Trapped in Sleep Paralysis, Bad Times!
Hi, I'm new to the forum, and I've had a few LD's in my life (all within the last 3 years), but recently I've been having a lot of strange experiences with sleep paralysis. -It was these experiences which caused me to do a bit of internet trawling and led me here. :)
So here's what keeps happening:
I'll be coming out of a dream, semi-lucid and aware that I'm asleep, it's morning, and I should be thinking about getting up. I get to a stage where I can almost feel myself lying in bed (I know what position I'm lying in, and that my eyes are shut), and I try to emerge to full wakefulness. However I find that I can't physically move, or force myself awake, even with quite a lot of mental effort. This situation is often accompanied by the remnants of whatever dream I was having floating about in my mind, but part of me knows, "Yep, there's the end of my dream," and it doesn't effect me in any way. The thing is, I know I'm lying in bed at home, but find it very difficult to return to my"self".
What usually ends up happening is I fall back to sleep and dream some more. These dreams aren't usually significant or lucid, and really just take up time until I start to wake up again and get stuck in the same state of sleep-paralysis. The cycle continues for maybe an hour (hard to tell), with up to four separate paralysis situations. Of course, I wake up eventually -Once I did it straight from the paralysis stage but it took a lot of effort!
Luckily this is never scary or uncomfortable for me; most of the time I'm thinking, "This is pretty cool". The weirdest thing for me is being concious of external stimuli like light levels in the bedroom and yet cannot commit to bringing myself back to the real world.
On a side note, I've found that this is actually more likely to occur if the curtains are open but the blinds are not (the sun rises in the direction my window faces), so the bright light on the white blinds makes the whole room extremely bright. More than once I've been stuck in bed thinking "My god, that sun is bright" while unable to move.
On the occasions when this happens without the bright light, I have been able to (rarely- twice) "float" out of myself and apprehend the room I'm sleeping in- in unbelievable detail; noticing things I would never pick up on when awake. If I open my eyes wide and focus, things become clearer still. (Not my waking eyes of course) One of the times I appeared at the bottom of the stairs in my old house, and floated upstairs, just looking at everything.
I was wondering if anybody has experienced anything like this, or has a theory of how it happens? I was thinking maybe the subconscious mind records everything we see, and this is all reassembled by the brain somehow into a really detailed "Dreamworld".
One other thing, I was wondering if anybody could share their expertise and offer me a bit of advice on what to do when I get stuck in sleep-paralysis in the mornings. Is there maybe a way I could harness this state to take me into a lucid dream?
Thanks in advance! -JD
