If You've Woken Up in The Middle of The Night and Unable to Move, Here's What It Means

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Did you know that the average person sleeps for around eight hours a day? Over a lifetime this amounts to spending about one third of life asleep.

It’s common knowledge that a good nights rest is vitally important for maintaining health and balance, both mentally and physically. Some people a good night’s sleep is hard to come by, or it ends up being ruined, by a strange phenomenon that is called sleep paralysis.

Sleep paralysis is a feeling of being conscious, but unable to move. It occurs when a person passes between stages of wakefulness and sleep.

During REM (rapid eye movement) sleep, our muscles are paralyzed so that we don’t act out our dreams. When one experiences hypnopompic sleep paralysis, a certain part of the brain wakes sooner.

In fact, some people experience difficulty in breathing and that it feels as if someone were choking them.

While there may be genetic factors that contribute to it, the main causes are thought to be a lack of sleep, schedule changes, and sleeping on ones back.

During earlier times it used to be thought that demons or evil forces were behind the strange phenomenon and it’s easy to see why.

We listed below the 8 scary facts about it:

1. It can happen to anybody

- You may have already experienced it at some point in your life, not everyone is aware that it happened, and practically everyone will go through it at least once over the course of their lifetime.

2. It can feel like a demon is sitting on your chest

- A common description given of what it feels like is that there is something heavy and bothersome weighing on your chest. Yikes!

3. It can happen when you’re trying to fall asleep

- It doesn’t only occur when you wake up. It can occur at two points in the sleep cycle when your body transitions between going into, and coming out of, the REM (deep sleep) stage.

4. If you suffer from a lack of sleep it’s more likely to happen to you

- Studies have indicated that individuals who suffer from chronic sleep issues, and who routinely don’t get enough sleep, are more likely to have an episode of sleep paralysis than their well-rested counterparts.

5. It feels like you’re dead

- Many people equate the experience of waking up and being unable to move, while fully mentally awake, to feeling like they’re dead. Basically, it’s a type of out of body experience that you never want to experience.

6. No one knows for sure what causes it

- Science and researchers have yet to find a definitive cause or explanation as to what may trigger it. It has been a mystery for thousands of years and to this day it remains one.

7. There is no way to wake your body up

- You literally have to wait for your body to snap out if it. No cough or blink will wake you, contrary to some beliefs.

8. Your nightmare may continue

- A lot of people have reported that they feel like they’re in a living nightmare even after they wake up because they open their eyes and see hallucinations. They are mentally alert and know they are awake, but their minds and eyes see things that aren’t there, and it’s all too freakishly real.

We hope that this brief article is informative to you, share this post so that you can also inform others about this and might help them a lot.