Which of you is experiencing sleep paralysis? How often does this happen to you? Do you feel scared when this happens to you?
In this article, I will share with you about my horrifying and terrifying experience.
What exactly is Sleep Paralysis?
Sleep paralysis is a feeling of being unconscious but unable to move. It occurs when a person goes through the stages of waking and sleeping. When this happens, you will not be able to move and speak in seconds or minutes. Our senses and consciousness are intact, but the feeling of having pressure on them or having a feeling of being choked.
According to the researchers, sleep paralysis is brief and not a serious risk but can cause anxiety or you may be remembered as a frightening event. It can occur alongside other sleep disorders such as narcolepsy.
Narcolepsy is an excessive need to sleep due to a problem with the brain's ability to control sleep.
During my college days, I had a terrifying experience with sleep paralysis. My cousin's name is Fe, she is 56 years old, she was a teacher and I was a student then. I was with that house. We were rented a house. It is said that it used to be a hospital but we are not afraid because we both do not believe in ghosts. Our room was formerly an emergency room, they say that there's many have died there, I just thought, so what? normally, people are dying there because that is a former hospital.
It happened to me twice but it was the worst. Every morning, between 4:00 to 5:00 a.m. I prepare breakfast and my cousin's lunch because she also goes to school early and I am left alone in a boarding house because I have a class at night. After I had prepared food and packed the food for my cousin I went back to bed to sleep again. In our almost everyday routine, we rarely see each other because in the morning she is not around there and in the evening I am not around there also.
It happened after I ate lunch and I fell asleep immediately. I am very tired and sleepy during those hours because of the many projects and activities that are being finalized, we all know the life of a student. I like to sleep in the living room because sometimes there are people who come unexpectedly like the bill collector of electricity, cable, water and rent pay. So that I can easily hear their knocks. I dreamed that someone was chasing me in a place I was not familiar with, it was wooded, dark, and deserted. I could not see who was chasing me but I was so scared then I woke up as if not because what I saw around is blurry, I can not move either. I try to open my eyes until I wake up, I ignore because it is just a dream and I do not take things like that very seriously. Until I went back to sleep, what I did not know the second time I went back to sleep was that it would be a continuation of my first dream. This time I could see the man chasing me. A fat man carrying a bolo knife. He chased me until he caught up with me and decapitated me. I can't understand why I can still move without ahead. I cried a lot. No one could hear me. As I slept, sleep paralysis happened again. I try to wake up but I seem to be stiff because I have difficulty moving my legs and it is also difficult to open my eyes. Fortunately, I was able to fight sleep paralysis again. But I thought I could not sleep because I forced my hands to open my eyes so that I could not sleep. For the third time, I did not realize that I had fallen asleep again. But this is another chapter of my dream because I was in the living room at that time and both my left hand and left leg were hanging on the floor. I slept on the sofa until I fell asleep paralyzed again. I could see a black woman with long hair, crawling closer to me, and as if I could hear her body twitching. I try to open my eyes and lift my dangling left hand and left leg but I can't move it. She is approaching! My mind says wake up! This is not true! This is just a dream. I scream but my voice has no sound. Until I woke up and suddenly the woman I could see in my dream disappeared. When I woke up again I saw that it was true that my left hand and leg were hanging. I was sweating with extreme fear and I could not breathe properly, I was also very tired. I could feel my chest pounding. At that moment when I woke up, I did not go back to sleep but I prayed over and over again. But my dreams kept haunting me over and over again. I was still terrified because when I woke up I had no one with me. I left the house and tried to calm myself.
I researched about sleep paralysis and having a decapitate nightmare. It says that when someone headless in a dream makes you feel a bit surreal, distanced or separate, this could be a good indication this dream is showing you that your head and heart are not in balance - one may be dominating the other. It may be your head is controlling your heart and you are being overly rational. Consider where in your life you feel disjointed from your feelings, where you may be behaving too intellectually and not letting your emotions flow. This often happens when we are afraid of letting ourselves feel for fear of pain or humiliation.
Previously, I believed that the reason a black woman entered my dream was because of wide imagination, and when I watched horror movies because I'm an avid fan of horror movies.
Right now I no longer experience sleep paralysis but I still often have nightmares and usually, it happens at dawn when I wake up and go back to sleep.
