The Horrors of Sleep Paralysis

[DonRocks]

This is a *great*, entertaining article about the nasty state of sleep paralysis. I've had sleep paralysis precisely once in my life (I had just taken a new prescribed drug, and one of the rare side effects was sleep paralysis). Fortunately, I didn't have any demons in the room with me, but I was absolutely, positively awake with full, coherent thought; yet, completely unable to move. Had I been dreaming, I have no doubt that whatever I was dreaming I would have also "seen," but couldn't have done anything about - thank goodness I wasn't.

"The Strange Case of the Phantom Pokemon" on bbc.com

I have had a couple interesting (not scary) instances of incorporating my dreams into my waking state - I remember in college, my alarm went off, and I propped myself up on my elbows, trying to wake up. I lay there for a minute, looking around, and all of a sudden, I saw this spider, as crystal-clear as anything I've ever seen before, walking down the side of my bed (note: at this moment, the periphery around the spider was blurred, so I'm pretty sure I'd started to fall back asleep, but I wasn't there quite yet). It startled me, and my eyes got as wide as saucers - interestingly, everything stayed the exact same, except things in my field of vision became extremely clear, and the spider simply ... vanished - it was actually pretty cool.

And I've been hypnotized, legitimately hypnotized, precisely once in my life. It, too, was an *amazing* experience. And from within the deepest recesses of my mind, I learned something which turned out to be absolutely true (in my opinion), and I never once before thought of this; in fact, I had always thought the exact opposite - so the professional hypnotist helped me to uncover a piece of information that has served me very well during the past thirty-or-so years (another interesting thing is that it took a couple of days for the process to unfold).