henry fuseli ain't got nothing on me
Jul. 13th, 2015 08:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hathycolI can't remember if I've ever mentioned it, but I very occasionally get the world's most mundane sleep paralysis. For those not in the know, sleep paralysis is where you wake up but can't actually wake up - your brain is up and alert and your eyes are sometimes open but all of your muscles are still frozen, like they are when you're in deep sleep.
Anyway, my version of it is very irregular - once a month or so - and deeply boring. It's invariably when I have a long lie in, and there's no one in the house, and I 'wake up' but am just stuck there is a dull groundhog day style of events, where I 'see' myself waking up, walking around and moving, doing all the things I need to do that morning, but instead stuck in bed staring at the ceiling. I normally shout at myself to wake up for a bit. It's pretty lame. I sometimes read articles about it and go, well, hey, at least I get to experience this fascinating world in a dull way. It's considered to be one of the driving forces behind people who experience alien abduction in their sleep, or the older myths of the succubus and incubus. This is the quite famous picture of it, of a swooning woman with a demon on her chest (you can't move, you see, so a demon was thought to be pressing you down) with a menacing horse thing leering over her. I just hallucinate about making the bed in the broad daylight. They're not dreams, whatever you see - you are awake, they are hallucinations, they're quite strong.
UNTIL LAST NIGHT.
I woke up at some point in the middle of the night, and watched some sort of squat humanoid in a red cloak walk into the room and stand over Richie, just staring at him. It had no interest in me but I could tell it very clearly had malicious thoughts towards Richie. I couldn't see the face or any features other than this red cloak. I did, however, feel it was clearly malevolent. I then realised I couldn't move and started shrieking at myself WAKE UP WAKE UP WAKE UP, after an unknown about of time I did, the hallucination disappeared and I promptly started to hyperventilate, which woke Richie up. I launched myself at him and clung onto him like a distressed koala for much of the rest of the night. "Go back to sleep," I tried to tell myself but my body was pretty much "NOPE THAT WORKED OUT SUPER BADLY LAST TIME"
I'm still a little unnerved. Richie left the house before I got out of bed this morning (I fell back asleep when the sun came up) so I didn't have the chance to tell him about it, but when I was describing it to him this evening I felt genuinely chilled again. I would like to return to that dull one about cleaning the bedroom, thanks.
So as you can imagine I was in a super good mood at work today. Argh. Happy Monday.
Anyway, my version of it is very irregular - once a month or so - and deeply boring. It's invariably when I have a long lie in, and there's no one in the house, and I 'wake up' but am just stuck there is a dull groundhog day style of events, where I 'see' myself waking up, walking around and moving, doing all the things I need to do that morning, but instead stuck in bed staring at the ceiling. I normally shout at myself to wake up for a bit. It's pretty lame. I sometimes read articles about it and go, well, hey, at least I get to experience this fascinating world in a dull way. It's considered to be one of the driving forces behind people who experience alien abduction in their sleep, or the older myths of the succubus and incubus. This is the quite famous picture of it, of a swooning woman with a demon on her chest (you can't move, you see, so a demon was thought to be pressing you down) with a menacing horse thing leering over her. I just hallucinate about making the bed in the broad daylight. They're not dreams, whatever you see - you are awake, they are hallucinations, they're quite strong.
UNTIL LAST NIGHT.
I woke up at some point in the middle of the night, and watched some sort of squat humanoid in a red cloak walk into the room and stand over Richie, just staring at him. It had no interest in me but I could tell it very clearly had malicious thoughts towards Richie. I couldn't see the face or any features other than this red cloak. I did, however, feel it was clearly malevolent. I then realised I couldn't move and started shrieking at myself WAKE UP WAKE UP WAKE UP, after an unknown about of time I did, the hallucination disappeared and I promptly started to hyperventilate, which woke Richie up. I launched myself at him and clung onto him like a distressed koala for much of the rest of the night. "Go back to sleep," I tried to tell myself but my body was pretty much "NOPE THAT WORKED OUT SUPER BADLY LAST TIME"
I'm still a little unnerved. Richie left the house before I got out of bed this morning (I fell back asleep when the sun came up) so I didn't have the chance to tell him about it, but when I was describing it to him this evening I felt genuinely chilled again. I would like to return to that dull one about cleaning the bedroom, thanks.
So as you can imagine I was in a super good mood at work today. Argh. Happy Monday.
Date: 2015-07-13 09:26 pm (UTC)It's not just that; you can have physical & auditory hallucinations as well - I had an episode once while my sister was trying to wake me up (poor timing...) and I really thought she was leaning on my chest and I was struggling to breathe.
*hugs* Here's hoping you go back to your cleaning hallucinations!
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Date: 2015-07-15 01:12 pm (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2015-07-15 01:13 pm (UTC)