Veda #10 : Sleep Paralysis

Day 10
Question by : None - "Sleep Paralysis"

common sleep paralysis

Have you ever been on a sleep state between unconsious and awake, and you try to move your body, but you can't move. You try to speak or shout, but that didn't work either. Sometimes followed with strange hallucination, heavy breath, and others phobia. If you answered "yes" to most symptoms, yeah that's what we called "Sleep Paralysis" according to medical term, or our traditional Indonesian people would call it "Ketindihan" (-Stacked, in English) just because we would feel like being stacked by "something".

Surprisingly, many people in this whole world have their explanation about this thing, and it was all about their myths. let's take some example :
In Afro-America culture, this is called "The devil riding your back"
in Chinese beliefs, called "gui ya shen"
The Mexican believe it was a dead person's spirit stick to living person
and many more from Cambodia, Turk, Iceland, Japan, Thailand, Hungaria...they all believe that this sleep paralysis means there was/were a spirit(s) that sit on your chest and try to steal your living spirit.
Could this explained medically?

Explanation
This condition often called "Sleep paralysis", and it could happen to everybody, both men and women. Most of the people have experienced this condition at least once or twice in their lives, mostly the first time occured at age between 14-17. Most of the cases just happened only for a few seconds or minutes, in the advanced case, sometimes the person would felt a hallucination, like seeing black shadow, or heard something around them. That's why many peoples said it was mystical.
The western would call this as "incubus nightmare", or else, based on what they would "see".

According to Al Cheyne, researcher from Waterloo University, sleep paralysis is a hallucination because there is a sleep-malfunction at the stage called REM (Rapid Eye Movement). As for information, our sleeping state could be divided into 4 stage :
Light Sleep ; Deep Sleep ; Very Deep Sleep ; and REM, where event we called as dream could happen (see the diagram below for explanation)

sleeping state

When we feel too tired, or lack of sleep, our brain wave doesn't synchronized well with the sleeping stages. Put it in the simple explanation, we feel like we've take enough sleep, our brain said so, but our body haven't take enough "sleep". Still hard to follow? okay, our brain count 1-2-5, but our body still counting at 1-2-3-4-5. This is when sleep paralysis could happen, we try to wake up but our body still in the sleep state, so we couldn't move it yet.

The Causes
Sleep paralysis often caused by narcolepsy (sudden sleep attack), sleep apnea (snoring), depression. If you ever felt like you had enough sleep, but sometimes without notice, you fell asleep, that's narcolepsy.
Lack of sleep also considered as the cause. Next, your sleep position could affect this Sleep Paralysis, it happened that people who slept with supine position (lying with face upwards, or simple word :Terlentang!) has more chances to caught sleep paralysis when they're too tired.

As for me, i've had this feeling once, and i thought i was dead, because in my case, i'm fully awake but i can't opened my eyes at all....Thank God i'm still living till now.