QUOTE(Justice_Angel @ Oct 27 2007, 03:00 AM)
So Last night/morning about 3:30 to 4:00 my time I woke up unable to move or breathe or speak this lasted about a couple minutes then I heard what I thought was someone in the hallway (being that I verified it today that everyone was asleep at such said time) I was sleeping in my daughters room(who frequentlly complains of night terrors and such)...
The experience you describe -- lying in bed, paralyzed, being unable to breathe, and fearing the presence of an intruder -- is what was originally was meant by the word 'nightmare': the word meant more than just a bad dream. Nowadays, as paxx notes, it's often called sleep paralysis. It has been regarded as both a natural phenomenon, and as a supernatural attack.
Traditionally:
This is regarded as a supernatural assault by a malign spirit or a projecting witch. Sometimes the inability to breathe is accompanied by a sensation of weight on the chest, as if the attacker is crushing the breath out of the sleeper, or throttling them. The spirit or intruder may or may not be visible, and people have given various descriptions of its form -- a dark shadowy figure, or an old woman known as the 'Old Hag'. 'Hagridden' originally refers to the stressed, sleep-deprived look of someone who is ridden often by the Old Hag.
The standard naturalistic explanation:
The body is largely paralyzed, by the action of inhibitory nerves, during REM (dreaming) sleep, in order to keep the sleeper from getting up and acting out the dream. It's possible to wake up, or to fall asleep, a bit out of the usual order -- if one has been dreaming, the mind may come back to consciousness and feel as if it's awake, without the dream-state being wholly dissipated, so that one is still paralyzed as in REM sleep, and still experiencing vivid (but imaginary) sensations. It is said that someone who half-wakes into such a state and realizes that they're paralyzed is likely to become frightened and experience an alarming waking dream as a result -- hence the panick-induced inability to breathe, and the fear of a malign presence. To shed the paralysis, try to move fingers or toes: as anyone who's watched a dreamer's fingers twitching might suppose, the extremities (and the eyes) are under the least inhibition, and this may help throw the state off.
The naturalistic explanation above may shed some light on the subject -- it may be very true that a dream state is involved -- but it impresses me as oversimplified. Obviously, it isn't a part of the normal workings of the nervous system to paralyze the muscles involved in breathing during dreams.
Some people experience this often, to the point of it disrupting their lives badly. For others it occurs only intermittently, or once. Still others never experience it at all. It happened once to one of my relatives; he said that he prayed, and then found that he could breathe again.
I have woken up so slowly I saw dream-images blended into waking vision as if they were real objects at my bedside, only to slowly disintegrate as I woke further, but there was nothing alarming in my experience: I've never encountered the original Nightmare.
More on on sleep paralysis:
http://watarts.uwaterloo.ca/~acheyne/S_P.htmlThe Terror That Comes in the Night: An Experience-Centered Study of Supernatural Assault Traditions
by David J. Hufford
http://www.amazon.com/Terror-Publications-.../dp/081221305X/Added: in case it isn't clear, I'm not taking a position on the nature of your experience, or what the nightmare experience is in general -- only pointing to more discussion and research on the subject.
This post has been edited by Polaris: Nov 9 2007, 07:42 PM
A Wtf Attack
Justice_Angel A Wtf Attack Oct 27 2007, 02:00 AM
Oct 27 2007, 02:00 AM
