Sleep Paralysis: Petrifying Hallucinations, Waking Nightmares, Silent Screams

Scientifically, SP occurs when a person becomes aware before the REM (rapid eye movement) cycle has finished. Normally during REM sleep, when the most vivid dreams occur, you cannot move or speak. It’s the body’s way of protecting itself from acting out dreams and hurting itself. Everyone experiences REM sleep, but not everyone will become aware during it. Those who do may have SP, and their experiences vary. For Leah, it starts with a buzzing coming from inside her head.

“You know when your teeth chatter? Imagine that but times a hundred,” she says. “It starts in my teeth and spreads through my body and then the whole room.”

She says that after what feels like hours, but is probably in reality only minutes, she starts to hear wind swooshing, which also starts within her body and then moves out into the room. Soon everything around her appears to be caught in a windstorm. At this point, she will either slip back to sleep or things will continue into an episode like the one described above, the most intense SP episode she has ever experienced.

“It’s like Alice in Wonderland falling down the rabbit hole,” she explains. “It’s otherworldly, surreal, like you are walking around in a dream.”

Leah’s first experience with sleep paralysis that she can remember was when she was 7 years old. She describes it as an “extremely real nightmare” and she can recall it in detail.

The second of three renditions of artist Henry Fuseli’s “The Nightmare” depicting an episode of sleep paralysis.

“There was an old, gothic, really scary castle in the middle of my street where the road should be and one of my dolls gradually turned into a woman, and she was talking to me beside my bed,” she says. “I know it wasn’t real, but I remember it as something that happened to me, not a dream.”

The shadows and the voices don’t scare Leah anymore, although they’re not something she tends to bring up in conversation.

“You can’t tell someone you hear voices and feel like you are floating out of your physical body at night without them looking at you like you’re a lunatic,” she says.

The handful of studies on SP are hard to come by, and provided you know what it is you’re suffering from, you probably wont find them.

“It took me years to realize what was happening to me,” Leah says. “I would Google things like ‘teeth vibrating’ and ‘teeth buzzing’ and the only thing I’d get was symptoms of tinnitus. Another time I Googled ‘hearing voices in your dreams’ and I ended up on a page for schizophrenia. The more I looked the more scared I got.”

It wasn’t until a chance reading of a blog by a man who claimed to have had an out-of-body experience related to sleep paralysis that Leah had a name to go by. The symptoms described hers exactly.