Nightmares are not much fun as discussed in the previous post. For me at least, nightmares led in part, to a fear of the dark and going to sleep. Yet sleep is inevitable unless you have insomnia but that’s a whole different subject in which I have no personal knowledge. Sleep though is weird, your body and your brain both go into this standby mode, but it is in no way certain they will enter or exit this mode together. Welcome to the fresh hell that is sleep paralysis.
With nightmares there is the guarantee that you will wake up from them and while disturbing there is the relief that you have escaped into the waking world. What if instead you awake and the waking world is not what it appears to be? What if you wake from one nightmare into another, far more frightening and real. This happens to myself on the odd occasion, thankfully not regularly enough to be a permanent feature in my life. In my experience sleep paralysis comes in two forms.
Firstly like I said, waking from one nightmare into another. In the second nightmare my eyes are usually wide open and I am able to see the room around me in a first person perspective but not able to move. Then out of the corner of my eye I will see a gigantic spider dropping from the ceiling onto my face and I will be powerless to do anything about it. This dream will be so vivid and powerful that I will usually wake up immediately and check the bed for the offending arachnid. I have a pathological fear and hatred of spiders that is so longstanding that I can’t remember how or why it began. Perhaps this is why my visual hallucinations take the form of a spider. For others it can be shadow people or alien abduction, the possibilities are literally endless and terrifying.
Secondly and far more common for myself, will be the sure and certain knowledge that I am suffering an episode of sleep paralysis. In this scenario my mind is awake but my body is asleep. I am fully conscious while my body is either cutting off the blood supply to a limb causing it to go numb and die, or I am suffocating and unable to change my resting position. Most of the time this dream happens in some natural environment where I am partially buried and struggling for breath. In this one I am desperately struggling to move to free myself and live. The dream ends when I wake up and find there is nothing wrong whatsoever.
As a post script to this post I’d like to add another dream. Only once have things gone the other way. In this dream I was falling out of the sky, with the ground rushing up towards me. It’s not unusual for me to have this dream, and sometimes I wake with a sudden sense of inertia. This one time though I didn’t wake up, I felt every inch of hitting the ground and knowing that I was dead. It disturbed me for years and I still wonder why I would put myself through such an awful event. I’d like to know if anyone else has actually died in their dreams and if anyone has a theory as to what it means?