Thread: Can anyone explain this...

This exact thing that you have described is Sleep Paralysis; basically what this means is that your body has paralyzed you, in a similar fashion to when it paralyzes you to keep you from acting out your dreams during REM sleep, except that something has gone wrong and it has turned/stayed on while you are awake. The difficulty breathing and pressure on the chest are hallucinations that accompany SP of the 'incubus' type (there are a few generic types that people experience). You'll find that at this time you can open your eyes and look around, but all other movements will be difficult to impossible until the SP wears off.

Believe it or not, this is something that lucid dreamers often strive for. When you are in sleep paralysis, you can use that state to enter a lucid dream (see these tutorials 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8).

As absolutely terrifying and uncomfortable as sleep paralysis can be, it is completely harmless. It won't last more than a few minutes, unless you have some sort of problem like narcolepsy that it's associated with (and even then, it typically won't last much longer). If besides the SP you're a totally normal, healthy person sleepwise, you're fine. Some ways to get out of it include wiggling the extremities like your toes and fingers. This should gradually let your body go free.

It sounds more like your problem is originating with becoming lucid in these nightmares, and immediately trying to wake yourself up, which lands you in SP since you're sort of prematurely awakening from the dream. My biggest suggestion is to read as much as you can about sleep paralysis and become more familiar with what it is, how to end it, how incredibly harmless it is, to make it a much more relaxing experience. You'll see there's nothing to worry about, and maybe even something to gain if you want to learn to WILD into a lucid dream.

On the other hand, you can attack this problem at the source- you're becoming lucid, but waking yourself up to avoid these situations. If you read about dream control, you will learn how to just block out scary/gruesome things in dreams, turn them pleasant and enjoyable and control it. Turn a scary, attacking monster into your best friend and hang out, turn a scary sight into a haunted house and eat a piece of dream candy (yummmmm!), turn a chase dream into a game of tag and chase the asshole who was just chasing you, all sorts of things like that are possible if you become lucid and manage to have the right mindset. I highly recommend reading these few posts: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

There are many, many people, especially on these forums, who suffer from ISP regularly. There are also a bunch of us who don't get sp regularly, but who have had it at least a handful of times. You are far from alone in this experience, and just keep in mind that the paralysis is harmless and temporary, and the hallucinations themselves, no matter how uncomfortable or frightening, are just all in your head. Try to ignore them, as fear and attention are believed to make them worse. Hopefully as you spend more time on dreamviews you'll be able to turn this around and into a rewarding experience. Good luck!

Great advice Shift.

I've never tried to wake myself up from a Lucid into SP.
But it would be interesting.
Has anyone else managed this?

Thanks

On top of SP being most common after waking up, I have definitely noticed that people intentionally waking themselves up from lucids seem to end up in SP a lot. It doesn't usually happen to me, but then again I rarely wake myself up from lucids intentionally, and I don't get SP very often. My guess is that if you made a poll, a lot of people who wake themselves up do end up in it. Which is really bad, if you're forcing yourself awake from a nightmare just to end up in SP with some frightening hallucinations, and I suspect this is part of the reason that SP experiences are usually so negative- that people are going into them already afraid.

Thanks for the detailed response! I had heard of sleep paralysis before but it was my understanding that it was just something uncommon that makes people hallucinate.

The paralysis always wears off for me when I open my eyes, which as I mentioned before takes a lot of effort to do. Next time I'll put up with it for a little while instead of struggling to end it. Hopefully I can have more lucid dreams now.

Sure thing
You're actually in an excellent position. Sounds like you can get lucid by DILD pretty easily, and with the SP you should be able to WILD too. It is a rare breed of lucid dreamer who masters both of these.

Haha thanks. It's strange because I never thought of these nightmares as lucid dreams.. In a normal lucid dream I realise I am dreaming before anything bad happens then if it happens I can usually deal with it or spin. With these I just automatically wake myself up.

I don't always find it easy to DILD. If I'm stressed (which is most of the time ), have a bad night's sleep or sometimes just randomly I go for a while without having any.

I'm glad I went back to this site. I think I can learn some good things here.