Sleep Paralysis Treatment – Dreams of Being Held Down

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, the dreamer is 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.

Read more

The Link Between Depression and Dreams

Sleep plays a major role in mood regulation; that’s a truism that is behind every mother’s call for “time to go to bed!”    But while the links between dreams and depression are well documented, the role of dreams in maintaining mental health is still one of the most confusing components in the function of sleep.

Read more

Sleep Paralysis and Spirits

Are spirits real, or are they just irrational stories meant to explain things that science now explains better” This is the way the question of spirits is framed by many. According to many recent polls, belief in ghosts in the West hovers around 60%, and one British poll found that more people believe in ghosts than God. These statistics are then typically melded to reinforce the idea that “we hold irrational belief despite all the math we”ve done,” such as this statement from Live Science:

Read more

REM is not the Man Holding Us Down

It’s been roughly 54 years since a young graduate student discovered and named REM sleep, which is commonly known as the “dream state.” While it is true that dreaming can occur in all of the sleep states (as cognition, mental imagery, and uncanny kinesthetics), it is REM that grants us the long dramatic dreamy narratives that we usually remember in the mornings.

REM stands for Rapid Eye Movement, and was named by young E. Aserinsky because, in this sleep state, every voluntary muscle in the body is in motor paralysis, except for the eyes. They roll back and forth wildly while the rest of the body remains frozen.

Read more

Nightmares and Sleep Paralysis

Gyrus from Dreamflesh made this connection between false awakenings and sleep paralysis: in both of these altered states, we feel like we are “awake” and aware of our surroundings. In a false awakening, this certainty of “awakeness” turns out to be a lucid dream about where we are actually sleeping. In sleep paralysis, we also feel awake but the situation is a little more complicated. Here our self-awareness is active and we may even have eyes open, but our bodies are still under the paralysis of REM sleep. The more we struggle, the more it feel like we are being “held down.”

I wrote about the creepiness of night terrors about a year ago on my culture shock blog, so I won’t go on at length here. Even though the REM paralysis is probably what is happening on the “exterior” levels of our reality, we really can’t reduce the entire experience of night terrors to biomechanics. After all, many people throughout history have described intense visitation dreams that follow from the initial feeling that “someone else is in the room.” These night visitors have ranged from dead relatives to benign ghostly apparitions to scary demonic entities to figures of light and peace.

Read more