Something that I’ve always been interested in is the concept of sleep paralysis. When you sleep, your brain relaxes your muscles, which is known as atonia. Sleep paralysis occurs when your body experiences atonia when you’re awake. During an episode, you are fully aware of your surroundings and can breathe normally, although you cannot move or speak — hence the term paralysis. This can last from a few seconds up to a few minutes. Episodes can end in three ways: on its own, if someone touches you, or if you force yourself out of it. There are many cases of hallucinations during sleep paralysis, and people often claim to have seen a figure/demon in the room with them. This is a common search result if you google the effects. I find it interesting how multiple people see the “same things” even if they had no prior connections to each other. The cause is still unclear, but researchers believe that a disturbance in your rapid eye movement (R.E.M) cycle leads to sleep paralysis.

 

The reason for my interest in this topic is because I have actually experienced this personally, at least four times. I must say I’ve never seen a demon in my room or anything. For the most part, I wake up, realize I can’t move, and spend a few moments trying to wiggle something. I’m not scared per se, but it isn’t a fun time. Only once have I felt fear. My dog sleeps in my parents’ room and every night we block off the staircase so he can’t go downstairs and chew things. During my episode, however, I swear I could hear the usually cute sounds of his footsteps coming up the stairs. Since I was awake and conscious, I knew for a fact that it couldn’t have been my dog, who was sleeping in the other room. But yeah, I shook myself awake and went back to sleep.

 

 

 

Artists who deal with sleep:

Lee Hadwin: can’t draw when he’s awake and is known as the sleepwalking artist