Often I get friends telling me about some wild and crazy dream they had. Most of the time they are still feeling the emotional charge from that unexpected dream as they recount the bits and pieces that they could remember.
All of us has experienced the feeling of warping out of some random nightmare and being placed back into reality. Dreaming is natural, it happens to all of us and if you never dream...well then maybe you are a serial killer with no conscience but that's another story.
I have heard stories of people waking up in the middle of the night, unable to move or scream. What's worse is that they often get the feeling that some invisible force is holding them down or they see shadows moving through the corner of their eye. I love when people tell me about stuff like that. It's so creepy and unimaginable - goosebumps.
Now, what if I told you that the mind was behind all of this. Yep, that's right - our very own minds are the culprits for these horrific happenings within our unconscious realms of life! Shall I enlighten you?
I believe my first eye opener happened while taking a college level psychology course back in 2007. There was a chapter in the textbook based on sleep. It explained the two types of sleep which are: #1. Non-Rapid Eye Movement (NREM) and #2. Rapid Eye Movement (REM)
- Here is a decent article about the stages of sleep: http://psychology.about.com/od/statesofconsciousness/a/SleepStages.htm
But I want to get to my point here. Basically, there are 5 stages of sleep: Stage 1 is the lightest stage of sleep, this is when your eyes are closing but the slightest noise out of place can wake you back up and it's like you were not asleep at all. Stage 2 is when your body gets involved. You are falling asleep now...your heart rate is slowing down and your body temperature drops. Stage 3 is when your mind starts to drift off into lala land. You are now crossing over from light sleep to deep sleep. Stage 4 is when you are knocked out. This lasts for 30 minutes. During this stage you may wet your bed or sleepwalk. Finally, Stage 5 is when you are dreaming. During this stage your brain becomes increasingly active (this causes dreaming) but your body muscles relax and your involuntary muscles become paralyzed.
Now what if there was a disruption in the sequence of sleep? What if you woke up while your muscles were still paralyzed and your mind was still dreaming? Apparently this actually happens. They call it Sleep Paralysis.
Sleep paralysis can occur either when falling asleep or when waking up. It is the logic behind the phenomena of being held down in your sleep. So, if this happens to you - it could be triggered from anything like prolonged lack of sleep, stress or for more extreme cases where Sleep paralysis happens way too often it could very well be that you have a sleeping disorder. But if you are one of those people who prefers to believe that it is a demon trying to kill you in your sleep, you are free to think what you want, that aint my problemo.
Now what about nightmares? We all have dreams that we run to tell our friends about. These dreams just makes you wake up asking "What the fuck?". But my friend I would like to feed you a second plate of logic. Every out-of- place scene of imagination you have dreamed up was produced by the mind. It is your brain throwing up. I believe that the brain is so complicated and amazing that it collects fragments of thoughts we never knew we had and binds them together as a collage that can compel our deepest and most innocent of feelings. In dreams our mind reveals our most compressed thoughts, the things we packed away and forgot about. Of course when we try to make sense of a dream, it's like trying to put a puzzle together when none of the puzzle pieces match. Instead, try to think of each portion of that dream as a unique contribute...pull it apart like you would a car. The battery is the power source, the engine empowers motion, the wheel is for steering, the tires are for moving and...you get my drift. If you remove any one of those parts, the car will not work and a battery on it's own is just a battery. In a way, this is how dreams work, each individual thought helps to make a dream, but each thought in itself represents an entirely different thought on it's own.
So the next time you wake up from weird sleep be aware and be calmed by the fact that it was just your mind trolling you.
