Head asleep, body awake | Hacker News Reader

Head asleep, body awake

alvinalexander.com

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Not exactly the same, but I've gone through sleep paralysis 4 or 5 times in the last 10 years and it remains one of the most terrifying things I've experienced. It happened upon waking up from a short nap, and always while I was on my back (I usually sleep on my stomach or side at night).

The first time I went through it I had no idea what was going on and for the ~60 seconds that it lasted I went from thinking if this was really happening to whether I would be able to tell my family I loved them again. The subsequent 3 or 4 times I experienced it (after extensive research following the first episode) I repeated the thought that this was temporary and would go away soon forcefully until it in fact did after 60-90 seconds.

I know this is an evolutionary defense mechanism our brain/brain stem have developed over time, but wow is it awful if you ever go through it.

The first time it happened was very frightening for me. It felt like I was buried alive and was not able to move. it has gotten better, now after few seconds I realise it is happening and I just have to wait for some time.

My first time I spent a few minutes trying with all my might to move a muscle. Any muscle. I felt like I was trying to thrash around to wake myself up but there was just no way to get a signal to any part of my body.

When it happens to me, I try to roll my tongue. Once I do that it snaps me out of it.

For me its jaw or lip movement, that usually still works to wake me up fully.

Did you have the sense that someone was in the room? Reports of an ominous presence often go along with sleep paralysis.

No, I know it's common to hallucinate or something similar during an episode but I felt completely lucid. It was just as if the motor cortex was disconnected temporarily from the other parts of my body (which I believe aligns with the research that the brain stem "filters" or simply doesn't propagate the signals from the brain to the rest of the body).

I've had paralysis twice. And both times I had the sense someone was in the room. The presence felt way more than ominous though, it felt TERRIFYING.

I've had a whole range of hallucinations from it, visual, physical and auditory, eventually I tended to get the paralysis part less and less but still have the hallucinations.

Things like the feeling of someone on your back grasping you and talking into your ear while trying to fall asleep. Sitting up awake in the morning and seeing fully formed objects floating in the room like a floating filing cabinet, fully formed person in the room not a "Shadowperson". Auditory ones usually happen as you're falling asleep and its all voices you know sorta talking gibberish sentences.

Around the same period of time it started I also began having lucid dreams too, generally always had a bit of trouble sleeping.

Ah crap, I only had it once and that Shadowperson was too close to my ear, whispering gibberish. I felt warmth of its breath, I think it was literally the fear which woke me up..

I’ve experienced sleep paralysis so many times that I’ve almost gotten used to it. Usually it happens when I have been staying awake for too long before going to sleep, or if I have been getting too few hours of sleep many days in a row.

Several times it has felt like someone was present. One of the first time I can remember the feeling of someone or something being present was maybe a decade ago or two or something. It felt like a dark shadow person standing in the corner of my room, by the door just looking at me while I was unable to move. Very creepy feeling.

Recently, I thought someone was sitting on top of me and pushing me very hard down into my bed. And I was like wtf, why is someone trying to murder me and I was very scared. And then I realized that lol it’s just sleep paralysis yet again. Still felt shaken for a while afterwards.

Sleep paralysis sucks, so I try to avoid it. Sometimes I get into a bad rhythm though and then it is increasingly probable that it will happen.

When I got it when I was younger, I used to see Ghosts. Terrifying. When I learned what sleep paralysis is, funny enough, the hallucinations changed. Now they are much more realistic things like someone in the room who really could be, more auditory hallucinations, etc. I was getting it a few times a week for a while, now ~1-2x a month. If it wasn't also associated with difficulty breathing (I think the root cause) I think I could enjoy it now, its a bit like a lucid dream.

I too sometimes experience sleep paralysis. The first time it is indeed terrifying -- in fact I thought I was dead, and was surprised to still be conscious.

But over time I learned to kind of enjoy it. It's a funny situation where you're totally aware and yet can't control anything in your body. It's like being a pure spirit!

I can now then stay in that state for some time, and then choose to either fall back asleep, or wake up entirely. But waking up demands a huge force of will, like "pushing" consciousness out of your mind and into your body. Usually I simply let go.

Do you not get the feeling of something being wrong? I've only just had this start happening in the last few months and twice now I've known there was someone just outside our door and in the house, and I need so badly to reach my wife to wake her up, but I can't move my hand.

In my experience it's horrible.

That's pretty much exactly my experience. "Waking up", feeling there's a stranger in the house (or an evil spirit/presence), and not being able to do anything about it, except panic with my eyes closed (can't open them), until somehow I fall back asleep. Then I always wonder whether it was a dream or not.

I get it every couple years and always have but I think it’s fun too. I even get the dark figure standing at the foot of my bed thing as well. It’s sort of like a being on a roller coaster. It’s a little scary at first but you can’t get off so might as well enjoy the ride.

For me, going to sleep can only be accomplished by holding my body as still as possible, for as long as possible. It happens over a period of an hour or more.

When I’m conscious of what is happening, I notice that I no longer have a physical sense of where my leg is. Or maybe it’s my arm. Or maybe just part of an extremity. It’s not tingling, but there is no conscious connection between that part of my body and my brain.

I can wiggle my fingers or toes or whatever, and then I will immediately be able to sense that it is still connected and where it is, but then I can stop wiggling my fingers or toes, and let that connection drop back away quickly.

I’m forcing the conditions where my body slowly paralyzes itself to sleep, and stops stimulating my brain, so that the brain can finally go to sleep.

Waking up from a deep sleep, I have to go through the reverse process. I cannot wake up quickly and easily. If it has to be quick (like I’m late for something), then it has to be pretty violent. If I want it to be easy, then it takes at least a half hour of slowly waking up different body parts until I can finally be awake enough to sit up in bed.

And if I have to wake up too quickly, it’s easier for me to lose my balance if I have to physically move quickly — like picking up a second cat that has managed to snuck into the bedroom, when I already have one cat in the other hand. The result is that I fall to the floor, and hopefully don’t squish either cat. Then I can lay there for a couple of minutes, get my bearings, figure out if I’m actually injured or just feeling minor pain from bruising, and then get back up and get on with the rest of the morning.

Our cats are really good at snucking into the bedroom when they’re not supposed to be there, but so far the falling part has only happened once.

So, where most fear sleep paralysis, I for one welcome it. It’s the only way I can regularly get to sleep at all.

Something similar happened to me a couple of times. Now I already get used to it but the first experience was quite terrifying. I woke up in the middle of the night from a lack of air and just felt that there was someone outside. It didn't move, it made no sound, it did nothing. It just was there - a black creature behind the door watching my weak attempts to break free and begin breath. And this feeling of helplessness was perhaps the worst.

I’ve had this too, and only when on my back. I had a pounding sensation in my head (heart beat), an ominous presence, and the feeling that I’d die if I didn’t force myself awake. I’m convinced this is related to sleep apnea. I try to avoid sleeping on my back now.

Just mentioned this too. Do you feel like you're not getting enough air essentially?

Yes, it feels like I’ve stopped breathing for a minute or longer (which might actually be the case). On a few occasions I hear screaming, which I believe is my brain trying to wake me up due to low oxygen.

Whenever I experience sleep paralysis and want to wake up, I start wiggling my toes. Somehow this triggers my body to wake up. YMMV

Can confirm, I’ve been hit with it a few times when I messed up my sleep schedule bad enough. The first time I tried to just chill until it passed, and that was the longest 3 minutes of semiconscious ever.

Since then I’ve had decent luck forcing myself awake by using what little control I have to mess with my own breathing until I “wake up” but the whole process sucks, and usually makes me feel like I’m dying.

I either go back to sleep (relatively easy because I'm still sleepy) or struggle until I wake (harder because struggling makes you panic more).

Once I managed to wiggle my pinky against my wife and she realized what was happening and woke me up fully.

I used to get sleep paralysis in my teens; it was extremely scary the first few times but when I understood what it was it just became annoying. My mind would wake up almost immediately but it did take significant mental effort to regain feelings.

In my early twenties I experimented with lucid dreaming for a bit; since then I never had sleep paralysis episodes but I do not know if it is connected; it is entirely possible that getting older awareness is just suppressed more while sleeping (apparently you dream less as you get older).

I had some of this around the same time I was experiencing periodic vertigo. In my case, the inability to wake automatically was tied to nutritional / metabolic issues plus a general lack of sleep. My point being, at least in my case it was the body's warning signals. Once I got those issues under control, I've not experienced further issues with sleep paralysis.

When I was in my late teens/early 20s it happened to me a few times. It felt very similar to what you described except my thoughts were not as clear. Each time I closed my eyes I would be back in a dream. Finally I figured out I could turn on my TV if my remote was close and the noise snapped me out of it. It would take me forever to move my hand to the remote at my side.

Yep! Have had it happen twice.

The first time I somehow recognized it for what it was and closed my eyes and just went back to sleep.

The second time, it 100% felt like someone crawled on top of me and was suffocating me with a pillow. It was dark, I couldn't move, absolutely terrifying experience overall.

Happens to me, on average, probably once per month. It tends to happen in spurts though— I might go 3 or 4 months without an episode but then once a week for a while. If it happens enough to quickly realize what's happening, you tend to be able to move past the feeling of imminent danger and focus on controlled breathing (I can always control my breath.) Then again, I've had a few jobs where I had to deal with physically threatening situations regularly, so maybe I've just worn that nerve ending smooth.

As background, sleep paralysis occurs to prevent body motions in the context of a dream: Having our legs churn while we're dreaming of running would be not so good.

In general, sleep paralysis can be 'cured' by wiggling an extremity. Trying to move the large muscles will almost never succeed, but wiggling toes, the nose, blinking an eye are all worth trying. Almost always, these small motions help trigger the body to realize it's no longer sleeping and should do the biochemistry to stop paralyzing the large muscles.

This doesn't work for me, at least not directly. However, I find that if I relax for a few moments and then make a full body effort to do a short-sharp shake of, well, everything, I can normally wake myself up. Trick then is to keep moving so I wake up fully and don't fall back into it :/

It's quite possible than I'm just twitching a finger or toe when I do that initial effort though :)

This is my trick too. I have to build up the mental energy and then absolutely lay into it. Like I'd be wildly flailing around if my body wasn't switched off. Then when I'm moving I have to try to stand, or I'm just going to get drawn back in. Most of the time I don't bother anymore and just allow myself to fall back asleep.

I suffer from sleep apnea as well and often when I wake up paralyzed I honestly feel like if I don't force myself to move that I am going to die from lack of getting enough air. It almost always feels like I'm barely breathing.

Interesting. I've never experienced sleep paralysis; my body tends to err in the other direction. I have woken myself up before because my muscles accidentally do still move while dreaming, most often because I will physically flinch when surprised by something.

It happens to me probably once a week or so. It is a good exercise in calming thoughts down and being rational about what is going on. I usually just focus on staying calm and trying to move one finger or one toe patiently until it does, and the second I can move one digit a bit my whole body snaps online. Sleep paralysis, being extremely stoned, and having my contacts fall out at inconvenient times (I am pretty blind) have all been great exercises in suppressing mounting panic haha.

I too had sleep paralysis, 3 times upon waking up and 2 while trying to fall asleep. Moreover 3 days ago I had my first hypnagogic auditory hallucination. Basically I have heard a guy talking something about two candidates for US presidency (even though I don't live in the USA and I am not an American) and then sound of shooting shotgun. At first I was scared that maybe I got schizophrenia, but after reading a bit I have found out that it is sort of like sleep paralysis, at least in too happens among people who experience sleep paralysis.

One possibility is maybe I am slowly developing narcolepsy, because both sleep paralysis and these hypnagogic hallucinations are symptoms of it. I sometimes feel sort of sleepy especially around 4 pm and I usually just take some coffeine. I don't know if I have cataplexy, certainly not the severe form, but I think that I get weakness in the knees under influence of strong emotions which according to internet is basically mild cataplexy. I know that my mother has this weakness too and she is always tired so there could be a genetic link.

As interesting trivia it seems like narcolepsy is an autoimmune illness that works by killing neurons producing hypocretin which is neuropeptide responsible for regulation of sleep and wakefulness, and for hunger management. There are only about 100k - 200k hypocretin producing neurons, while brain has orders of magnitude more neurons. That I find interesting, because it seems like this autoimmune process is very selective for these hypocretin producing neurons, cause so far it seems like people with narcolepsy don't have similar cognitive deficits as people with other autoimmune illnesses that kill neurons.

I used to get this, along with some other anxiety stuff. A low dose of prozac taken 2x per week totally eliminated it (anecdata i know, but i thought it was interesting).

Wear a sleep mask and you'll never get sleep paralysis again.

To add another sleep paralysis anecdote, I used to get it and it was always coupled with an extremely loud pulsating ringing kind of noise in my head which would get progressively louder and faster until the moment I woke up, when it would disappear. It only happened in the late morning or if I had a nap at an odd time. I asked several sleep doctors about it at the time and always got puzzled responses. I discovered that if I wiggled my toes, which took an enormous effort, I could pull out of it and wake up. It stopped happening several years ago on its own.

I'm reminded of the curiously named exploding head syndrome, described as a condition in which a person experiences unreal noises that are loud and of short duration when falling asleep or waking up.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploding_head_syndrome

Nah, that’s just my wife coughing again, at over 100db. I’ve measured it.

And yes, she does seem to do it right in my ear. My 32db NRR earplugs help bring that down to a tolerable level, but only when I’m wearing them. And I can’t wear them 24x7.

I get sleep paralysis all the time, and have experienced everything described in this thread. One thing for me though is that as the paralysis starts to wane, I get a feeling of euphoria that permeates my muscles and lasts for several minutes.

In Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!, Richard Feynman recounts a similar "drifting" of the location of the ego while in a sensory deprivation tank:

"I tried and after a while I got my ego to go down through my neck into the middle of my chest. When a drop of water came down and hit me on the shoulder, I felt it "up there," above where "I" was. Every time a drop came I was startled a little bit, and my ego would jump back up through the neck to the usual place."

https://pastebin.com/42YhjjYg

Thanks, a nice read.

There are commercial versions of these around in various places; we have one here in Portland, Oregon. I haven't tried it yet but it seems like a very interesting experience.

I used this state for lucid dreaming quite a bit. It’s actually the opposite: the brain is starting to dream but hasn’t forgotten where it is yet. So you can ‘get up’ slowly and walk around while your brain imagines the perceptive inputs. I can’t do this in any ‘normal life’ state, only when isolated in strange places (military deployments).

So weird -- when did we all decide to start saying "I was laying in bed" instead of "I was lying in bed"? I have noticed this shift over the past few years.

Laying has always been past tense "That day I lay in bed for hours" or transitive "I lay the books down". Chickens also could be laying in bed, if eggs are coming out of them. Lying has always been intransitive "I was lying in bed". But nowadays, "I was laying in bed" is almost all I see.

It's just the same thing as "would of", ie people making grammar errors.

"the usage, though non-standard, is ubiquitous, and in fact has been around for over seven hundred years. Robert Burchfield, in his third edition of Fowler, writes that in the 17th and 18th centuries the two words’ alternation was not considered a mistake, even in literary text, but that nowadays it’s either taken as ‘evidence of imperfect education’ or ‘accepted in regional speech as being a deep-rooted survival from an earlier period’."

https://www.macmillandictionaryblog.com/laying-down-the-lie-...

You should be putting punctuation inside the quote when it ends a sentence.

Single quotes, not double quotes, should be used in your comment since you are not completely and directly quoting your source.

You should not be capitalising the first letter of a quote when it occurs after the beginning of a sentence.

These are just some of the grammatical errors you've made in two paragraphs. I've probably made some too. It's pointless to discuss these things outside academic contexts as long as the text can still be understood.

> You should be putting punctuation inside the quote when it ends a sentence.

It is commonplace to put punctuation outside the quotation marks when the punctuation itself is not being quoted.

You're missing the point.

Those are typographic eccentricities, to be pedant :)

And they're not even that uncommon on the Internet and amongst tech people. (See the Jargon file[1], for example.)

But I get your point: pedantry is often needless, and sometimes even lacks proper justification (see taejo's comment). But it's difficult to stop seeing errors when you see them, so I would forgive the parent for being that Hacker News guy.

[1] http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/writing-style.html

No, it's English grammar. (EDIT: Actually it's not. See, there are mistakes everywhere. It's not typographic either though.)

There's nothing to forgive. My comment was instruction on being a better reader/listener.

Focus on the things people are saying and not nitpicking their delivery and you will absorb more information.

> Focus on the things people are saying and not nitpicking their delivery and you will absorb more information.

I agree. Form is not so important.

It's something poor students/learners do. You spend all your time looking for minor errors in instruction or text so you can 'win' while missing the actual lesson or overarching idea. I am definitely not innocent of this as a former high school dropout lol. Cheers.

That’s not grammar, it’s style and convention. And the convention is not the same across all english-speaking countries. Parent comment’s punctuation is “correct” by British standards, for example.

I've become the very thing I sought to destroy.

I was taught in elementary school (in the US) that punctuation inside the quotes is correct usage in the UK. It was good of them to note when we were so young that the rules we were being taught were not universal and that we shouldn't freak out if we encounter a text using different rules.

I gratefully accept the information of your post, but I don't think it manages to make the intended point. Notice how many times you used the word "should", which was never a consideration in my post.

We could talk about should. As a starting point, it would seem to me most useful to preserve meaningful distinctions which convey information, and otherwise make language as fluid and relaxed as possible. But I'm not expert.

I've always thought it was an American thing. I've never heard a UK/Irish person say "laying" for "lying"

I haven't noticed it in British English. My default reaction would be blame it on Americans screwing up the language again.

> I did some things in Alaska before where I used yoga techniques to very slowly fall asleep, and I was able to stay awake while my sense of hearing and sense of touch went away

I would love to be able to "sleep" while preserving consciousness. Willingly losing consciousness terrifies me. It's like death. You are physically unable to observe the moment you transition from consciousness to unconsciousness, because observing inplies consciousness. Sleeping is basically leaping into the void.

lookup WILD (wake induced lucid dream) it's basically the practice of remaining conscious while falling asleep - techniques for dipping your toes in the void instead of leaping in head first

I turn into a zombie when nearly asleep. You can help me stand up, order me to do things and I will obey with no memories of it happening. If you order me to go to another room (e.g. the bedroom, as my girlfriend does), I will be very confused next morning.

Confused that you woke up in the bedroom? Do you not normally sleep there?

Confused how I appeared there - even though I can deduce it now. It's a very strong feeling of missing information that does not go away even after she tells me.

You two might enjoy this short story:

https://www.guernicamag.com/gay_10_1_10/

The term zombie comes from Haiti and there might be a partly medical process involved. Here is a link I found with a quick search (that mentions at the end that there is some criticism of this theory):

https://sites.duke.edu/ginalisgh323/zombie-project/

But mostly I wanted to share that short story.

I have a weird experience sometimes when waking up. It's not sleep paralysis, at least I don't think so, it feels more like a deep meditation.

The only way to describe it is that I (my mind) is working at two different levels. At one I am dreaming or thinking of something and at another level I am observing the dreams of the first "I".

Really hard to explain. Does anyone else have this happen or know the phenomenon?

Lucid dream?

Yes, I've had this experience while awake through meditation.

I think I've had something similar a number of times, like daydreaming while another part of me is disengaged, although in my case not really observing in any active sense just half asleep in a different way :/.

I think this may be related to altered thalamus activity (less relaying) during sleep and meditation.

I have noticed that the senses detach when I'm sleeping with hands on my chest too. In our community, it's believed that demons possess you if you sleep with hands on chest. Probably its because of this kind of feeling. Weird, indeed.

For me it's vision and hearing that seems to go; I'm aware that I'm still awake, but my mind has drifted off elsewhere and isn't processing any visual / auditory things anymore. Mostly if I'm dozing off in front of the TV.

What community is that out of interest?

That's super interesting! I've been doing some meditations lately while lying in bed, and I have my hands on my chest, and it is only during these times, when I've fallen asleep while meditating, that I have noticed myself snoring. I'm going to pay more attention to that now.

I've had my body fall asleep while my mind was awake before, but not the opposite. It's a very odd sensation feeling your body snore of it's own accord, with your breathing rate slowing down, hearing sounds in the environment. This happened a couple of times while I was trying to learn how to move from the waking state into the dreaming state (WILD technique in lucid-dreaming parlance). I managed it once, but it was a lot of work for me (lots of others can do it much easier than I can).

Objectively you can only hear through your cochlea. You can sense vibrations through your skin but that is very different to hearing yourself snore. My guess is that the author's ears were in such a position that it appeared to his brain that the sound was coming from above their head. Combined with knowing that snoring comes from your mouth/nose and with the author's eyes closed his brain could be tricked into thinking it was "hearing from the body".

i hate feeling my own heartbeat or a situation when i realise that I'm actually breathing, Cause when that happens I'd attempt to maintain my breathing rate manually it's awful asf.

Sleep paralysis is quite useful for lucid dreaming, as once you're in that state, you can transition to a lucid dream easily.

It's fascinating to me how the author describes this as a wondrous and curious experience. I feel like that's something that many people, me included, would imagine in a nightmare. Being awake but not in control, cognizant of your own self and body. That's something straight out of philosophical horror stories.

I’m not sure what it’s called, but I once experienced being trapped in the dream. I knew I was dreaming and had full control over my actions, but I just could not wake up. I was very young then, and remember I resorted to jumping of a high fall. That woke me up, and I was happy it was only a dream.

1. Did you have any hesitations before the jump?

2. How do you know you have actually woken up?

Sounds like a lucid dream. I've had it a few times, last week I had one where I was really stressed about losing my backpack, and in my dream I said to myself "I don't want to be stressed about this, it's just a backpack, and I'm in a dream anyway", it was at that point where I realized I was dreaming so said to myself "so...if you don't want to be stressed about this, just wake up then", and upon waking, I was laughing at myself over how silly the experience was.

It's quite fun, if you've done it once before, maybe you want to try it again?

Mr. Robot vibe.

Mind awake, body asleep.

I wonder if this may have to do with the "second brain" that scientists claim exists in the gut: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/gut-second-brain/

Learning to astral project is worth the effort.

"astral projection" has no basis in objective reality

Fun to think about how reality would be different if it were though.

Imagine who would be rich and why because of it.

So what?

I'm curious about the 'objective reality' concept. Care to explain?

The onus of explaining is on the person claiming astral projection without any proof of basis in reality, not on the person being skeptical of those claims. It's called the burden of evidence.

I've done it, it's not that hard. There's plenty of books about how to do it. I'm not interested in arguing with internet idiots though, sorry.

astral projection is just oobe and "experience" implies subjectivity w/no claim of objectivity and no corresponding onus or burden or anything

I had a few "astral projection" experiences while experimenting with lucid dreaming in my early 20s; exactly when sleep paralysis kicks in, if you are able to maintain awareness, you can literally feel your "soul" ripping out from your body and being able to move away from it.

I'm 100% sure it is an hallucinatory experience, but it is an extremely vivid experience and I can see how you get the mysticism that surrounds it.

How do you define the difference between astral projection and lucid dreaming. Lucid dreaming has been proven in a laboratory setting.

They feel very different. You can exit lucid and get to astral. Just takes practice and some will.

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