Last night my husband got sick in the middle of the night. I was asleep when it happened, but I heard it and I tried to wake up. The problem was I don’t think I was fully awake. Although I could hear him, when I tried to move my body, I couldn’t move. When I tried to open my eyes, I couldn’t open them. I have had this type of thing happen to me before when I was a kid.
I just realized what this is: sleep paralysis. What’s even stranger is I think I have had episodes all along I just didn’t put it all together. I’m the type of person who if there is something rare, I am a likely candidate. I have had lucid dreams all my life. I have had dreams where I am falling asleep, and something will happen when I wake up and I am literally standing up out of bed and I have no idea how I got out the bed. I have had episodes where I talk in my sleep. So, it shouldn’t be strange that I would have infrequent episodes of sleep paralysis.
I have had lucid dreams all my life where I feel helpless, and I can’t scream or move. I still remember having a nightmare when I was about nine years old. I couldn’t wake up, but I knew that I was dreaming. In real life, I sat up and I tried to open my eyes, but I couldn’t open them. As soon as my mom came into my bedroom and touched my shoulder, my eyes opened without a problem.
I think I have had a fear all my life of being trapped inside my body fully conscious but not able to move. It is a terrible fate. When my father started to show symptoms of Alzheimer’s, I feared that part the most about the disease. What if the spirit is still stuck inside the body fully aware and yet trapped inside of a deteriorating mind and body? How does that spirit exist? What does it feel? Is it anything like the helplessness I have felt during my episodes of sleep paralysis?
In the fight or flight response, there’s a third option that no one really talks about. It’s the freeze reaction. When someone gets really scared, they freeze, like a deer caught in headlights or like someone in sleep paralysis. Most people think that they won’t do it, but most people do freeze. If you catch someone coming around a corner unexpectedly and you yell “Boo!”, most people don’t run or start fighting. Most people scream, they tense up, and for just a moment their entire body freezes because they don’t have a clue what is going on. Most of us freeze when we are startled even if it is just for a second.
So, am I destined to be stuck inside my body? Frozen in time forever within flesh? I don’t know there’s all kinds of things that could happen, but all I can do is pray that God’s will be done and hope that His plan for me brings me a greater appreciation for the gift of life that He has given me. And I pray that one day, my spirit will return to wherever it came and I will be able to commune with God on and even greater level than I do right now.
As for sleep paralysis, it really scared me when I was a child. I didn’t know what it was. But now as an adult, I know that it won’t last forever, if I just relax, then God will guide me to the next minute and then the next one until I see the light at the end of the tunnel of my bad dream.
My faith saved me. May God’s peace reside in all of our hearts.
