What It's Like to Suffer From Sleep Paralysis

I’ve had vivid nightmares, insomnia and sleep paralysis since childhood. These days, I have vivid nightmares that wake me up about twice a week, meaning I only sleep five to six hours a day. Sleep paralysis affected me the most when I was a teenager, occurring every two to three months. Now, it's around twice a year, usually happening when I sleep somewhere new.

My nightmares are usually broadly tied to things that I've seen or heard about in my life. As a child, it was mostly demons (I went to a religious school) or cannibals because I read books about them. As a teenager, it was zombies. Today it's a mixture of things. I assume it's heavily influenced by horror films and what I'm watching.

When I wake up from a nightmare, I often find myself in a seated position. Or with my legs up. Or my arms up. It's because I jerk myself out of my nightmare. I'm scared in my dream, so I sit up because my mind senses danger and I’m ready to fight back.  

You know when you're about to sleep and you suddenly jump uncontrollably? Well, when I get these it’s not just a physical sensation. I hear things. When I'm almost asleep, I’ll hear a voice yell, and then I wake up. The worst episode I’ve ever had of this was when I was about 11 years old. I was almost asleep, and I heard a voice screaming next to me and hallucinated a demonic yellow face immediately in front of mine contorted in anger. Unsurprisingly, this freaked me out pretty badly.

That said, no sleep disorder is quite as terrifying as sleep paralysis. It occurs during Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep, the period of sleep when you’re dreaming. Normally when you dream, your brain puts your body in a paralysed state so you won't try and "do" what you're dreaming about. If this doesn’t work for whatever reason, that’s when people sleepwalk. Sleep paralysis is the opposite, as you’ll be waking up but not able to move. Although you’re aware that you're conscious, you can't move anything, not a muscle.

On top of this, it’s quite common to also be hallucinating. I’ll hear something talking to me in one ear, the side I can’t see from my frozen position on the bed. Usually it says my name, and it has a really deep voice. I’ve also had instances where I’ve hallucinated that people are having conversations or watching TV downstairs so I go downstairs, only to find no one is there.

My first episode of sleep paralysis featured visual hallucinations, which is so much worse. I must have been about 10 or 11, just before secondary school. I realized I couldn't move so I started panicking a bit and tried to call my mum. I tried to sit up to open the curtains and turn the lights on but I couldn't move. I saw the locked bedroom door open, and a huge black shadow standing in the doorway. I could see it partly reflected in the wardrobe mirror, and it started floating or gliding around the bed towards me. I couldn’t move to look at it properly, so all I could see was this specific angle in the mirror as it came towards me.

And then I woke myself up.

Despite how much they mess with my life, I find nightmares like these fascinating. I used to look up the science behind sleep disorders quite a lot as a child, hoping I’d learn something to make them stop. Unfortunately, scientists don't know why we dream so there’s a lot of research still to be done. One of the only things we really know for sure is that cheese can give you bad dreams, but if it came to a choice between being visited by demons or giving up cheddar, I’d probably pick the former....

Amelia Hopkins was talking to Mathilde Frot