Sleep Paralysis

I don't think I've ever written about this before but its sort of interesting. I think it started in late high school. I would have dreams where I was staring at whatever I'd been looking at on the wall before I fell asleep. I felt like I couldn't breathe very well and I would try to wake myself up out of it. I would try sooo hard to move one of my limbs and would eventually get my arm to move and wake up. Sometimes the things I saw were warped and I saw a face instead, or someone laying next to me. One time I saw a face and when I woke up it was Boyfriend's hair. It was the shadows and textures making shapes. Eventually the fact that I could only see one thing and couldn't move around in the dream clued me into something a little terrifying. I wasn't asleep.

I realized that I would wake up, or, to say it better, my brain would wake up. I would wake up and see what was in front of me, but not be able to move, and since I was really actually still physically asleep, sometimes what I saw was warped. My body still thought I was asleep and that's why my breathing was shallow. I guess that's all well and good when you're actually asleep, but to me it felt like suffocation. When you fall asleep your brain kind of paralyzes your body to keep you from harming yourself, for example, by falling off your bed and such things. It was fucked up and I had to will myself for what seems like forever to move and kick myself out of sleep. Sometimes it would happen as soon as I fell asleep, almost like those dreams you can't get out of.

At some point I saw some sort of documentary on tv that described such a thing and called it "sleep paralysis". They showed artwork where there were little red demons sitting on women's chests, holding them down. That looked about right. It happened ALOT junior and senior years of college, and its mostly trickled off since then. Its scary because even when you know there is someone next to you, you can't ask them for help and from what I've seen on YouTube, nothing they can do seems to help anyways, at least not in severe cases. I watched a video where there was a woman making noises with her throat and her boyfriend, who was filming, explained that she was probably telling him to add something to the film but he didn't know what she was trying to say. Its only happened occasionally in the recent years, but I can tell you right now it fuckin sucks. It reminds me of when my sister was really little and she used to get night terrors. My parents couldn't try to wake her up because anything they did would just add to the night terror. I remember a specific one where she described being on the deck with my aunt and me and mom and no one could get a jar of bees to open. She tried and it opened and all the bees flew out into her face. I saw a documentary on tv of that too and people have to take drugs for it. They get up and walk around and end up hurting themselves because they're asleep walking around their house. And then there's sleepeaters and that's a whole nother thing. Sleep problems are just crazy shit because everything you experience is happening in an alternative world.