Lauri Loewenberg

So here's what happens when you get sleep paralysis.

It's usually caused by a fitful night of sleep, bad sleep.

Your sleep routine is messed up.

Now, when we go to sleep and we enter the dream phase, REM, the brain releases a chemical that paralyzes your skeletal muscles.

It's a built-in safety mechanism so you don't get up and act out your dream.

When we're having a fitful night of sleep or we're just not sleeping good, we can start to wake up before our brain can catch up and reactivate our skeletal muscles.

That is crazy.

So we get stuck very briefly in the in-between state.

It's called hypnagogia.

That's crazy.

And you're awake and you're asleep at the same time, but you can't move because your body's still paralyzed.

Now, what's going on in the brain is the amygdala, the fear center of the brain, is highly active during sleep paralysis.

So that's why it's always such a frightening experience.

Now, it is also a hallucinatory experience.

And you can...

hear maybe whispers or you will perceive someone sitting on your chest or on the bed or maybe in the corner of the room and that's not real that's just your brain doing that and a lot back in the old days they called this the old hag syndrome because they thought that that sinister presence in the room was a witch

Yes.

People think that they're being abducted by an alien or that they're being haunted or they're having a demonic possession.

And you're not.

You're just stuck.