Dreams???awake Lucid dreams???or just lossing it??

I very rarely have dreams (or that I can at least remember) and when I do they end up paralysing me mentally for a few days.....However the weirdest experiences I want to share with my fellow members is that on probablly half a dozen times I had been lying down in darkness or sitting idle in an armchair on balmey nites outside where I have been overwhelmed by this humungous weight on top of me that pins me down and I have no energy or force to get out of it or stand up....I can hardly talk or move a millemetre thats the intensity that I physically feel on top of me and I feel it increasing in increments. I break out in cold sweats and the only thing i can hear is my heart beating erratically(just like a panic attack which i know of first handedly)The pinning down is real, like an invisible person doing it to me,I have had this experince like I said about six times with no pattern of my days events being the same in every episode, as its sudden.Fortunately they last around 5mins no more than ten but it feels like an eternity. I eventually ended up talkin to compassionate people and tryed to research it but have had various conclusions such as lucid dreaming..??? and one person also attained it to defining it as what they call "The Shadow"..which makes kinda sense as I have read the theories of "Carl Jung". who has discussed this simmilar occurence in his writings. I Thank you all and would appreciate any one who may have experienced this.Bless you all!!!

Hi there,

I have had similar experiences to this. It sounds a lot like sleep paralysis, this can do the sort of things that you are experiencing. In a sense it is like your mind is awake but your body is asleep. You can't move and you panic not realising why and sort of hallucinate imagining that someone or something is there holding or pinning you down which is about the only rational thing you can think of why you are unable to move when actually your body is asleep. It normally happens to me when I start to wake up in the morning but not sure of it happening suddenly??

It does sound like sleep paralysis. There are a couple of books written about it and I am sure you can do a search and find plenty stuff on the internet. If you are interested in lucid dreaming you can learn to use sleep paralysis as a spring board so to speak. If your lucky you might even have an OBE. You have to learn to get over your fear of it first. Wrestling With Ghosts is a good book.
I hope this has helped, Shoe

I have had a few of these dreams, and I know exactly what you mean by the strong feeling of oppression and helplessness of not being able to move a muscle. It's been awhile, but as I recall in each case where I had this paralysis, I was dreaming THAT I WAS SLEEPING (for example, I dreamed that I walk into a motel room, crawled in bed and went to sleep). And furthermore, this paralysis occurred when I was waking up in the sleep in my dream (that is, not waking up from my actual sleep!). It makes me wonder. Perhaps there is some kind of special circuitry in the brain that specifically addresses your mental state at the moment you fall asleep, such that when you wake up this mental state is reestablished through this circuitry (or might I say "activation memory"). Perhaps the same circuitry is activated or invoke twice in these unusual cases, but because you are in effect still dreaming your body is indeed paralyzed but another part of your brain thinks that it shouldn't be! Pretty wild, huh? :-)