But the lower part of your brain is still in REM, says Jalal, and is still sending out neurotransmitters to paralyse your muscles. But sometimes – and scientists still aren't sure why – the sensory part of your brain emerges from REM prematurely. During REM, your brain paralyses your muscles, probably to stop you physically acting out your dreams and hurting yourself. The final stage is called rapid-eye movement sleep, or "REM". At night, our body cycles through four stages of sleep. In reality, says Jalal, the cause is far more mundane.
"It's really not that uncommon," says Sharpless, who is also the co-author of Sleep Paralysis: Historical, Psychological, and Medical Perspectives.Īfter experiencing the condition, some gravitate towards supernatural or even paranormal explanations. That figure is much higher among university students (28%) and psychiatric patients (32%). Sharpless found that sleep paralysis was more common than previously thought, with almost 8% of adults claiming to have experienced it at one point. Collectively they included more than 36,000 volunteers. It looked at data from 35 studies spanning five decades. Studies were sporadic, with little consistency between methods.īut in 2011, clinical psychologist Brian Sharpless, currently a visiting associate professor at St Mary's College of Maryland, conducted the most comprehensive review to date of the condition's prevalence while he was at Pennsylvania State University. Until recently, there was little agreement about how many people experience sleep paralysis. The forgotten medieval habit of 'two sleeps'.They hope to paint a more robust picture of the causes and effects – and find out what the condition tells us about the broader mysteries of the human brain. Jalal is one of a handful sleep scientists now investing serious time and energy into researching the condition.
STRIKE WITCHES EPISODES TRIAL
"It's been an ignored phenomenon … but over the last 10 years there's been a growing interest," says Baland Jalal, a sleep researcher at Harvard University who in 2020 completed what may have been the first clinical trial into different ways of treating sleep paralysis. But until recently it has been little researched. There are several colourful descriptions of the episodes through literary history, and Mary Shelley was apparently inspired to write a scene in Frankenstein by a painting depicting an episode of sleep paralysis. Scientists think sleep paralysis has probably existed for as long as humans have slept. Researchers think these hallucinations may have fuelled belief in witches in Early Modern Europe, and could even explain some modern claims of alien abductions. Some see angels and later believe they have had a religious experience. They see parts of their own bodies floating in the air, or cloned copies of themselves standing beside their bed. Others hallucinate demons, ghosts, aliens, threatening intruders, even dead relatives. And the scariest thing was I couldn't scream. "I saw this gremlin-looking figure hiding behind my curtain. One 24-year-old sufferer I spoke to, who asked to be only identified by her first name, Victoria, remembers it happening one night when she was 18. And for some, it comes with terrifying hallucinations.
Eventually it was little more than an inconvenience.īut sleep paralysis can be far more life-affecting. The more it happened, the less frightening it became. After that initial scary incident, it became a frequent occurrence, with an episode every two or three nights. It's a surprisingly common night-time condition in which part of your brain wakes up while your body remains temporarily paralysed. Later, I found a name for what had happened to me: sleep paralysis. Finally, after about 15 seconds, the paralysis lifted. My bedroom felt hot and restrictive, like the walls were closing in and I felt panicked. I woke up and tried to turn over in bed, but my body wouldn't let me – I was unable to move, paralysed down to my toes.Īlthough my brain was conscious, my muscles were still asleep. It was the early hours of the morning, still some hours before I had to get out of bed for school.
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