Petrified

Last night, it happened again.

I woke up about 4 a.m., noticing both my cats noisily jumping off the bed and dashing elsewhere.  I lay there for a while, thinking various thoughts about various subjects.  Finally, I decided to get up, get a drink of water, and see what the cats were up to.  But I couldn't.

I felt entirely weighted down by my light electric blanket, as though I were covered by a pile of heavy quilts.  I could make only slight movements of my legs.  Try as I might, I couldn't swing my legs over to the side of the bed and stand up.

"Sleep paralysis."  I quickly realized exactly what was happening.  As I lay in bed helplessly, I even knew the term for it.  But, as is the case so often in life, understanding the problem didn't solve it.

As a kid, I often had the same experience, often accompanied by nightmarish sensations that someone -- a burglar, perhaps -- was in the room with me.   I was petrified, unable to defend myself.  Those youthful experiences are very common, according to Wikipedia.  Folklore in virtually every culture is full of stories of nightly terrors, a sleeper awaking paralyzed and in the presence of a ghost, a hag, a demon, a witch, a djinn.  Or, in modern American folklore, an alien intruder.  The intruder is often pictured as sitting on the sleeper's chest, or in some other manner preventing him from moving or escaping.

Fortunately, although I still occasionally experience sleep paralysis, it's now rarely accompanied by nightmares.  Even in my paralytic state, I understand the cause.  I'm more frustrated and irritated than frightened.

Sleep paralysis is believed to occur when a sleeper passes from a period of REM sleep -- during which he dreams and his body is prevented from moving so as to avoid acting out the dreams -- and a waking state.  Usually this transition is managed in an orderly fashion, but sometimes the REM paralysis continues for a time after the sleeper becomes conscious of his surroundings.

I usually try to fight my way out of my predicament by struggling to move my legs over the side of the bed and stand up.  Sometimes, after heroic efforts, I succeed; sometimes I instead drift back into sleep.  Last night, I seemed to struggle endlessly.  Finally, I felt I had succeeded.  I walked out into the hall looking for the cats, still worried that they were chasing around after mice or other tiny intruders downstairs.  But when I walked into the hall, I discovered both cats sleeping peacefully, side by side, like two young children, bundled up warmly in what appeared to be small sleeping bags.  I decided that all was well.

I awoke some time later.  I am able now to conclude, quite reasonably, that -- despite what I believed at the time -- I had definitely returned to sleep and to renewed dreams.

Whether scary, irritating, or merely a bit humorous, awaking while paralyzed is a peculiar and confusing experience -- regardless of how many times one's gone through the experience in the past.  I recently read an account of a boy who had, for unknown reasons, lay in a coma for ten years.  During most of that time, he was fully conscious of everything that was going on and being said about him.  But he could make only the tiniest movements with his muscles, movements too slight to be detected until he was finally examined closely by a trained professional.

The boy spent ten years in a state of frustration and despair.  I totally sympathize.  Five minutes of "sleep paralysis" is sufficient to give me a glimmering of what he went through.