Sleep paralysis

The teaching

As sleep medicine, with the projectors' reading of the same moment teaches it.

Two switches out of step

In dream sleep the brain keeps the body still. While the most vivid dreams run, the muscles of the limbs and trunk are switched off, so that a dreamer who runs in a dream lies motionless in bed. The eyes can still move, and breathing goes on by itself. Normally this stillness and the dream begin and end together. In sleep paralysis they come apart: awareness returns while the stillness is still on, or arrives before awareness has gone.

The result is a person awake, able to look about the room and to breathe, but unable to move or speak, usually for some seconds and at most a few minutes. It can come on falling asleep or on waking, and it always ends by itself. Nothing in it harms the body. The inability to move is the dream's own stillness, not a failure of the heart or the breath.

What comes with it

Because the dreaming brain is still at work, its images can spill into the open eyes. The psychologist J. Allan Cheyne, who gathered a great many accounts, sorted them into three kinds. The first he called the intruder: a sense that someone is in the room, footsteps, whispers, a shadow by the door or at the bedside, usually with fear. The second he called the incubus: pressure on the chest, a feeling of being held down or smothered, difficulty breathing, sometimes pain. These two tend to come together.

The third kind he called unusual bodily experiences: floating, flying, falling, spinning, being pulled, and seeing oneself from outside. They are less often frightening, and some people find them pleasant, even blissful. This third kind is the one the projectors seek.

The figure in the room

The presence is the part people fear most, and it helps to know what it is. A mind that wakes to find the body unable to move goes on the alert, and the dream, still running, supplies something to be alert to: a figure, a weight, a voice. It is dream content seen with open eyes. It cannot touch, take or harm. The way to meet it is to name it for what it is, a dream image, and to let it go, without arguing with it or trying to make it out more clearly.

What the projectors make of it

The projectors read the same moment as a doorway. Muldoon called the stiffness that came before his phantom rose astral catalepsy, and Monroe felt his body go rigid while the vibrations ran. Their teaching is that when the stillness comes calmly, the person can rest in it and think of floating up or of rolling out, in Monroe's way. The house's rule is that this is for a calm moment only. If fear is present, the right thing is to end the episode, not to go further.

Ending an episode

There are two schools on what to do, and both are sound. The first, the common advice of sleep clinics, is to end it gently. Remember what it is: the body asleep, the mind awake, and it always passes. Breathe slowly, which stays under your control. Do not throw the whole body against the stillness; instead try to move one small part, a finger or a toe, or blink hard, and the rest of the body follows.

The second, taught by the neuroscientist Baland Jalal as meditation and relaxation therapy, is to stop trying to move and to ride the episode out. It has four steps. Reappraise what is happening, reminding yourself that it is harmless and will pass. Step back from the fear and watch it, as an onlooker would. Turn the attention inward and rest it on something calm and good, a loved memory or a word. And relax the muscles instead of straining them, letting the episode end on its own.

Afterwards

When it is over, sit up, put a light on for a moment, and let the body feel its own weight and warmth. Many people find it best not to go straight back into the same position. A note in the notebook, the hour and what was felt, is enough; read back later, such notes often show that episodes gather in short nights and tired weeks.

Making it rarer

Sleep paralysis comes most to people who sleep too little, keep irregular hours, sleep on their backs, or are under strain, and it often clusters in weeks of exams, after travel across time zones, and in shift work. The remedies are plain: enough sleep at regular hours, a gentler run up to bedtime, and, for those whose episodes come on the back, sleeping on the side. None of this needs any special practice.

When to see a doctor

An occasional episode needs nothing. When episodes come often, tell a doctor, and tell them too of any of the following: falling asleep suddenly and helplessly by day, a sudden weakness of the knees or face when laughing or startled, episodes that make bedtime something to dread, or anything unlike the pattern described here. These can point to a treatable sleep disorder such as narcolepsy, and a doctor can tell. For everyone else the teaching is the same as sleep medicine's: it is frightening, it is harmless, and it passes.