Sleep disorders seem to be common for autistics. Insomnia, funky sleep-wake cycles, completely unpredictable sleep cycles, extreme night-owlishness... you name it, we've got it
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On sleep paralysis
anonymous
February 28 2014, 06:04:42 UTC
People are usually shocked by things they don't experience especially with the word 'paralysis' in it. I get Todd's paralysis after I have a seizure and it's pretty routine for me. I have had hallucinations accompany sleep paralysis though and those are always nightmarish scenarios, usually about being asphyxiated. Not the best thing to experience before you start the day. The blindness is still scary though. I suppose I rely on my vision a lot and would hate to lose it.
Re: On sleep paralysischaoticidealismFebruary 28 2014, 07:02:15 UTC
Lots of people who have regular episodes of sleep paralysis find it very disturbing; they wake up with their fight-or-flight response active, but they can't move. For all practical purposes, their experiences are completely different from mine--"paralyzed and panicking" versus "might as well still be asleep". I don't go into fight-or-flight mode, for some reason. I don't even know if what I experience can properly be called sleep paralysis, if it comes without panic or hallucinations. Maybe a better description than "sleep paralysis" would be to say that I'm aware of my surroundings before I wake up enough to move?
I've had sleep paralysis occasionally. The first few times, it was frightening, because it came with frightening dream-images (I don't want to call them hallucinations; this happens when one IS, in some sense, still partly asleep), but I'd read about it before it happened, so I quickly became more matter-of-fact about it.
I'm terrible at lucid dreaming, though. I've tried it, but as soon as my brain realizes it's asleep, it seems to find this alarming and jerks awake. I used to have a lot of semi-lucid states, where I would make certain decisions thinking "This is just a dream, so [strange or dangerous behavior] is okay," but I would somehow not make the inference from "This is just a dream" to "I can become fully lucid and control the dream environment if I want to." The latter just somehow doesn't occur to me, and in the past few years I haven't even been semi-lucid much.
My brain can manufacture quite a lot of detail, including things that you're not "supposed" to be able to do while you're dreaming, like reading text and
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I have had hallucinations accompany sleep paralysis though and those are always nightmarish scenarios, usually about being asphyxiated. Not the best thing to experience before you start the day.
The blindness is still scary though. I suppose I rely on my vision a lot and would hate to lose it.
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I'm terrible at lucid dreaming, though. I've tried it, but as soon as my brain realizes it's asleep, it seems to find this alarming and jerks awake. I used to have a lot of semi-lucid states, where I would make certain decisions thinking "This is just a dream, so [strange or dangerous behavior] is okay," but I would somehow not make the inference from "This is just a dream" to "I can become fully lucid and control the dream environment if I want to." The latter just somehow doesn't occur to me, and in the past few years I haven't even been semi-lucid much.
My brain can manufacture quite a lot of detail, including things that you're not "supposed" to be able to do while you're dreaming, like reading text and ( ... )
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