Cassie's Series of Adventures: The Curious Case of Sleep Paralysis.

The White Page, 1967 by René Magritte. Courtesy of: www.renemagritte.org

Hello everyone! 

For those of you perhaps waiting for my Rotterdam post (I won't lose hope!), rest assured. It will still come later today. Yet right now I am too excited about something that has just happened to me an hour ago. 

I heard about sleep paralysis many times in my life from various people. For most of them it was a really scary experience, usually involving problems with breathing, inability to scream and some dark creatures trying to do them harm. That's why when I had my own first experience with sleep paralysis today (at least I'm pretty sure it was first), I haven't initially labelled it as such. In fact, I always hoped I would never get one as my friends made it sound so nightmarish. 

So, with my friends or family we would often lead long conversations about dreams and dreaming - whenever somebody brought up the subject, it seemed as if it would always create an avalanche of responses, there was just no other way. In fact, I think it is something we share as human beings - and by that I mean our interest in what direcly applies to us yet seems strange, uncanny, sometimes even potentially unexplainable. I, personally, am fascinated by such cases. My experience, however, was pretty explainable, come to think of it.

The False Mirror, 1928  by René Magritte. Courtesy of: www.renemagritte.org

It all started on a bus journey within my dream (actually my dream was much longer but this is the point at which things started to get weird). I was coming back home and so I wanted to get out at my station. I was ready to finish my dream and wake up. And yes, I was quite aware of the fact I was dreaming but this didn't really bother me at all. However, I was continuously conscious about two sides of a coin, i.e., dream and reality. I started walking downstairs (the bus was in English style even though the dream took action in Poland, a country from which I come from). But then something happened to me and I felt super tired. So tired in fact I couldn't force my body to move. On the other hand, my bus had no problems with moving and so I missed my station and now I was on a way to the unknown. All I could think about was "Oh no, I'm gonna have to spend more money on commuting now."

The bus stopped again and this time I was one of the first ones to leave. Yet at this point another strange thing happened - my vision became blurry. I tried to focus my eyes again but it just wouldn't work. Nobody around me seemed to notice that anything was wrong with me. Some woman said "Come on, if we are gonna make it in an hour, we need to start moving now." I told her I can't see and asked if she would be kind enough to help me find my suitcase and bag. Everything around me seemed white and after a moment my mind came to the conclusion it must be snowy. All of the sudden  the whole world transformed from summer into a winter wonderland. I grabbed a bit of snow into my hands - it was cold, freezing. I smudged it on my face hoping that the sudden temperature change would somehow help with my impaired vision. I could only see about a half of the dream world and I soon realised that the little part left was also falty. I kept seeing this lightbulb on a straight stick. Wherever my eyes went, the lamp somehow followed. It started to frustrate me. 

My dream crashed like a computer game. The sounds and the narrative were still working perfectly but the image froze. My only worry was "Why is it taking so long for it to reboot?".

Matrix. Courtesy of: Dream Catcher Reality.

I took my phone out and tried to unlock it. Blindly. I felt the main button under my fingers yet I couldn't see my phone, only the ubiquitous haunted lightbulb. I knew the phone won't help me. And at this point, I started to get worried. I decided to change the space but I couldn't move quickly. Firstly, because I was semi-blind. Secondly, because whatever I could see didn't fit in with the surroundings. Where I saw the lightbulb, I slowed down afraid to bumb into something, but nothing would be there. However, in the places I would see nothing suddenly things would start to appear. 

Once I saw a blurry black shadow which my mind labelled a windmill. Lots of people seemed to climb the hill towards it. It was quite a giant windmill. 

Another time, all of my vision disappered - there was only darkness with red flashes that reminded me of neural networks. I didn't like it there so I came back to the land of white.

Neural network. Mine was red. Picture courtesy of Interia.

And then finally I saw something sharply. Initially I didn't recognised it. I guess I was just really shocked by the fact that I can finally see something. It took me a moment to realise I awakened and was looking at the paintings above my boyfriend's bed. My eyes were wide open and dry, and my head was hurting as if somebody just hit me with a hammer. 

Then everything started making sense. I knew what happened. I got stuck between a dream and reality. My mind was awakening slower than my body. My body was awaken when my mind was still in a dream.

I used pencil and my phone editing app to represent my confusion with the ubiquitous lightbulb.
I guess I used the man as a sort of archetypical detective trying to crack the case. 

The thought amused me, and once I knew I haven't lost my sight forever and my brain wasn't in any way damaged (these thoughts crossed my mind while I was still in my dream), I started texting people and describing them my experience. In the end, I found it rather interesting and extraordinary.  It felt as if I accidentally came upon some secret power of my mind that I was not aware of before. 

My jacket - "The Windmill"

"The Snow"

The ubiquitous lightbulb

I'm just glad my mind decided to stick with the snow theme and didn't turn my black jacket into some kind of dementor. Thank you, my lovely innocent mind. Let's stick to windmills. Because it definitely looks like a windmill (rolls her eyes).

My sister, a psychologist, found it exciting and fascinating. Meanwhile, one other of my friends informed me I had "a very imaginative sleep paralysis" and, after hearing my computer game analogy, proposed it as an evidence that we are all living in the matrix.

Was it a sleep paralysis? Or reversed sleep paralysis?

The reason why I am thinking about this distinction is because in all sleep paralysis cases that my friends described to me, they thought they were awaken. In the same time they weren't able to move and they saw creatures from their dream coming into their room as if it was real. In my case I was fully dreaming and I just didn't realise that my body is awaken - in particular, my eyes.

I wonder how often do people get stuck between reality and dream? Do they always know something strange is happening? Can they always differentiate between the two? I know one of my friends didn't and so the whole paralysis state was really traumatic for her. 

One other of my friends had a different kind of an uncanny dream experience in which he was stuck in a loop (here, the use of uncanny is really fitting as Freud was also writing of repetition). He would get up, start getting ready for school, then the dream would reset and he would find himself in bed once again. He got ready a couple of times, with each reset doing a bit more and getting further, till at last when his actual alarm rang, he couldn't tell the difference anymore between whether this time it was real or just another layer of a never-ending dreamy loop. Inception comes to mind. 

Inception. Courtesy of: Pinterest. 

Have you, my invisible reader, experienced anything similar? Or perhaps, you had encountered something completely different? In any case, I would love to hear about it. 

Yours, 

-A.