Ex-Position

When I first started experiencing shoulder and neck pain my physical therapist recommended that I start sleeping on my back instead of on my side. As you can imagine this wasn’t a welcome prospect, as I had always slept on my right side, with my arm splayed out overhead as if I was raising my hand to answer an important question throughout the length of the night. Despite being comfortable it was apparently awful for my shoulder joint, so I had to train myself to sleep on my back. I ended up learning to sleep on my back with my hands across my chest like a vampire.

It was honestly pretty terrible for a long time, and one of the primary reasons it was terrible was because when I slept on my back I would have these really scary experiences in the nighttime and morning. The reason I’m writing this is that I’m hoping to save other people from having similar experiences, especially for as long as I did.

What Does Sleep Paralysis Feel Like?

Here’s typical experience that I had once I started sleeping on my back:

"I'm lying in bed and I wake up and I can't move my arms or legs. I'm having trouble breathing and I can't see well. I cry out but I can't speak. It feels as if my mouth is sealed shut. Every movement seems as though I'm pulling my limbs through miles of paralyzing goo. Eventually I black out or wake up"

This is called sleep paralysis, and it is pretty common. A lot of people experience it in their lifetime, but it is definitely more common in people that sleep on their backs. It also happened more to me because I was trying to sleep while in immense pain, which meant that my sleep was more shallow and disrupted.

Despite the name “sleep paralysis”, which, at least to me, seems to imply that you are somehow “awake” in your room but you can’t move your limbs, you are actually asleep. This may sound strange, but if this has happened to you, despite the fact that you think you’re in your room, you’re really asleep and paralyzed in your own mind. Seemingly trapped in a bedroom or sleeping place of your own creation.

Some people (myself included) experience terrifying presences and other very unpleasant things while in sleep paralysis, and that is the reason why I’m writing this article. If you read about dreams, you may have heard of the “old hag”, which is the term used to describe any kind of “evil” presence sensed while in sleep paralysis. Depending on the person this can range from the sensation of animals near the bed, to angry ghosts, and even the devil himself.

Here’s a very scary incident that I experienced myself,

"I awake in my bed and immediately sense that I'm paralyzed. I become immediately terrified. Within moments I can sense a dark, shadowy figure, seemingly made entirely out of dark static, just outside the field of my vision. He says nothing and is standing just over my bed with a pillow outstretched hanging right over my face. I am trapped for some time in this position attempting to scream out or move my arms to fight back. I am convinced that he'll try to smother me at some point, but I eventually wake up."

Now, that is a pretty gnarly situation, and I’m sure there are people out there who have had much worse. If you’ve never experienced something like this, there is a strong possibility that you’ll experience it in the future, and I’d like to provide you with the knowledge and tools to escape from such a situation.

First and foremost, you have to remember that you’re dreaming. Despite the fact that it might feel like you’re in your room and in your bed: you are dreaming. This will cut out almost all of the terror that is associated with this situation. The physical threat that you feel is actually non-existent. You are in your dream and nothing can hurt you. Also, the fact that you’re dreaming rules out (in my opinion) the intervention of Demons, Ghosts, or other ill intended spirits.

My take on sleep paralysis is that people who experience this helplessness (inadvertently) manufacture some sort of threat because of their helplessness. Depending on their background or what kind of media they’ve consumed recently that threat may change. But, regardless of the shape of the threat, (and as I’ve said numerous times before) IT’S JUST A DREAM. People get into real trouble when they don’t understand this; often times they think they’re being visited by a real demon. Basically, the more scared you are in these types of situations the worse it gets. From what I’ve read, the pineal gland–which secretes melatonin and helps regulate our sleep cycle–is highly active during dreaming. There is some evidence that it has a sort of cyclical ramping effect. So if you are scared, it becomes more active, perhaps making more scary dream environments, which can scare you more, and so on. So the key in these situations is to stay relaxed. I’ve experienced these terror cycles first hand, and getting scared (in my experience) only leads to escalated levels of discomfort, anxiety, and terror.

The Good News

The good news is that any sleep paralysis episode is a golden opportunity to pursue any type of dream activity that you’ve ever wished to indulge in through the use of lucid dreaming. I consider myself to be a fairly advanced lucid dreamer, and I’ve found that sleep paralysis is the best way to get into a lucid dream quickly.

For those of you who don’t know what lucid dreaming is, it basically means that you are aware that you’re dreaming while you’re dreaming. Sound familiar? It should, because that was what we established was happening during sleep paralysis. I’ll go into more detail about lucid dreaming in some other posts, but I’m describing this so that the trick I’m about to share makes sense. Here’s another example of sleep paralysis, but this time I use it as a gateway to a lucid dream:

"I'm in bed again and I'm pinned down. Can't move. I begin to feel a bit frightened at my lack of mobility, and soon I sense the presence of some sort of "evil" creature near by. I try to move my arms but I can't, and I can't yell either. Just as I'm about to freak out I realize that this is sleep paralysis, and that none of it is real: I'm in my own head, dreaming that I'm trapped in my bed. I decide to try falling through the bed, and soon after visualizing this sensation I begin to fall through the bed as if it was a warm cloud. I continue falling backwards, and as I do I imagine a large pool of warm water ready to catch me down below. I flip over in mid air and land in the pool that I imagined. When I pop my head out I discover that I'm in a yellow tiled room, in an indoor jacuzzi. There is a single door. I open the door..."

From this point on I had a very interesting lucid dream where I walked around and saw a variety of strange sights and sounds. I also spoke with some dream characters and did a little flying. After the fall I felt so much more in control that I didn’t even think about the phantom monsters that I’d fled from. Even if they had followed me they would have been in for a rude awakening themselves, because unlike before I was lucid and had full function of my “dream” arms legs and body, meaning that I could fight back instead of wallowing in languid terror.

Falling is one of many escape methods to possibly use when in sleep paralysis. Others include: rising out of the bed on a white beam of light, spinning around the surface of your bed like a clock hand; pretty much any method to get you out of the mindset of “I’m in my real body”. I’ve spoken with four or five people who were all haunted by severe sleep paralysis and intense dreams. After I shared this information with them they all noticed a huge decrease in sleep paralysis, and even when they had it they used the tools I gave them to escape. Even if you don’t manage to use the falling technique, the knowledge that you’re dreaming should give you enough comfort in those situations not to trigger a panic cycle while you’re dreaming, and it should calm you once you wake up and realize that the images you saw were a dream and not some shadowy figure invading your bedroom.