Free nightmare hotline still active

Halloween in the USA: basically it’s a nationwide sugar rush and an good excuse to dress up in a sexy costume. But don’t forget the origins of the holiday – that’s some scary stuff. Turn on the tube tonight and you”re likely to see more than your fair share of slasher flicks too. So whether or not you consciously subscribe to the idea that the boundary between the living and the dead is flimsier than usual tonight, horror is “in the air.”

Times like this, it’s good to remember that the Int”l Association for the Study of Dreams still offers its free nightmare hotline. This service is staffed by professionals with decades of experience with frightening dreams and nightmares.

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