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LittleSkylark -> RE: Hypnagogic Imagery and Sleep Paralysis (12/4/2007 10:45:43 AM)
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Whoops went and posted on the Masters account! [&:]
Lets try this again!
Ahem!
Ok here goes.. *Takes a deep breath*
I suffer in exactly the same way you do, I'll be unable to move my entire body, but I can still see, and always, always will see some kind of figure or person standing beside my bed or over me. Sleep paralysis is actually where the idea of the succubus/incubus came from hundreds of years ago today it's still often called "Old hag syndrome" as people would often associate the figure/presence they saw as a black old frightening hag.
Luckily for people like us modern science has an answer for our problems!
While the episodes are frightening, our body is actually doing us a favor, when someone suffers from SP, they are usually woken from their third REM stage during sleep, while in this deep sleep our body produces a chemical every night which paralyzes our body in a sense, the reason it produces this chemical is to prevent our bodies from acting out our dreams. (The opposite of sleep paralysis is sleep walking, where the sufferer's body does not produce enough of this chemical )
As a result of our mind being woken up out of deep sleep, the body has to take a few minuets to catch up, so while you can feel like you have been lying there from anything of 10 minuets to 3 hours! The episodes only tend to last 30 seconds! )
The good thing is that while you may always suffer from them, you can learn to control them. Velvet as you said luckily none have been as bad as your first! Each time you have one you have to convince your body of what is going on so that it learns what to expect when you have one, sadly though this never quite seems to prevent the frightening images from appearing, but I've kind of learnt to do my best to look past them and wait for the episode to end.
Since I moved into my full total power exchange in the US, I stopped having SP, and actually started suffering from night terrors! I'd never had one before, but they are similar to SP, only you can move and are fully awake. I'd wake up in the middle of the night, wide awake and see something hovering above my bed, which would cause me to jump out of bed and run off screaming/crying, no jokes. But every time I was 100% awake and the object would seem 100% real. These occurrences started happening so frequently that my Master would have to secure me, tied to the bed at night! So that if I did suffer from one I would not bolt off into the darkness and trip over stuff in the room, or worse fall down the stairs!
I went to several doctors who thought it was strange as children tend to be the main sufferers of night terrors, and yet I never had an sp attack or night terror until I was 17.
From what I can tell though, sp and night terrors are somewhat genetic, both my grandfather and my brother suffered from them most their lives, and there does seem to b a general trend so you should check up with your family and see if any of them have lucid dreams.
Recently I also discovered while taking benadryl that it tends to provoke sp!
Was glad to see though that i'm not alone in the world, thought I was going nuts for a while! ;p
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