Imagine this:

You wake up and you can open your eyes just enough to see your surroundings, but not all the way. You can hear everything around you. But you go to pull the covers off and you can’t move. You can’t move at all, not even the slightest bit. You can’t even lift a finger. You try to yell for help, but you can’t even open your mouth. You can’t even moan. And you start to panic. You might be stuck here forever. You can hear people in the other room but you can’t even yell for help. Breaths become short and you are struggling to even breathe at this point and you wonder if you will lose control of this too. This goes on for several minutes which feels like forever. Then finally, with what feels like all of the effort you could possibly have you manage to kick a foot, and slowly wake up the rest of your body.

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This morning was probably the 6th or 7th time my mind has woken up before my body. It is a really scary feeling. So I finally looked it up to see if this was common, or normal. And it does in fact exist, and it has for century’s. Most people’s minds make a lot of other crazyiness happen, like seeing figures, or hearing their names called, or feeling levitated like an alien abduction. Luckily I don’t experience any of that. Just a panic as I start to struggle to breathe.

Sleep Paralysis is the exact opposite of sleep walking. Your body releases a chemical when you are in the REM stages of sleeping so your body doesn’t act it out. When your brain wakes up before your body during REM the chemical you’ve released still has your body paralyzed, and you can’t move. There’s nothing unhealthy or dangerous about it, but it is really scary. You can check out some weird vids on YouTube about people that see stuff during sleep paralysis and hear things, creepy! There’s cool things about it to though, like it’s connection to lucid dreaming and out of the body experiences.