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Comment by globuous | Hacker News Reader

That's a crazy story, I could never imagine myself not sleeping for 72 hours!! When I mess up my sleeping schedule pretty bad (which happened a lot back in college), I usually do sleep paralysis when falling asleep (as opposed to when waking up). And I can do it 6 or 7 times in a row, it's a nightmare. Usually though, I realize what's going on (it's happened to me so. many. times.) after the second or third 'paralysis' and sleep on my stomach, which for some reason, allows me to fall asleep without the whole paralysis thing going on. You can actually turn sleep paralysis into a lucid dream if you 'control' it properly. I usually just wake up thinking 'thank god I'm alive' though.

For those interested in sleep paralysis, wikipedia's got a pretty good page about it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_paralysis

Sleep is truely fascinating.

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Ah I get that too. I figured out why sleep paralysis happens and here's how to fix it. When you sleep on your back your pillow is compressing your brain stem at the base of your skull. Get the pillow further up on your head so as much as possible it doesn't touch your neck or the fleshy part just below the back of your skull. It'll feel a bit different (weird?) but you should be able to sleep without issue.

Tell as many people as you can after you see for yourself.

edit: As an additional tip, the way I get out of the paralysis is by trying to rock my body as if I'm building up momentum to jump or at least jerk a limb. Once I twitch a limb it feels easy enough to break everything else out. That rocking feeling is probably imaginary so I don't know how transferable the technique is to other people.

Oh man, sleep paralysis is scary. After I had it happen to me a few times, these days I either go "ugh, not this again" and go back to sleep, or just panic and try to fight it, in which case I wake with a jolt after what feels like a minute (an eternity, when you're paralyzed).

I tried polyphasic sleep where you sleep 10 minutes every 3 hours, except I couldn't fall asleep quickly enough so I didn't sleep at all for >72 hours. The strange thing is that I got the idea that I was somehow more awake, more focused. All the background thoughts in your brain disappear, and it makes you think you have laser focus on what you are doing. Except that you objectively suck at what you are doing...

A few weeks after that experiment I found out that some of my memories were missing. I was in high school at the time and I took a university course in classical mechanics with a few friends. This meant going with the train to a different city several times per week, but I had totally forgotten that I did that. I only realized this when my fiends kept talking about it as if I was there too. The memories did come back later; the lack of sleep only only broke the reference to that memory and when the reference was restored the memory itself was still in tact.

Truly horrible. I've once been trapped in a cycle of this for what seemed like dozens of times before I finally broke out of it drenched in sweat.

How to you get out of it?

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