Something strange happened to me once. One early morning I found myself in bed awake but unable to move or speak trapped in the state I tried to scream but couldn't then I realized that a spirit like creature was on my bed strangling.
I mean this experience was bizarre, but it took me a long journey around the world to study this phenomenon and try to understand what is the science behind sleep paralysis.
Sleep paralysis is this transition like state between wakefulness and rapid eye movement sleep or rem sleep and during rem sleep you have vivid crisp lifelike dreams and to prevent you from acting out these dreams and hurting yourself your brain temporarily paralyzes the entire body now this is a smart thing because it prevents you from hurting yourself. Sometimes you wake up while you're still under the spell of rain paralysis leaving the stock in a sense wakefulness and the dream worlds collide. So these conflicting signals you know messages to your body to move and no feedback coming back from the body it creates confusion in your sense of body image gets all distorted not the way you bring deals with this confusion is by building your body image for you, so it says let me you know hallucinate what your body image it looks like and in a sense like autocorrects toward you know filling in the blank it will create your body image for you.
The result is bizarre bottoms to nations you can see your limbs rotate in the air or sink into the bed or to entire body may project out there in space you have an out-of-body experience. Now this body image distortion also impacts your ability to distinguish between self and other the sense that I am me, and you are you and as the Bay Area between self and other dissolves you mistake your projected body for separate entity with its own free will. In my research I found that cultural explanations can have a big impact on how people experience sleep paralysis throughout history there been stories of people seeing and sensing ghosts during sleep.
The different beliefs for this. Egypt people blame a gym evil genie of sorts in Italy people talk about a cantata co which is a giant cat or which attacking you and in Denmark people attribute it to things like stress those who have striking or supernatural beliefs about it tend to have a much more they also have longer paralysis and greater fear. One sleep paralysis is interpreted through the lens of fear it leads to more anxiety and unwanted nighttime awakenings and more sleep paralysis. This vicious cycle which I call the Panic summation model continues to feed on itself until see myself. Paralysis becomes chronic prolonged and potentially even traumatized.
So how do you help these people?
A psychological treatment calls meditation relaxation therapy applied directly during sleep paralysis. In a pilot study in Italy showed promising results 50 percent plus reductions the paralysis after using this therapy for only 8 weeks but of course need to do more research to be sure of its benefits. Now I still experience sleep paralysis now, and then I get to explore my own theories. Sometimes I try to imagine ghost just to see if I can create my own monsters. Like I'm usually unable to complete these experiments for, but instead I resort to meditation relaxation therapy just to calm myself down a scientist like myself are among a select group of people can say they're working while sleeping.
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