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Comment by Waterluvian | Hacker News Reader

I could see but I couldn’t move any muscles. It felt like five minutes but was probably less. It happened in an afternoon nap which is something I never did.

I was screaming internally for my girlfriend to notice me. I thought I was suddenly a quadriplegic or something and was panicking. Eventually my girlfriend noticed (she later said she noticed my deep, heavy breathing) and shook me and being shaken pulled me immediately out of it.

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This is almost exactly how it is for me as well. I've experienced this 50+ times, the feeling of complete or almost complete paralysis. I make a great effort to move and can feel my heart racing and heat in my face from panic and exertion. I can see my immediate surroundings; if the sun is up I can tell it's daytime. Although my eyes are open and aware, I'm not quite fully alert. Sometimes there are hints of hallucinations like the feeling that a shadowy figure is approaching my bed, and it's scary, but most often I'm just aware that I'm paralyzed. As a child I learned that if I can force a limb to move slowly, I will usually jerk myself fully awake. About 25% of the time I can calm myself down and fall back to sleep.

> I could see

How do you know that you weren't simply dreaming?

REM atonia, which is the paralysis that sleep paralysis comes from/uses, paralyzes the majority of your body. However, one organ it doesn’t paralyze is your eyes, hence people experiencing it generally open their eyes as they try to escape it. However, even with your eyes open, you can experience dream-like hallucinations overlayed ontop your view of reality, hence people thinking they see other entities in their bedrooms, etc. It’s possible that it was a dream, but it’s completely possible it wasn’t, so if a person claims they were awake, then in all likelyhood they were.

Well, there's an objective test: did they see something that actually happened out in the world during the episode that could be verified later?

When it happened the Monorail episode of the Simpsons was on. And it continued to be on when I was shaken out of it because my girlfriend suggested we just watch the rest to get my mind off it.

It was also just a very vivid experience. I felt completely awake. Just unable to do a thing.

Thanks.

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