Sleeping Paralysis Essay

Awake but still sleeping: a frightening experience.

Have you ever felt that you are already awake, but you find out that you can’t either talk or move? Or have you ever felt any strangepresence pressing you down while you were sleeping? It seems really scary to think that this may be caused by spirits, ghosts or demons, but many scientists and psychologists have explained this strangephenomenon as Sleep Paralysis. This may have many strange ways of expressing: Hallucinations, feeling shocked or suffocated and even hearing “voices from beyond”. And in many cultures this has beenattributed to different kind of spirits, but who is certain of what this is really about?

Is it just science, or there’s a whole supernatural world that comes to life, when ours goes to rest?In this essay, you will be presented all the facts involved in sleep paralysis: What happens when you start with the sleeping process, whether it’s a scientific or a spiritual phenomenon, and whatare some of the symptoms and experiences some people have had during these odd sleeping events. All this, with the only purpose of unraveling the mystery behind Sleep Paralysis.

In order to discoverwhat Sleep Paralysis is about, first of all we have to describe some general terms involved in this sleeping process, which is usually understood as “the time for our body and mind to shut down andtake a rest for the next day”. But few people are completely aware that this is, in fact, an active process where our mind keeps working, but at a different level. Although our metabolic ratedecreases, there is some major brain wave activity involved in this process, which is far away from being passive.

Brain activity has been separated into two different levels called NREM sleep (which standsfor Non-Rapid Eye Movement) and REM sleep (Rapid Eye Movement). These two stages alternate between 3 or 4 times in repeated cycles every night, and they last approximately between 90 and 110...