dont hear them, I actually do infact scream “wake me up” and as soon as I hear a family member open my door, I immediately wake up. There has never been a SP night where I didnt scream to be woken up. I keep trying to remind myself that when this happens again NOT to scream for help as it has alarmed my family for years now and they dont truly understand SP. Just thought I’d share
I’ve had experiences with SP for years but recently its been happening more frequently, about once a week. Most had been without hallucinations, but my recent ones are with. Two nights ago I had the most terrifying one to date. I woke up staring at a shadow in front of me, a dark shadowy person, and I started panicking. I tried reaching up to put the light on, I struggled, moving inch by inch, for what seemed like an excruciating amount of time. When I got close to the switch, the shadow grabbed my arm and started forcing me down again. Then I tried trying to scream and I was thrown across the room up against my door, with the figure gripping onto my throat, suffocating me. As this was happening I remember staring into the figure and telling myself over and over that it’s just a dream, and realizing that the shadow was a chair in my bedroom, the shadow started looking more and more like my chair. But then as I was calming down, the shadow turned its head to the side and opened its eye. I felt terror that felt like my heart stopped. I closed my eyes and can’t remember what happened after that, just that I woke up the next morning.
Last night, I kept falling back in and out of dreams wherein my house was being overrun by a demon or ghost (hard to tell); but firstly, things were being moved and this frightened me alone; as I often feel uncomfortable in my bedroom.
Anyway, after reading this forum, I believe I experienced an episode of SP, as I felt as if I had woken up (joking to myself about the dream I had just had to reassure myself), and then suddenly, it felt as if a pair of hands was pulling my head back into my pillow as I was struggling and attempting to scream for help. For some reason, I remembered something my mother had said about asking for protection from the archangels if I ever felt something was wrong in that sense, so instead of screaming for help, I resorted to that method, and instantly I was let go and woke up (I presume). This affected me emotionally, and left me in tears and breathing irregularly. I am only 16 years old and find this sort of thing terrifying; yet extremely fascinating. Just wanted to know if anyone else has had the same experience?
Well i guess i just figured out what has been happening to me. SP. Only mine is alittle different. After about the second or third time it happened, i felt like someone was telling me to relax and everything thing would be ok. I did. I now know how to break free from it, well most nights. I have had similar experiences in the past but they too were different. I could actually feel my self being lifted out of my body and looking down at myself. I didnt feel any pressure, just a rushing feeling when i would go back to my body. I have just recently( after a bad car accident) been experiencing SP.
Three nights ago, after i had SP i went straight to sleep, only to have a very strange dream. I saw a police officer and remember everything about him. He also wrote down his name for me so i could remember it. He then asked me to give his wife a message… I woke up before he could tell me. It was so vivid.
It is so hard not to imagine a more complex meaning to the SP episodes. I feel like it was my Grandmother telling me to be calm and everything would be ok. That is nothing new, as i feel her around often. As do my small children. But these new episodes make me feel like there is purpose behind them. Maybe that is just my fear talking.. I dont know. Just saying what i truly feel. Im very glad to have found this fourm. Im glad i got to share.
my sleep paralysis is always about not being able to move/ breathe, I always wake up gasping for air. there are always people I don’t know, doing things around me, aware that I’m there calling out to them to help me move but they ignore me. the last one was very scary, I was falling off the couch, fell off and still could not move my arms to get up, when I woke up I was on the floor and trembling, couldn’t catch a breath. what the heck is this about? I am pretty sure it’s stress related but they are getting worse because now the people in my dream ignore me, they don’t talk to me like my first few dreams / paralysis experiences where people told me I had to move or get out of there or I would die. Explanations anyone?
I googled being held down while sleeping and found this site. I suddenly don’t feel so crazy. At about 5:30 a.m. this morning right after my husband left for work I just had another episode of being held down. They scare me so much. I feel tingles run through my body and then I suddenly can’t move, I don’t see anything but my bedroom but I feel like something is there and it scares me to death. I try to call out for help and even try calling to my dog but nothing. I figure if something is really there my dog would do something right, at least I would hope so lol. Every time it happens I’m alone in bed its always after my husband has gotten up. I’m 24 and I believe this has happened many times before in my life but randomly. I know I suffered from night terrors when I was little starting from around age 4 to 13 before my night terrors stopped. I’ve had these episodes on and off through out my life and after I got married I really stopped having them and I figured it was because my husband was with me now. Well these episodes have recently come back and they are really disturbing to me because I’m pregnant with my first child. I’m 28 weeks now and these episodes started coming back when I was in my first trimester. Its scary, I try to relax but then I think of my baby and about how I can’t move to protect my stomach. I’m going to have to by your book Ryan Hurd! I hope it helps me because I really need to stop waking up stressed out or scared for my baby.
Hi Brittany thanks for commenting. Your story is a great reminder how sleep disturbances leads to SP. and what is pregnancy if not one gigantic sleep disturbance?? Seriously the hormones and later in the 3rd trimester, the uncomfort, disturbs normal sleep and triggers SP for those who are prone to it. It’s a part of the package for pregnant dreamers, apparently! Next time when you’re in SP try to breathe normally and say a prayer or an affirmation that helps remind you that this is normal and you and your baby are safe from harm. Or imagine a protective bubble of light around you. Then use the techniques in this article for waking up — I still think the finger/toe wiggle or face scrunch is the most effective.