Dr Sutapa Mukherjee

So it's different in the non-REM sleep and in REM sleep.

But in non-REM sleep, which is the first part as you're going off to sleep, your muscles are not really paralysed, but they're just...

not as active, you know, and that's when you have that lovely feeling.

But, you know, if you get woken up, you can, you know, get up and move fairly quickly.

So they're not completely paralyzed.

In REM sleep, there is...

a lot more relaxation of the muscles.

And as I said, there's this irregular breathing, the eye movements are quite rapid.

So it's a very different state.

And if you get woken up in REM sleep, sometimes we've experienced a bit of sleep paralysis where...

your brain is awake but you actually can't move your body.

Yeah, that's happened to me.

And so I imagine when you're in your 20s that you might have actually been maybe burning the candle at both ends.

You might have been a bit sleep deprived.

And so that's when I say normal people, I say people that don't have narcolepsy.

So all the non-narcolepsy people, which is, you know, the bulk of the population, we will experience sleep paralysis when we are more sleep deprived.

So meaning that perhaps your alarm woke you up and your body really wanted a bit more REM sleep.

And that's why...

your muscles are still paralyzed.

There's a little bit of a delay in the muscles being woken up.