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January 22 Wednesday 2003 There are some things that are difficult to explain. This is one of them. I was tired. Not due to overwork, although I may have been stressed. I was tired none-the-less, so I went to bed feeling like I had already slept, but still needing sleep. As I lay down, I felt a slight uneasiness throughout my body as I drifted off. I "awoke" to find my bed covers floating around me. I was conscious, yet paralyzed. I felt my "body" float out of the bed and hover just beside it. I looked up at the window, the blind was up. I was certain it was closed when I went to bed . A huge bright full moon floated in a dark blue sky, and my room was flooded with this blue light. I started to panic, I knew I was asleep, and tried to shake my "body" to wake up, but my physical one wasn't having anything of it. I shook harder and - bang ! Here I was back in my room again. Awake and alone. I felt very unsettled and emotional, not frightened. You see, I have taken this trip before and it can get scary. I have had these HYPNAGOGIC HALLUCINATIONS biannually for the last ten years. They are also known as "night terrors" or pre-sleep phenomena. A form of narcolepsy, though rare, six to ten percent of people can experience some type of sleep paralysis. When I awoke from the last bout, the first thought that went through my mind was, why did I panic instead of letting go and getting some form of insight from the whole experience? In the past I have had visions of a person in close proximity looking down at me in bed, or an overall presence in the room. And the most frightening of all was of a form sitting on my chest and strangling me. From my research, I discovered that the body and mind shut down in sequence at the onset of sleep. Eventually these "switches" are turned off and we enter the REM period of sleep. In the case of Hypagogia the body falls asleep before the mind does, so the body becomes paralysed even though you are really still conscious. This has been a recent discovery, and up until last month I thought these "dreams" were just very real nightmares. I knew there had to be more to it. Great minds such as Aldous Huxley, H.G Wells and some of the more "enlightened" thinkers know of this phenomenon. How I handle it next time will be a reflection of the way I face up to challenges in my waking life. Be courageous or scream ?
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