So I use to have hardcore sp for years up until about a couple years ago. Out of nowhere it just stopped one day. I don't know why but I didn't ask any questions and moved on. Then I started having dreams of having sleep paralysis. The dreams were far worse than the conscious version! Just recently I started having dreams of sp and waking up in SP again. It's nuts man. Sometimes it is fun with the hallucinations and all but 90% if the time it's horrifying.

I know it's a bizarre question for a music forum but I figured since most music producers are also hardcore insomniacs, some may also have sleep paralysis or like minded sleeping problems.

With that said, anybody else here have it and if so how do you roll with the punches? Any tips on how to control it, stop it, etc.. are all welcome.

 

I was going to Pm you this my but people of this society need to know....

My brother was suffering from the same delusion, some doctors call it that (don't believe everything your doc says *yes*) they put him on drugs & he got worst (go figure) me being his older brother wasn't having it. So i did some research on the subject see here

it's fucking ridiculous but doctors just don't know off the bat if could be it's actually something like this Hypnagogia, Narcolepsy or Cataplexy

after all this this still one fact that is unknown and it's called Phenomena

I prefer to keep the rest of my brother quiet, but knowledge is power & i will no longer hold it within

 

Here's another thread about SP, don't know much about it, but wish you fast recovery

 

It can be real bad. Luckily mines only last for 2-5 min (every time I wake up/fall asleep). I hope your brother finds a way to cope with his. It always helps me when someone is there after I wake up to comfort me. Most of the time it's my friends making fun of what noises I made or how fast my eyes were moving around but even if they are joking it still helps. Also I found a youtube video yesterday that says it helps to drink a glass of whiskey before bed.

Sounds about right because I cant remember having sp after I got shitfaced. Then again, I cant remember anything after gettin shitffaced so lol.

Sorry X, my bad, didn't see that old post there. Thanks for findin it thou. Has some helpful stuff in there.

 

I used to get sleep paralysis really bad, but I was also an insomniac at the time when I had them. Had waking hallucinations for years. It wasn't all bad stuff, but there were times when I'd be covered in spiders and insects and have no way to differentiate it from reality. That was years ago, I learned how to control it, but it mostly comes down to getting into a regular sleep cycle and eating right if you want it to stop.

When you are sleeping, your body is sub-paralyzed except for your eyes and mouth. This is so you can breathe and react to anything you might see. When we go into an REM (rapid eye movement) state, our eyes move back and forth really fast. You may not be aware of it, but there are blind spots in both of your eyes, you just don't notice them when you are awake because your brain fills in the gap. To illustrate this, look at this picture from a distance with one eye shut and the open one focusing on one of the dots. Adjust your head back and forth until the dot in your peripheral vision becomes invisible. When it becomes invisible, you have found your blind spot. Your brain fills in the space with white instead since it is not processing the dot anymore.

http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/gifs/blindspot1bw.gif

With that in mind, when you are asleep, your brain does not fill in the gaps of your blind spot, so if your eyes are open while you're in that REM stage you still get the visual data, but without the intricate processing. The blind spot, which is moving as fast as your eyes are become black lines. Those black clusters are then interpreted by a sleeping mind as all matter of things, for a majority of people it is spiders (a primitive subconscious level fear), but it can be insects, snakes, ghosts, demons or anything else really. The mind sees what it sees. But just because you see these things doesn't mean you'll wake up right away. You're in the deepest stage of sleep, the period of the day where the mind is most active.

Sometimes you'll get up and look for that spider and you'll never find it even though you swore it was there, so real. Other times you're body wont wake up because it has taken the visual cues for dreaming - and you are paralyzed. When you are in this state of paralysis, you can react to the fear, or you can take charge of it. If you consciously realize you are dreaming, then you can take it to the next level and get deep into the world of lucid dreaming and astral projection.

Before I go into lucid dreaming I just wanna put this out there. If your sleep paralysis is ever getting on your nerves, the answer is to get sleep. Ambien and Diphenhydramine (otc sleep aid) do not help you actually sleep, they just knock you out, so they will not help in this matter. Melatonin however will make drastic improvement in your sleep cycle. People often don't think that melatonin works for them, but that's because it is easy to overdose on it. Stores will sell melatonin in 3mg doses, however only .5 to 1 mg is needed. More than that actually messes with your circadian rhythm more than it helps, and could cause the very sleep paralysis they are trying to get rid of. Also, people think that melatonin supplements are something to be taken daily, when they are most assuredly not. The proper way to take melatonin is to take it twice a week at the very most, and take it about 1 hour before you would like to be asleep (and again, in .5 - 1 mg doses, not these monster doses that vitamin stores sell). This allows your body to establish a regular sleep cycle, it's what melatonin naturally made by your body does. You're body naturally turns it's serotonin into melatonin when exposed to darkness however. So it goes without saying that staring at a computer monitor does not help with sleep problems whatsoever.

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With that said, lucid dreaming is the reason I loved my hypnagogia. Without sleep paralysis I would never have found out how to properly take charge of dreaming, and now I can do it on the fly. It's my form of meditation if you will. 5 years ago, I didn't believe in lucid dreaming, I thought it was mostly made up. But since getting into it I know for a fact it's real. It's like taking a hallucinogenic drug when you go that deep. For those interested, this is a way that I trigger lucid dreams:

In order to lucid dream, you have to be consciously aware that you are dreaming. I don't know why this is, but making the connection that you are aware of dreaming for some reason allows you to remember the dream as well. One good way to get into the process is to leave notes for yourself (in the waking world). Write on a sticky note next to your desk, "This is a just a dream", and look at that note every once in a while when working on music or going on the internet. Put the same note on your fridge, your mirror, wherever you will see it, read it and comprehend its meaning. When you dream, you are mostly compounding memories from the day and storing them. Eventually you should come across a note in the dream. Really focus on that note while you are dreaming, this is something that is hard to do because you wont be consciously aware that you are dreaming when you read the note in your dream. It's all about making these weird connections really stick out at you to wake up parts of your brain that normally go into a sleep state.

Another way similar to the above example would be to stare at your hand for a really long time. Stare at it for an hour if you can, constantly counting each one of your five fingers. When dreaming, if any bit of the dream that day is remotely memorable, you might find yourself looking at your hand in the dream. Lookout for peculiarities such as lines on your hand that aren't there, or an extra finger. This would be your trigger to start recording the dream data and making it a lucid experience. All of a sudden you would have control of the dream hand in the same way you have control of your real hand in waking life, and this is important because having a body inside your dreams allows for more direct control.

A really advanced way of inducing lucid dreaming (and I think the most effective) is to lay in bed in the middle of the day when you are wide awake. As the body goes into a sleep state, parts of your body will go into sub-paralysis, as explained earlier with the sleep paralysis. Except for your eyes and mouth of course. You can lay with your eyes open and moving, as long as you don't move your body, and your brain will still go into a sleep state.

So what you want to do is focus on the parts of your body. You will feel an itch in certain places on your body. When you react to these itches, you wake up a little bit. Don't react to the itches. You get this vibration all over your body when you consciously focus on it while falling asleep. It is very hard to resist the urge to move a body part or scratch somewhere on your face, but when you do this, you wake yourself up too much, and blood is redistributed back to the body parts you moved. When you get a buzzing vibration on your body, focus on that feeling and try to move the body parts in your mind. So imagine yourself as a ghost stuck inside your body, and try to get the ghost out without waking the body in the process. Move your imaginary arm as much as you can. You will find this a difficult task, as you will keep getting the sensation of your imaginary arm desperately trying to reconnect with your real body. Slowly, with perseverance, you can create a full body emulation floating above your real body. When you have a grasp on this imaginary body, attempt to look at your real self. It will be as if you were looking at yourself from the 3rd person. You should be able to control this body, but it takes a lot of practice, you will constantly feel a pull back to your real body, a strong urge to keep yourself in the first person.

Once this practice is mastered, it becomes very easy to allow the mind to wander into lucid dreaming. Consciously doing things in them and going to really abstract states where there is no body, but states that you might not have been able to get into.

When in a dream, going through door ways normally causes dramatic changes in the dream. This is because when walking through a door way in waking life, your brain compartmentalizes the information from when you were in the previous room and creates a "fresh" slate if you will. When dreaming this is the same, and since dreams are memory compression from the day, this is the same. So in most dreams, when walking through a door, rather than going into the next room, you go into a new dream, a different place completely. In advanced lucid dreaming, you should be able to walk through a door without leaving the building your in.

Just some thoughts. I'm an avid dreamer. Saw this thread a while ago, wanted to write my thoughts down on the subject. Hypnagogic hallucinations can be a gift if you learn to control them.