People often hallucinate creepy things — shadowy forms, monsters, and aliens — in their bedrooms
Photo: Sergey Mironov/Getty Images/iStockphoto Brian Sharpless woke up in the middle of the night with the haunting feeling that he wasn’t alone. Slowly, his bedroom door creaked open, like a hand was lightly touching it. Moonlight from the hallway window streamed through the open door. He wondered if he was getting robbed. Then Sharpless discovered something even more alarming: He couldn’t move. He lay paralyzed as he watched a dark form with a long, serpentine neck creep through the doorway.
How common is sleep paralysis? As weird as waking up to hallucinations sounds, the experts I talked to say it’s more common than you might think. An estimated 8 percent of the worldwide population has experienced it, according to Sharpless, and that’s a conservative estimate. The number jumps to 28 percent for college students and 32 percent for psychiatric patients.
“The more complicated you make a computer or the more complicated you make a car, the more things can go wrong,” Sharpless explained. In sleep paralysis, you wake up before your brain stem, which stops your muscles from moving while you’re asleep, realizes it’s awake. As a result, it continues sending neurotransmitters that tell your muscles to freeze. Scientists still don’t know why this happens.
It doesn’t stop at seeing imaginary things. You can feel them too. Sharpless says that, just as the brain can create imaginary sights and sounds, it can create imaginary physical sensations, too. People say that the monster in their room sits on them, and they can sense the pressure on their chest. Sharpless notes that the anxiety from seeing monsters may create or add to this feeling, since anxiety can cause chest pain.
Is sleep paralysis harmful to your health? Can you die from it? “Other than that it scares the crap out of you, it’s not dangerous,” Breus told me. Still, your reaction to sleep paralysis could cause problems. Some people who get recurring sleep paralysis take stimulants at night or try other methods to stay awake, which can be pretty unhealthy. In one 19th-century case, a man paid his manservant to watch him all night in order to wake him up if he got sleep paralysis.
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