I had insane sleep paralysis and dreams within dreams during the episode last night.
Even dreamt about banging bumble in a bathtub, which is odd because I'm not infatuated with her in the least. I think she's cute and all, but it ends there. I just recently started taking hydroxyzine for anxiety and insomnia, but it's clearly making things worse. Except the bumble dream. That was actually pretty hot.
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"Yeah, but you say a lot of things...and how does that work? You're a bicycle."
Better than my dream last night. I was banging some prick who out-weighed 50 pounds.
It went on and on until I finally agreed with myself that I'm straight and it was very disgusting. Especially because it was on the sidewalk in front of a corner gas station.
Do you know that "sleep paralysis" lasts longer if you fight it or consider it abnormal? Which defeats the whole natural process of coming out of it.
Yeah. The dream within a dream part was when I tried to get my dad to help pull me up, so I could shake it off. He did that, then I was like wtf are you doing here, then semi-woke to more sleep paralysis.
Shit probably lasted about two hours.
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"Yeah, but you say a lot of things...and how does that work? You're a bicycle."
I always fight it. I've experienced sleep paralysis numerous times. I never see shadow people or anything like that. I just want to regain control and wake up. I've felt the presence (can't remember actually seeing him except for last night) of my still living father, though, each time trying to get his attention to help me, but that was only a few times. I've experienced it probably somewhere in the twenty-thirty range. Haven't talked to a doc about it, because the episodes are random and far between.
It's strange as fuck. That's for sure, but I have no illusions that it's anything more than a sleep disorder. The fact that I experienced it for the first time in months after starting a new medication is further proof. There's plenty of science behind it. Nothing paranormal going on unlike what some posters would have you believe.
Edited for clarity.
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"Yeah, but you say a lot of things...and how does that work? You're a bicycle."
Last edited by HampTheToker; 07-19-2012 at 07:30 PM.
It can be a little scary sometimes. I remember one night rocking my son when he fell asleep on my chest while he was an infant. I was dozing off too and I realized it was time to lay him down, but I couldn't move. I was scared he was going to roll off and fall to the floor.
I was staying with my parents at the time, and I thought I heard my dad get up to use the bathroom, so I tried to call to him but couldn't manage more than a mere whisper. I was trying to scream. I was so afraid he would fall and it would be my fault, so I kept fighting it and eventually regained control. That instance was the most terrifying, because there was a very real danger. That's really the only time I felt genuinely fearful. The other times it was more frustrating than fearful.
My experience is by no means typical. It can vary wildly for person to person. Some report an evil oppressive presence. I think sleep paralysis can account for many alien abduction stories. There's plenty of science to support that explanation.
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"Yeah, but you say a lot of things...and how does that work? You're a bicycle."
Why do you think it is worth it to fight it and how often do you win?
Every time, but it's a struggle. Sometimes are more difficult than others. I don't know why I feel the need to fight it or how exactly I'm able to regain control. I guess I just get so frustrated that it causes me to wake up. One of the characteristics of sleep paralysis is feeling the need to move and fight it. I imagine it's because paralysis is scary in and of itself for a healthy person that experiences it unexpectedly while sleeping. Then, there's the fear that it may never subside...that it's permanent.
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"Yeah, but you say a lot of things...and how does that work? You're a bicycle."
Every time, but it's a struggle. Sometimes are more difficult than others. I don't know why I feel the need to fight it or how exactly I'm able to regain control. I guess I just get so frustrated that it causes me to wake up. One of the characteristics of sleep paralysis is feeling the need to move and fight it. I imagine it's because paralysis is scary in and of itself for a healthy person that experiences it unexpectedly while sleeping. Then, there's the fear that it may never subside...that it's permanent.
So even knowing that not fighting it would allow you either wake up sooner or fall back into normal sleep, probably with no memory of the event, isn't worthwhile to you?
Would you prefer to never be paralyzed ever and rather be able to act out your every dream action with your body, even if it meant injury for yourself or others?
Quote:
The scientists' conclusion from their experiments: REM paralysis occurs when a powerful flood of two key chemicals -- GABA and glycine -- hits the nerves and switches them off during REM. This prevents the muscles they control from contracting. Both chemicals are needed: Paralysis doesn’t set in if you just block GABA action or you just block glycine action.
Lol, there isn't anything whacked out about it. Like Satyr said, sleep is fascinating. Given all our advancements in the understanding of neuroscience there is still that much more that we don't understand about mental processes such as sleep and dreaming.
Why do we dream? What purpose does it serve? What causes sleep disorders such as sleep paralysis and sleep walking? What causes lucid dreaming and why are only a small group of people capable of doing so?
Interesting stuff. I'm looking forward to seeing just how much we will learn about it in my lifetime.
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"Yeah, but you say a lot of things...and how does that work? You're a bicycle."
So even knowing that not fighting it would allow you either wake up sooner or fall back into normal sleep, probably with no memory of the event, isn't worthwhile to you?
Would you prefer to never be paralyzed ever and rather be able to act out your every dream action with your body, even if it meant injury for yourself or others?
I didn't say I never give up and just let it be. Fighting it is always my first response, but most of the time I'm not lucid enough to respond any other way.
I'd rather not be a sleep walker. That shit seems scarier to me. The scene from Step Brothers with the pillows in the oven comes to mind. Yeah, I'll pass.
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"Yeah, but you say a lot of things...and how does that work? You're a bicycle."
Lol, there isn't anything whacked out about it. Like Satyr said, sleep is fascinating. Given all our advancements in the understanding of neuroscience there is still that much more that we don't understand about mental processes such as sleep and dreaming.
Why do we dream? What purpose does it serve? What causes sleep disorders such as sleep paralysis and sleep walking? What causes lucid dreaming and why are only a small group of people capable of doing so?
Interesting stuff. I'm looking forward to seeing just how much we will learn about it in my lifetime.
Yeah I know. One time I saw a date in a dream, I looked it up and there was a planetary alignment on that day.
Another time a long tome ago, I had a dream where I foresaw the future.
Thank you, thank you very much. I find it depreciating to be called "manly" in the year 2012, because you know darned well that it's the neurotic spinster aunt who wears the pants in the family nowadays. Bitch.
I once woke up during a nightmare. In the nightmare I had been knocked on my back and something (I can't remember what now) was attacking me from my left side. In my dream I raised my fist from my chest to be perpendicular to the floor. Basically backhanding the thing, just with my fist. I only woke up because I had actually done this in my sleep and subsequently dented the wall beside my bed.
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You will change. You will transform. You will learn. You will disagree.
You will enjoy it.
RIP &T
I had sleep paralysis twice, but I only remember one of them.
The spoiler is the dream right before.
I had this weird ass fucking dream right before that felt completely real, and was almost like a waking dream (you know where it feels like you wake up in real life but you're still dreaming) except everything in my friends house where I was sleeping was rearranged including the rooms. I looked into the living room from the dining room and saw the room I was really in, so when I thought about what might be where the bedroom should be this blackness like a cloud started spreading from that room, which is down a hallway. Anyways, everytime I thought that, the blackness was spreading closer and closer and it felt like something invisible was squeezing my head super hard. I broke away from the thought a few times, and everything disappeared when I did, but as soon as I thought about it again it happened faster than the last time.
Eventually it(a black cloud shadow presence for those of you that didn't read the dream part.) finally reached me and I woke up. Normally i would have jolted up and been breathing really heavy and sweating, but this time I was stuck. I was thinking to myself "wtf is going on?" and then I realized..the shadow stuff was coming in through the door towards me and the pressure inside my head felt like it was going to explode. Once again as soon as it reached me I could move and it disappeared. Felt insane. I want it to happen again.
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Contradictions are constantly causing conflict within my consciousness. If I could just be contemplative and clever, I would be capable of condemning my cruel creations of mind, and commence circulating creative concepts to the cosmos.
It's a good thing, or else we'd all be rummaging around the house/yard while we slept.
Nah man, I once had a dream John Lennon was teaching me how to play guitar, and another one where a guy in a white suit walked up to me, put his hand on my shoulder and said "make drugs, make lots of drugs".
And what about lucid dreaming?
I've had one where I woke up in the dream and picked myself up with a cushion of air and floated down the street stretched out as if on a couch while listening to reggae dub and watching the sun rise.
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Everything is acceptable, as long as house prices don't crash.
I don't lucid dream much/feel the paralysis and work with it, as it mostly happens when I lay on my back. I usually can't do that because I'm liable to wake myself up with snoring 8x in a row which is totally annoying.
I used to go into sleep and feel my mind disconnect from my body and go right into lucid flying dreams. Though when I half awoke and just relaxed with it lucid dreams or deep sleep came.
Fighting it pumps too much adrenaline for sleeping well.
I don't lucid dream much/feel the paralysis and work with it, as it mostly happens when I lay on my back. I usually can't do that because I'm liable to wake myself up with snoring 8x in a row which is totally annoying.
I used to go into sleep and feel my mind disconnect from my body and go right into lucid flying dreams. Though when I half awoke and just relaxed with it lucid dreams or deep sleep came.
Fighting it pumps too much adrenaline for sleeping well.
You're not a fighter so don't ever imply that you fight anything or I'll cut your fuckin head off. Understand?
The only time I've ever experienced a lucid dream was in high school; the day we were assigned to record our dream(s) upon waking for psychology class. I had done research on sleep and lucid dreaming long before I even enrolled into high school, but for some odd reason (that I've since failed to reproduce) that assignment triggered my first and only lucid dream.
I dreamt that I was being chased by alien security guards in a bank that was under construction. I came to a combination locked grate and was trapped. I remember fumbling with the lock and, at that moment, the intense focus on my hands became a realization that nothing was logical about the situation. It really was like waking up within a dream. I jumped to test my reality and never came down. It didn't last long, because I got too excited and woke myself up. It was an awesome experience.
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"Yeah, but you say a lot of things...and how does that work? You're a bicycle."
Russian researchers in the late 1940s kept five people awake for fifteen days using an experimental gas based stimulant. They were kept in a sealed environment to carefully monitor their oxygen intake so the gas didn't kill them, since it was toxic in high concentrations. This was before closed circuit cameras so they had only microphones and 5 inch thick glass porthole sized windows into the chamber to monitor them. The chamber was stocked with books, cots to sleep on but no bedding, running water and toilet, and enough dried food to last all five for over a month.
The test subjects were political prisoners deemed enemies of the state during World War II.
Everything was fine for the first five days; the subjects hardly complained having been promised (falsely) that they would be freed if they submitted to the test and did not sleep for 30 days. Their conversations and activities were monitored and it was noted that they continued to talk about increasingly traumatic incidents in their past, and the general tone of their conversations took on a darker aspect after the 4 day mark.
After five days they started to complain about the circumstances and events that lead them to where they were and started to demonstrate severe paranoia. They stopped talking to each other and began alternately whispering to the microphones and one way mirrored portholes. Oddly they all seemed to think they could win the trust of the experimenters by turning over their comrades, the other subjects in captivity with them. At first the researchers suspected this was an effect of the gas itself...
After nine days the first of them started screaming. He ran the length of the chamber repeatedly yelling at the top of his lungs for 3 hours straight, he continued attempting to scream but was only able to produce occasional squeaks. The researchers postulated that he had physically torn his vocal cords. The most surprising thing about this behavior is how the other captives reacted to it... or rather didn't react to it. They continued whispering to the microphones until the second of the captives started to scream. The 2 non-screaming captives took the books apart, smeared page after page with their own feces and pasted them calmly over the glass portholes. The screaming promptly stopped.
So did the whispering to the microphones.
After 3 more days passed. The researchers checked the microphones hourly to make sure they were working, since they thought it impossible that no sound could be coming with 5 people inside. The oxygen consumption in the chamber indicated that all 5 must still be alive. In fact it was the amount of oxygen 5 people would consume at a very heavy level of strenuous exercise. On the morning of the 14th day the researchers did something they said they would not do to get a reaction from the captives, they used the intercom inside the chamber, hoping to provoke any response from the captives they were afraid were either dead or vegetables.
They announced: "We are opening the chamber to test the microphones step away from the door and lie flat on the floor or you will be shot. Compliance will earn one of you your immediate freedom."
To their surprise they heard a single phrase in a calm voice response: "We no longer want to be freed."
Debate broke out among the researchers and the military forces funding the research. Unable to provoke any more response using the intercom it was finally decided to open the chamber at midnight on the fifteenth day.
The chamber was flushed of the stimulant gas and filled with fresh air and immediately voices from the microphones began to object. 3 different voices began begging, as if pleading for the life of loved ones to turn the gas back on. The chamber was opened and soldiers sent in to retrieve the test subjects. They began to scream louder than ever, and so did the soldiers when they saw what was inside. Four of the five subjects were still alive, although no one could rightly call the state that any of them in 'life.'
The food rations past day 5 had not been so much as touched. There were chunks of meat from the dead test subject's thighs and chest stuffed into the drain in the center of the chamber, blocking the drain and allowing 4 inches of water to accumulate on the floor. Precisely how much of the water on the floor was actually blood was never determined. All four 'surviving' test subjects also had large portions of muscle and skin torn away from their bodies. The destruction of flesh and exposed bone on their finger tips indicated that the wounds were inflicted by hand, not with teeth as the researchers initially thought. Closer examination of the position and angles of the wounds indicated that most if not all of them were self-inflicted.
The abdominal organs below the ribcage of all four test subjects had been removed. While the heart, lungs and diaphragm remained in place, the skin and most of the muscles attached to the ribs had been ripped off, exposing the lungs through the ribcage. All the blood vessels and organs remained intact, they had just been taken out and laid on the floor, fanning out around the eviscerated but still living bodies of the subjects. The digestive tract of all four could be seen to be working, digesting food. It quickly became apparent that what they were digesting was their own flesh that they had ripped off and eaten over the course of days.
Most of the soldiers were Russian special operatives at the facility, but still many refused to return to the chamber to remove the test subjects. They continued to scream to be left in the chamber and alternately begged and demanded that the gas be turned back on, lest they fall asleep...
To everyone's surprise the test subjects put up a fierce fight in the process of being removed from the chamber. One of the Russian soldiers died from having his throat ripped out, another was gravely injured by having his testicles ripped off and an artery in his leg severed by one of the subject's teeth. Another 5 of the soldiers lost their lives if you count ones that committed suicide in the weeks following the incident.
In the struggle one of the four living subjects had his spleen ruptured and he bled out almost immediately. The medical researchers attempted to sedate him but this proved impossible. He was injected with more than ten times the human dose of a morphine derivative and still fought like a cornered animal, breaking the ribs and arm of one doctor. When heart was seen to beat for a full two minutes after he had bled out to the point there was more air in his vascular system than blood. Even after it stopped he continued to scream and flail for another 3 minutes, struggling to attack anyone in reach and just repeating the word "MORE" over and over, weaker and weaker, until he finally fell silent.
The surviving three test subjects were heavily restrained and moved to a medical facility, the two with intact vocal cords continuously begging for the gas demanding to be kept awake...
The most injured of the three was taken to the only surgical operating room that the facility had. In the process of preparing the subject to have his organs placed back within his body it was found that he was effectively immune to the sedative they had given him to prepare him for the surgery. He fought furiously against his restraints when the anesthetic gas was brought out to put him under. He managed to tear most of the way through a 4 inch wide leather strap on one wrist, even through the weight of a 200 pound soldier holding that wrist as well. It took only a little more anesthetic than normal to put him under, and the instant his eyelids fluttered and closed, his heart stopped. In the autopsy of the test subject that died on the operating table it was found that his blood had triple the normal level of oxygen. His muscles that were still attached to his skeleton were badly torn and he had broken 9 bones in his struggle to not be subdued. Most of them were from the force his own muscles had exerted on them.
The second survivor had been the first of the group of five to start screaming. His vocal cords destroyed he was unable to beg or object to surgery, and he only reacted by shaking his head violently in disapproval when the anesthetic gas was brought near him. He shook his head yes when someone suggested, reluctantly, they try the surgery without anesthetic, and did not react for the entire 6 hour procedure of replacing his abdominal organs and attempting to cover them with what remained of his skin. The surgeon presiding stated repeatedly that it should be medically possible for the patient to still be alive. One terrified nurse assisting the surgery stated that she had seen the patients mouth curl into a smile several times, whenever his eyes met hers.
When the surgery ended the subject looked at the surgeon and began to wheeze loudly, attempting to talk while struggling. Assuming this must be something of drastic importance the surgeon had a pen and pad fetched so the patient could write his message. It was simple. "Keep cutting."
The other two test subjects were given the same surgery, both without anesthetic as well. Although they had to be injected with a paralytic for the duration of the operation. The surgeon found it impossible to perform the operation while the patients laughed continuously. Once paralyzed the subjects could only follow the attending researchers with their eyes. The paralytic cleared their system in an abnormally short period of time and they were soon trying to escape their bonds. The moment they could speak they were again asking for the stimulant gas. The researchers tried asking why they had injured themselves, why they had ripped out their own guts and why they wanted to be given the gas again.
Only one response was given: "I must remain awake."
All three subject's restraints were reinforced and they were placed back into the chamber awaiting determination as to what should be done with them. The researchers, facing the wrath of their military 'benefactors' for having failed the stated goals of their project considered euthanizing the surviving subjects. The commanding officer, an ex-KGB instead saw potential, and wanted to see what would happen if they were put back on the gas. The researchers strongly objected, but were overruled.
In preparation for being sealed in the chamber again the subjects were connected to an EEG monitor and had their restraints padded for long term confinement. To everyone's surprise all three stopped struggling the moment it was let slip that they were going back on the gas. It was obvious that at this point all three were putting up a great struggle to stay awake. One of subjects that could speak was humming loudly and continuously; the mute subject was straining his legs against the leather bonds with all his might, first left, then right, then left again for something to focus on. The remaining subject was holding his head off his pillow and blinking rapidly. Having been the first to be wired for EEG most of the researchers were monitoring his brain waves in surprise. They were normal most of the time but sometimes flat lined inexplicably. It looked as if he were repeatedly suffering brain death, before returning to normal. As they focused on paper scrolling out of the brainwave monitor only one nurse saw his eyes slip shut at the same moment his head hit the pillow. His brainwaves immediately changed to that of deep sleep, then flatlined for the last time as his heart simultaneously stopped.
The only remaining subject that could speak started screaming to be sealed in now. His brainwaves showed the same flatlines as one who had just died from falling asleep. The commander gave the order to seal the chamber with both subjects inside, as well as 3 researchers. One of the named three immediately drew his gun and shot the commander point blank between the eyes, then turned the gun on the mute subject and blew his brains out as well.
He pointed his gun at the remaining subject, still restrained to a bed as the remaining members of the medical and research team fled the room. "I won't be locked in here with these things! Not with you!" he screamed at the man strapped to the table. "WHAT ARE YOU?" he demanded. "I must know!"
The subject smiled.
"Have you forgotten so easily?" The subject asked. "We are you. We are the madness that lurks within you all, begging to be free at every moment in your deepest animal mind. We are what you hide from in your beds every night. We are what you sedate into silence and paralysis when you go to the nocturnal haven where we cannot tread."
The researcher paused. Then aimed at the subject's heart and fired. The EEG flatlined as the subject weakly choked out, "So... nearly... free..."
Every night you're paralyzed while you dream!
