Starting Again

The sleeping baby strapped to my chest suddenly spasms and clasps me in a gesture I call “crabbing”. I stop to exclaim.

“Did you fall off your branch?” I ask my daughter.

The baby sleeps on.

But I know she will wake soon: sleep starts (or hypnic jerks) like this tend to happen when someone is falling to sleep or waking up, as their mind wrestles between consciousness and unconsciousness – like so many other sleep phenomena (e.g. sleep paralysis). And so far, experience has agreed with the science.

But what are these “sleep starts”?

Sleep Paralysis - A Ghost Story

I’ve just had my first sleep paralysis with shadows.

Champion of ghost stories, sleep paralysis is thought to lie behind hundreds and thousands of ghost stories and alien abductions every year.

It affects up to half of us during our lifetimes. It may even have happened to you.

We still have much to learn about how sleep works, how the brain works, and how our emotions guide understanding. One fascinating insight is this phenomenon. Rather like opening up the back of a watch, it spills its guts and opens up more scientific questions than it answers.

Shadow -  © TWDK

Sleep paralysis happens when the waking and sleeping parts of the brain become confused, usually just when you are about to drift off, or just as you awaken. When we’re in REM sleep, all of our muscles are frozen, except those in our eyes and diaphragm, to prevent us from acting out our dreams: when we suffer sleep paralysis, they remain frozen, even though our minds – our desperately trapped, struggling brains – are wide, wide awake.

It feels like you’re being held in place by invisible forces: unable to scream, unable to sit up. Worse, your paralysed torso forces you to breathe shallowly, and during the few seconds or minutes that sleep paralysis takes hold, it feels like a weight has been placed upon your chest, the ghost is sitting on you, squeezing out all the air… And, with air deficiency comes a real feeling of panic, and a powerful sense of impending doom.