{"id":4269,"date":"2005-07-10T08:51:12","date_gmt":"2005-07-10T12:51:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/httpblogslawharvardeduceerock4\/2005\/07\/10\/get-off-my-che"},"modified":"2005-07-10T08:51:12","modified_gmt":"2005-07-10T12:51:12","slug":"get-off-my-chest","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ceerock\/2005\/07\/10\/get-off-my-chest\/","title":{"rendered":"Get Off My Chest!"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a><\/p>\n

I had a very rough night of sleep that included a bout of Sleep Paralysis<\/A>:  “A period of inability to perform voluntary movements either at sleep onset (called hypnogogic or predormital form) or upon awakening (called hypnopompic or postdormtal form).”

In other words, your brain wakes up but your body doesn’t, and you can’t move, and it feels like someone is there, squeezing you. Everyone’s brain paralyzes their body while you’re asleep to prevent you from acting out your dreams, and that’s where the glitch happens. The brain is awake but has failed to turn the switch to release your body from paralysis. And you are groggy and half-asleep and confused and you can’t move. There is an old myth about an Old Hag<\/A> sitting on your chest (not to be confused with The blogging Old Hag<\/A>, though I don’t know if the name of her blog has anything to do with the sleep-disorder myth), and personally I believe that people who think they have been visited by aliens are really just experiencing sleep paralysis. Because it absolutely feels like someone is in the room with you. The mixture of dream-state and waking-state and a paralyzed body is a recipe for all sorts of creepy stories about what is actually going on. I suppose it was scary for me the first time, but once I learned what it is I just wait for it to pass and wake up.

It happens to me infrequently, about once a year. When I lived in Maryland I experienced it more. I think it has some correlation to mood, and there is some evidence that it is linked. My mood is certainly quite bad these days, and I haven’t experienced it in a long time. And when it was happening a lot in Maryland my mood was the worst it’s ever been. But last night before going to bed I was actually thinking about the fact that I haven’t experienced sleep paralysis in awhile, so perhaps the power of suggestion was enough to bring it on … the brain is a strange thing.

Or maybe the Old Hag heard my thoughts and wanted to teach me a lesson…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I had a very rough night of sleep that included a bout of Sleep Paralysis:  “A period of inability to perform voluntary movements either at sleep onset (called hypnogogic or predormital form) or upon awakening (called hypnopompic or postdormtal form).”In other words, your brain wakes up but your body doesn’t, and you can’t move, and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":92,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4269","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p58QoK-16R","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ceerock\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4269","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ceerock\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ceerock\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ceerock\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/92"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ceerock\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4269"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ceerock\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4269\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ceerock\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4269"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ceerock\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4269"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ceerock\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4269"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}