Hello, I'm new to this forum. Please forgive a long post, but between you, you must have a lot of experience and can maybe help to solve an old mystery for me.
I had this experience a lot for about twenty years starting suddenly at age twenty, and after that it has become much less frequent, but still happens occasionally. I suffered quite badly from sleep onset difficulties and it would usually happen after several hours of lying in bed not sleeping. Generally I feel a sort of tightness and perhaps buzzing in my head and sometimes upper body and a strong sense of movement away from my position lying in bed. Often it is sliding up the walls, sometimes moving into my partner’s side. The first time it happened to me I was convinced I had fallen out of bed, the second time it felt as if I rose a few inches above where I was lying and started to move out from the bed. I never felt it was a true OBE even supposing there to be such a thing, because there was no vision of my body and no sense of returning to it. When the sensations cease, I am aware I am just lying immobile in bed in the same position I had been in before. Usually it is a rather unpleasant experience and at first it was very frightening. After a while I learned to cope with it by repeating prayers and mantras (I was quite spiritually inclined then) and just hanging in there, aware that the apparent movement was not really happening and it would soon end.
I’ve read descriptions of sleep paralysis and recognise some features of what I've read in my experience, but mine doesn’t seem to be a classic case, as I never had the feeling of not being able to move, and while the fear and unease fit, there’s not usually the sense of a presence in the room, as far as I remember. A long time ago I read a newspaper article about temporal lobe seizures and wondered if that is what was happening to me. The worrying thing is that after the episode (I always wake up at that point) I can often feel a tingling in my head as though some abnormal electrical activity had taken place in my brain.
As I said, this happens much less frequently now, partly because I tend to sleep better nowadays, but even on bad nights it’s quite unusual. But having been thinking about it yesterday, I experienced a variant form this morning! The previous episodes were all, I think, in a hypnagogic context. This one seemed to be hypnopompic. I had woken up at my usual time in the morning. Having been reading about sleep paralysis, I though about it and began to feel my limbs very heavy but wasn’t sure if I could move them or not… anyway, I drifted off to sleep again, had a fairly normal dream in which I was moving around, then dreamed I was lying on my back in a dream setting (I was in that position in bed) and finally was aware of being in bed but at the same time drifting up supine to the ceiling. It was not unpleasant at all, and I thought ‘oh, this is a lucid dream’. Then I felt I was rocking from side to side in bed, and my left leg came out of the bed – and I woke, with all limbs still firmly in bed. I had that weird tingling feeling in my head.
It was odd to get the comparison with a lucid dream, because when I’d been talking to a friend recently I’d explained in answer to a query that these experiences were not at all like flying or floating in a lucid dream (the comparison hadn't occurred to me), because the LD experience is pleasant, and this isn’t; and these involve the dream body moving upwards from bed, while in the dreams I take off from a standing position in a dream location. But of course, in both there is the double consciousness – you are both moving and not moving.
Has anyone had experiences like these, and can anyone suggest an explanation?