Right, people on here often use "sleep paralysis" as an umbrella term, being the paralysis you experience before and right after sleep, including REM atonia while actually asleep, and usually also including any sort of sensation (including 'buzzing' or vibrating, falling, etc.), and hallucinations that often accompany it (w/ the exception of HH, I know I know, a fine line). That's just the way lucid dreaming communities tend to refer to them. Whether or not they are medically inaccurate is irrelevant. For the average lucid dreamer, who knows so little about the human body and neuroscience and neuropsychology but for whom the focus is to achieve lucid dreaming, the term works fine.
This is probably because the majority have read Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming, which is often touted as the "Lucid Dream Bible" and is the source that most people gather their lucid dreaming-related information from. A lot of the information on this site is just distilled from or more loosely based on his book.
So regarding sleep paralysis, Stephen LaBerge says:
"The “sleep paralysis” of REM sleep doesn’t always turn off immediately upon awakening; this is why you may have experienced waking up and not being able to move for a minute. Sleep paralysis can seem a terrifying experience, but actually it is quite harmless, and indeed, can even be useful for inducing lucid dreams (see chapter 4)." – p. 21
"If you focus on your body while falling asleep, you will sometimes notice a condition in which it seems to undergo extreme distortions, or begins to shake with mysterious vibrations, or becomes completely paralyzed. All of these unusual bodily states are related to the process of sleep onset and particularly REM sleep onset.
During REM sleep, as you will recall from chapter 2, all the voluntary muscles of your body are almost completely paralyzed, except for the muscles that move your eyes and those with which you breathe. REM sleep is a psychophysiological state involving the cooperative activity of a number of distinct special-purpose brain systems. For example, independent neural systems cause muscle paralysis, blockade of sensory input, and cortical activation. When these three systems are working together, your brain will be in the state or REM sleep, and you will probably be dreaming.
Sometimes the REM systems don’t turn on or off at the same time. For example, you may awaken partially from REM sleep, before the paralysis system turns off, so that your body is still paralyzed even though you are otherwise awake. Sleep paralysis, as this condition is called, can occur while people are falling asleep (rarely) or waking up (more frequently). If you don’t know what’s happening, your first experience with sleep paralysis can be terrifying. People typically struggle in a fruitless effort to move or to fully wake up. In fact, such emotional panic reactions are completely counterproductive; they are likely to stimulate the limbic (emotional) areas of the brain and cause the REM state to persist.
The fact is that sleep paralysis is harmless. Sometimes when it happens to you, you feel as if you are suffocating or in the presence of a nameless evil. But this is just the way your half-dreaming brain interprets these abnormal conditions: something terrible must be happening!....
Sleep paralysis is not only nothing to be frightened of, it can be something to be sought after and cultivated. Whenever you experience sleep paralysis you are on the threshold of REM sleep. You have, as it were, one foot in the dream state and one in the waking state. Just step over and you’re in the world of lucid dreams. In the following exercises we present several techniques for taking that step.” – p. 108-109
During his WILD Twin Bodies Technique, which has basically been renamed DEILD, he says:
“Now focus your attention on your physical body…notice how your body feels at each point along the way. Watch for signs of strange sensations, vibrations, and distortions of your body image. These are the harbingers of REM sleep paralysis. Eventually you will experience sensations like those described above which will rapidly develop into complete paralysis of your physical body. At this stage you are ready to leave your paralyzed body behind and to enter the dream world in your dream body.” – p.110
He also says himself that one is more likely to WILD in the sleep laboratory, versus while at home, due to the amount of attention and intention one implements regarding attaining a lucid dream. Since sleep paralysis (or pre-sleep paralysis sensations or whatever you want to call them) is the main component to one of his main WILD induction techniques, I don't think it would be a stretch to say that by planning on attaining these states, focusing on these states, and attaining a WILD will likely increase your frequency of experiencing these sleep-paralysis precursors, which, as I've already said, everyone just refers to as 'sleep-paralysis'.
Most people don't spend their lives trying to WILD. Even if they know about it, they don't spend every single time they go to sleep trying to experience these sensations. When you have a community of people, many of whom are dedicating almost every brief awakening to WILD attempts, of course you are going to get people experiencing and documenting them and in much higher frequencies than the average person.
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