Is it just me?
Or anyone can relate?
Sleep paralysis happens to me 2x a week or more and I’m just used to it by now. Like it’s some kind of an unwanted friend visiting me without a word. It depends on the state of my mind before catching my sleep. It doesn’t matter if I’m sleeping at night or simply taking a nap at daytime. The first time I experienced it was back in high school. I’ve been reading and watching too much horror stuff that I literally thought I was being haunted by ghosts. I got scared and traumatized. As I grew up, whenever stress or overthinking imprisoned me, it happened again. And again. Until now. It’s that weird and scary feeling when you can see everything around but you can’t move or speak. Yup. I’m not delusional. So based on experience, I fall asleep then eventually be trapped in a dream. Except it’s a bad dream. Usually, I’m being attacked by someone, seeing unfamiliar faces and places or just falling into deep, black emptiness. Basically, I would try to instinctively protect my body or run only to realize I can’t move at all. From there, panic attacks me. I can literally feel my breath leaving me the more I struggle to wake my body up. So I gasp for air and try to shout for help but no words come out too.
It’s so weird because I know I’m asleep but I could feel my eyes wide open and witnessing the scary things with my own eyes. Then as soon as I realized it’s just sleep paralysis, my whole view transitioned back to my room and I could see the ceiling and everywhere but my body is still asleep. Very weird.
But the scariest thing is when I realized I have two bodies in the room. One that is fully awake and moving. One that is immobile and asleep. I’m not crazy. It’s true.
So the “awake body” will now do her best to let us escape the sleep paralysis. Based on suggestions, I need to move my toes to wake my “asleep body” up. The first time I tried it, I could literally feel my feet moving and toes bending on my “awake body” but my “asleep body” is not affected at all. So I knew this trick doesn’t work for me.
Try not to cringe and be weirded out by me when I tell you this. So as I get older, I’ve experimented on a lot of ways to wake my body up. And up to this day these TWO TRICKS work FOR ME.
First, I take advanatage of my “awake body”, put my two hands on my face and use my fingers to force and open my closed eyes. Believe me when I say this, I can literally feel my fingers on my lids and my eyes opening from the force. Like what happened when I bended my toes! And just to make it more effective, I keep my hold on the lids longer because once I stop, it just closes automatically again.
So while I’m holding to it, I will patiently wait for the “go signal” from my mind that will trigger my “asleep body”. Then I wake up gasping for air as I open my real eyes, feeling surprisingly tired from all the struggle. Why do I feel exhausted? Why? That’s still one of the questions I want reasonable answers.
Secondly, I pinch my skin so hard or sometimes slap my arms to use the pain and trigger my “asleep body”. It’s effective but I realized as soon as I wake up that I’m more tired than by doing the first trick. So I stick to that one.
But then, when sleep paralysis is being a bitch, I think it makes fun of me. And that scares me to death. Sometimes, as I’m holding my lids open, I feel the “go signal” and let go finally thinking I’m saved yet again. But guess what? Instead of me gasping and waking up for real, I just go back to my bad dream and the cycle starts all over again. When that happens, the panic attack is tripled. I’m aware how to get out from the loop but I can’t help but think, “What if I can’t escape and just bounce back to the same cycle until my breath gives up?”, because at this moment, my body seems to be pinned down and breathing is really painful. Like my heart is being punched everytime I gasp for air.
So I will try and struggle to wake my “asleep body” up again until it works.
Here are tricks I learned from this casual visit of sleep paralysis:
(This is my personal experience. I don’t know how others personally handle sleep paralysis but I just want to share the tricks that work for me. Goodnight)
🇵🇭Namae
