How Sleep Paralysis Works, or The Worst Thing That Can Happen While You're Sleeping

For as long as people have been sleeping, about half of us have probably suffered from sleep paralysis. Thanks to an unusual fluke in the sleep cycle, the sufferer feels paralyzed and consumed by fear as something on their chest tries to kill them.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
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(00:23):
it professional, make it beautiful. Welcome to you Stuff you
should Know Frondhouse Stuff Works dot Com. Hey, and welcome
to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark with Charles W. Chuck Bryant,
and Jerry is over there. So the stuff you should

(00:45):
know the podcast. Something large on my chest. It's the devil.
It's the devil is hey, Chuck, you okay, what happened? Uh?
You were just having what's known sleep paralysis, buddy, whoa,
it was close to it, but my touch, my gentle touch,

(01:06):
broke you out of it. That actually sees me. I'm
just kidding people. I was acting. That was stagecraft. Yeah,
and we were well, we weren't debating because I was wrong,
but we were talking about whether or not we had
done this yet we have not. Uh like I said
it was wrong. We've bitten around the edges of it

(01:27):
so much they feel like, yeah, I feel like if
you pulled every little bit of sleep paralysis out Of
all the episodes where we've talked at it, talked at it,
we talked at it, not about it, you go away
sleep paralysis. Well, the most recent one was either Exploding
Head or night terrors, um, and we specifically stopped talking

(01:49):
about sleep paralysis so that we could save it for
the actual episode. Those are always good ones. So finally
here it is like we'll be on an interesting train
of thought and say no, no, no no, no stop. Yeah,
that's exactly what we did too. I remember the first
time this came up was in trans magnetic stimulation, the
thinking cap one. Yeah. Well, it's pretty interesting stuff and

(02:09):
it's been around a while. You know. UM, the word nightmare,
we use that to describe like bad dreams. It's actually
incorrect usage. Nightmare was originally intended specifically to describe sleep
paralysis because night means night, then mar a or mayor
and may e r e. That extra e in there

(02:32):
really messes it up. But it's old English, so I
don't know if I pronounced it correctly. Or not. Neither
does anyone else alive, so it doesn't matter. But that
um that specifically means an incubus, and an incubus was
a type of devil, like the one that was just
sitting on your chest, A male, a sex craze male
demon who would well, I'm just making assumptions here, who

(02:55):
would come to you while you were sleeping and sit
on your chest and maybe kill you, try to kill
you and you couldn't do anything about it. Uh. Yeah,
I'm into I'm into the succubus and the incubus. I'm
I'm open minded. But that's exactly right. The incubus is
the male version of the succubus, or the old sex
crazed tag that sits on your chest. So this, this

(03:16):
whole idea of of this has been around for a
very long time. It's steeped in the supernatural, and we're
only just now starting to figure out what sleep paralysis is.
And to me, it's even more interesting now that we
understand it a little more. Yeah, I did not know
the exact definition of incubus until this research, and now

(03:37):
I hate that band even more. Yeah, I think sex
mail demons. I wonder if that's what they were going forth.
They were just like that sounds cool. No, I'm sure
they knew well. I'm hats off to them for realizing that. Yeah,
you know, making a medieval era. Nod In might have

(03:59):
just thought it sounded cool. Who knows whom you're thinking?
You're right, I clearly know nothing about good band names.
That's not true. I thought you always come up with
good bad names. I don't know if other people agree
they're good to me? Has someone been No? Okay, no,
no one's talking no, no, no I should say about that. No.

(04:21):
But my own band name is not No, I like it.
But El Cheapo we're named after a gas station. Where
El Cheapos are I know, in the South, like South
Carolina and like I've seen him in Savannah coastal Southeast.
I thought that was a coincidence, they're l cheap. No, no,
it is. It is a coincidence, it is, But people

(04:42):
send me pictures of El cheap out gas stations. Okay,
the light in So you're not named after a gas
station because then we would be x on Mobile because
that's a great band. Everybody loves. What have they ever done? Nothing?
All right? So, um, the the strict definition. I guess
it's not strict, but the definition we're going to give.

(05:04):
And where did you get this article? This is good?
Oh yeah, we better shout this out. This is straight
out of the British Psychological Society's journal. I could tell
it was British it was, yeah, because they say Wildston
stuff like that. Way off. Um, but it was written
by Julia Santamorrow and Christopher Cee French, and I believe
they're both sleep paralysis experts. I know for sure Professor

(05:27):
French is because I also saw a video of him
on vimeo, UM, just basically talking about this and he
had a sweater on. This said expert pretty much. Uh
So sleep paralysis how they define it, and I agree,
it's it's a period of transient, consciously experienced paralysis, either
when going to sleep or waking up. And um, I

(05:49):
think I was under the misguided notion that it was
almost always in the transition of waking up. And it
sounds like it's even more common when you're going uh
into sleep and that is the hypnagogic stage as opposed
to the hypno pompic stage coming out. So I think

(06:10):
I don't know, Well, I got that impression, but I
think I was wrong. I had the same impression. Yeah,
probably came from us each other. So have you ever
had sleep paralysis? No? Um, but I did want to
mention that I did. I told you I had an
exploding head syndrome experience. After we did that show, like

(06:31):
two or three nights later, it happened to me for
the first time ever. Yeah, I was worried about getting
this last night. I don't want this. Well that that's
a bad way to go about it. Yeah, because I
will get it in your head. We should say it's actually,
like you said, it's kind of common, right. Well, I
mean it depends on who you ask. I've seen everywhere
from a third a half of people that might experience

(06:52):
this at least once. But I think as far as
chronic uh, chronically, it's not nearly that common. No, it's
something like, um, do we have stats on that. Yeah,
they're in here somewhere something like three percent, three to
six percent of the general population experience what's called isolated

(07:17):
sleep paralysis. And that's if you don't have an arcalepsy. Yeah.
That was the big thing I didn't realize is that
sleep paralysis is a major symptom of narcolepsy, which we
should do. And that came up and I was like, well,
let's just replaced sleep paralysis as the show we gotta do. Yeah.
I had a great aunt, great aunt Laura from Mississippi

(07:37):
that had an arcolepsy No really, Yeah, and I didn't
get to see her a lot in life. This was
my father's mother's sister. Um, but I remember very specifically,
my brother and I go in like one time to Jackson,
Mississippi or Tupelow, I think where she lived when I
was like twelve, and she would do that, you know,

(07:57):
she would nod off while talking to us and back
up and finish her sentence. So it was like she
wasn't even aware that she doted off. No, And um,
of course, you know, I thought it was funny at
the time. It was a little kid, But I'm sure
there's a lot more to it than that. Sure, it
can probably be quite dangerous, I imagine. So yeah, I
would guess kind of hard to come by a driver's
license if you are diagnosed with narcolepsy. I don't think

(08:21):
Laura drove. Yeah, she was one of those that probably
wouldn't have driven anyway. You know, she's like like a
Strickland type. You know, I don't want to drive, Come
pick me up. She was just like we had to
take the keys for my grandmother, that kind of thing
when she was drinking. No, when she was when she
was got to an age where she could drive safely. Yeah,

(08:42):
it was she was were like, Grandma can't drive anymore.
You know. In Japan they have these very prominent like
magnets or stickers that you put on a car. Um.
One's like a triangle. I can't remember what the other
one is, but one means kind of um, but no,
not at all. It's UM. One me this is a
new driver, like usually a teen driver, so everybody steer clear.

(09:05):
And then the other means this is a very elderly driver,
so everybody's steer clear. I would love one of those
in my car. It's like, I don't understand why this
isn't universal. Yeah, you know, it makes perfect sense. I
would like one just to keep people away from me,
just to leave you alone. Yeah, you put on like, like, uh,
what was the guy's name from Phantasm? I don't know,

(09:27):
Angus something. Yeah, you put on a little wig like his.
It's a little skull cap while you're driving, just to
really drive at home. H that was a an accidental pun.
Just now. I didn't catch it. I said, you put
it on while you're driving just to drive it home,
to drive the point home. Yeah, And I made a
really good accidental pun when we were talking about hunting

(09:50):
and I said, my dad didn't hunt. I said, it's
not like he wasn't he was trying to take a stand,
or he wasn't trying to take a stand as in
a deer stand. Totally miss that, all right. So the
deal with sleep paralysis is how you know that you're
experiencing it is, uh, you can open your eyes, you're conscious,

(10:10):
but you are aware that you can't you can't move,
you can't move your body. I mean, it kind of
varies between severity and individual experience, but the common thing
is is that you can't move. You feel paralyzed. Sometimes
you can't even make a noise. It's that bad. And
and the problem with not being able to make a
noise is that it particularly sucks in instances like this

(10:31):
because you want to scream. Because most of the time
when you are experiencing sleep paralysis, you are in the
grips of terror like you wouldn't ever normally experience. You're
scared out of your mind. You have an impending sense
of death. Um. And you have all sorts of hallucinations,
basically of every every sense could conceivably hallucinate. Right. You

(10:54):
have auditory hallucinations where you hear something in the room
with you. There's I should say, there's also like a
sense of presence, like another thing. Yeah, there's something in
the room. Usually it's something that means you harm, so
you sentence presents. You might also hear it. You probably
also see it, and it can be anything from like
that succubus or incubus sitting on your chest, um, both

(11:17):
the things. You're getting a little kinky, right, You're like,
you're both here. I didn't think you'd find out about
each other. And you'll let me wake my wife. But
I can't move right, So you're just sitting there laying
like this is getting weird. She's gonna be so mad.
Uh uh. And then uh, you can smell them, you
can taste them. There's something called gustatory hallucinations. Um. And

(11:42):
then also the sense of feeling like moving and um
of pressure on your chest, like you feel all this
stuff like you're experiencing it. Yeah, and um, I think
pressure is one of the big ones, like someone sitting
on you, uh and not allowing you to move so
um our own. Robert Lamb wrote an article about this

(12:04):
oner site too, not about the full thing, but about
like why is it? Uh, why are they demons usually?
And that was kind of one of my questions, that
why is it usually a malevolent spirit? And why isn't it,
you know whatever, some fantasy which is like a rod
saying like hey, you want to go play cats or

(12:26):
something like that, that would be yours? No, okay, isn't
he like the most hated man on the planet now
for some reason? Oh? I mean he kind of went
his end of his career. He was not very well
Like why what did you do? I didn't pick up
on that he did a lot of steroids and lied
about it for years. Oh gotcha, Yeah, gotcha. He was
like a repeat offender that consistently was like doing steroids.

(12:49):
I see, I don't know why these drug testers saying
I did. They're like you have a syringe in your arm, um,
Robert said. And you know, he didn't like make the
U up, but his research indicated that um, someone's beliefs
going into it might conjure up these negative connotations. And

(13:10):
when the experience itself is marked by like a pulse
rate increase in labored breathing sometimes and these, it doesn't
lend itself to like a good experience, right right, because
um so, Professor French concurs with Robert right. He's he
was saying, like the fear being usually a hallmark of

(13:31):
the sleep paralysis. Paralysis experience is not just you're afraid
because you can't move and there's something in the room
with you, that's part of it. But he's saying, you're
a migdala is also hyperactive, right then, So you're experiencing
fear on like its own terms. It's like its own
freestanding symptom that that even if like this, even if

(13:54):
it was lucky the lepre Con, you'd still be super
afraid that he was in the room with you kind
of thing, because you're you're like that region of your
brain that's that's delivering these jolts of fear to you
is working over time. Then it becomes that bad leprechn movie.
Yeah yeah, I was she in that. Yeah, yeah, I
never saw those I never did either. Um. Well, it

(14:17):
also said speaking of movies that like your own, like
what kind of pop culture you're into, Like all this
stuff can play into it because they are. It's sort
of like an extension of a dream. So, um, if
it's you know, agitated by like labored breathing and rapid
pulse rate and a nightmare, then it's not going to
be uh, you know, a rod floating in onto your

(14:40):
chick with the baseball, unless you're super scared of him,
then it might be. So let's take a break, man,
then we'll come back and talk about some of like
the cultural interpretations of what the heck is going on here. Okay,
it sounds good. Yeah, so Chuck, remember we were talking

(15:18):
about like how nightmare is like an old English term
for sleep paralysis. It's been around for a while and
there's and it's basically it seems to be universal and
so since it's an interpreted by the person based on
like what their culture believes in. Um, there's been like

(15:39):
different interpretations of sleep paralysis throughout history and cultures around
the world, and they're pretty interesting. Yeah, and I and
most of them the common thread here is that ah,
and even in modern terms, they're described this way sometimes,
but definitely in the olden days, it's almost always some
sort of supernatural thing like a witch or norwe I'm sorry.

(16:03):
Newfoundland they called it the old Hag, which is creepy
just hearing that. Uh. And China the ghost oppression because
apparently the Chinese believe that you're you're very vulnerable your
soul is when you're asleep. So I think that's sort
of the common thread here there all these countries. There

(16:24):
was I took an anthropology class and I can't remember
what it was talking about in general, but one of
the things that seemed to pop up around the world
was something called spirit intrusion, Like when you were sleeping,
your spirit got up and walked around, and if like
the tether between your spirit and your body was severed,
you were like anybody could come and possess you. And

(16:45):
it was a big like that. That was a big
explanation for mental illness in cultures around the world. So
I thought that was interesting that that was also an
explanation for um, for sleep paralysis too. Yeah. I think
it kind of depends on whatever the the leading ghoul
is in your country in region, because in Europe. Of

(17:06):
course in the fifteen hundreds through the seventeen hundreds, it's
gonna be witches. You were witch ridden. Uh. That was
at one of the witch trials in seventy seven. Uh.
This woman testified her about her husband in bed and
he said he was laying there stiff, barely drawing breath,
and he woke up and he said, my Lord Jesus
helped me, Oh fiery, which is took me to Mara

(17:28):
Maros and they put six hundred weight of salt on me,
which we're laughing at. But if you break it down,
that has all the hallmarks of all the different hallucinations,
whether it's traveling or the weight on your chest or
you know, the all these tactics. Yeah, hallucinations like wrapped

(17:48):
up into one nightmare with exclamation points. Yeah, there weren't
in Uh. I thought this is pretty interesting. In um St. Lucia,
the Caribbean island, they have a term called Cookema and
they think that it's a little unbaptized babies who are
haunting the area that are that are causing sleep paralysis

(18:11):
or doing all sorts of horrible things to you while
you're sleeping. But you're not sleeping, we should be. I
want to restate this again because it's a little confusing. Yeah,
when you're experiencing sleep paralysis, you're laying there and your
eyes are open, and you know that something's in the
room with you. Maybe it comes over and climbs on
your chest. When it does, you can feel its breath
in your face. You can smell and taste its rank breath.

(18:36):
You can feel the pressure of it laying on your chest.
It's staring you in the eyes, and you cannot move.
Not only can you not move, you can't make a
sound as much as you're trying to scream your head
off because you were scared out of your mind. And
this experience can last from a few seconds to I've
seen up to ten minutes, and from anecdotally, each second

(19:01):
of those ten minutes feels like a decade because you're
just so scared and it's just going on and on
and on. So um, it makes total sense that you
would say, ah, there was a spirit in my room
last night. Yeah, because if not, you're you think I'm
losing my mind, right, So let's blame it on. I mean,
we'll get into some of the other reasons, but blame

(19:23):
it on something else, right, Like in in Japan kind
of shabari um is now they believe that it's evil
spirits messing with you. Same thing in Korea with how
we knew Alita, how we Nulita? Yeah, I thought that
was pretty good pronunciation. And like we said, though, these
are all sort of versions of the same thing, um,

(19:45):
no matter where you go, which I always find interesting,
like these sort of universal regional things. And then most
recently though the and this is where I think we
first came into sleep paralysis with the trans cranial me
that stimulation episode. Was that, um, it's to blame for

(20:06):
basically every UFO abduction account. Oh yeah, was that where
we talked about it? For sure? Um, they have done
studies and they found that if you, ah, I think,
if you believe in alien abductions, if that's part of
your belief system, then you're more or did they do

(20:26):
the study of people that experienced sleep paralysis and all
of them believed you know, maybe in UFOs. I think
they did the reverse of people who have report having
been abducted by UFOs they experienced sleep paralysis. Okay, they
have a higher frequency of experiencing sleep paralysis so they
just the people study this and they just fold their
arms again. Okay, right, yeah it was an alien but there,

(20:49):
I mean apparently in the UFO lore, the sleep paralysis
has been accounted for. So like you when you're abducted,
you remember being paralyzed before and after. Um, but you
they wipe your memory of the actual like abduction out,
but they leave the sleep paralysis. And like I remember

(21:09):
an X files. I think when Fox Moulder's sister was taken,
like she was levitated off the bed and like just
stiff as a board, floats out the window. That's classic
sleep paralysis symptoms where you can't move and yet you
still feel like you're floating and you're moving your levitating,
or that there's six hundredweight of salt being put on
your chest. Um, I love salt, so that might not

(21:32):
be a bad thing. He'd be like, this is delicious
and terrifying. It up towards my tongue, that that'd be
the part that was making you crazy. I couldn't get
to it. Uh. They say it usually occurs when you
are lying on your back in bed, although it can
occur in any position at all. Because one of the

(21:53):
accounts this article is school because they have first hand accounts.
One of the guys was laying on his stomach and
he felt the de and the incubus I think on
his back um or maybe it was a succubus. I'm
not sure. Um. And you can break it. Sometimes it
happens on its own. Sometimes, Uh, you can break it

(22:14):
on your own on purpose, they recommend, and this is
a good idea. I think they recommend to try and
like instead of saying I gotta get up and run
out of here, they say to try to like just
blink or like lift your little finger or just any
conscious movement that you can get can break that thing. Yeah,
And apparently the moment you do that, the spell is broken. Yeah.

(22:37):
Um is how it's been put forever. Um. Herman Melville
was the first, I think to write about this, and
Mobi dick Ishmael recounts sleep paralysis again. Yeah. And then
I think twenty five or fifty years later, the first time,
um it shows up in the medical literature. Silas Weir Mitchell,
who we know from The Exploding Heads and right. He

(23:00):
also he also described that for the first time to
this guy was like knocking out the paras omnia is
left and right, um, but they both used this terminology
that the spell is broken. All it takes is just
the slightest stir and and the sleep prowsis is over with.
But the problem is you can't move, you can't make
a sound. Um. They said to even try to clearing

(23:22):
your throat. Yeah, but even that can be challenging. But
supposedly if you can even get just a little bit
going you you wake yourself up a little bit, and
then you can do it a little more and more
and more, and then all of a sudden you're screaming
and you've woken yourself up. Or if you can make
a sound or a signal or something to get your
partner help, something to notice that you are in the

(23:45):
midst of sleep prowesses, all they have to do is
just like touch you and it brings you back to
reality or this reality. Yeah, and it's not one of
those things where you know it's dangerous to wake someone
up experiencing sleep proalysis, right, and it's like totally fine. Yeah,
that's the other thing about it is as terrifying and
horrifying and just what a horrible experience it is. It's
physiologically it's harmless aside from raising your blood pressure. Yeah,

(24:09):
I mean I guess you could always like trigger up
cardiac arrest or something maybe. But right, well, supposedly it mimics, um,
having a heart attack in some ways, so you actually
could be having a heart attack and and think it
a sleep paralysis or um. I think it also mimics
epilepsy in some ways. Um. But if it is just

(24:32):
actual sleep paralysis, it's harmless. Well yeah, and I know
we did mention this. It might have been the trans
magnetic transcranial magnetic yeah, yeah, simulation where they recommend one
of the things is to just tell or it might
have been night terrors. Tell people just to like learn

(24:52):
to embrace it and go with it and then it
doesn't because sometimes it can be a joyful experience. It's
not always tear. Yeah, and maybe if you roll with it,
you can control it a little bit more. It was
it was exploding head syndrome. That's just just learning that
it's actually harmless, the same thing like let people. Some
people just got over it immediately, um, and then other people,

(25:15):
um yeah with this have learned to actually enjoy like
the feeling of levitating or floating, and it all comes
down to hearing that it's harmless, and hearing that it's
harmless relieves stress, and stress is actually what brings both
of those things on. So they're related in some way,
and we'll we'll get down to the scientific nitty gritty
after this break. Huh chuck, sir, if you're trying to

(25:50):
eat better, all right, tune. What's what's really going on here?
Old hags aside? Uh, well, I guess we should talk
about narcolepsy a little bit because this is one of

(26:13):
the I guess side effects of narcolepsy. Um. There are
actually a couple of them, sleep paralysis and then what's
called vivid hypnogogic hallucinations, which is when you're falling asleep
like we talked about. And apparently if you're narcileptic about
seventeen of narcoleptic or people who have narcolepsy, is it

(26:34):
wrong to say narcoleptic? Probably? Probably. I think with any
any condition or disease, don't like identify the person, right, Yeah,
it's somebody with it, that's right, So somebody with narcailepsy.
And I want to hear from you people. By the way,
some people who who have NARCOLEPSI will be like, hey,
I'm an arcileptic. I don't care, and other people will
say like, kudos, right for saying people with narcilepsy, UH

(26:58):
seventeen experienced sleep paralysis. If you are stricken with narcolepsy,
experience those vivid hypnogogic hallucinations and UM, it pretty much
as individual as far as UH is how much you're
going to have these and how much you experience it,
whether you're have narcolepsy or not. UM. But if you

(27:22):
are non narcalyptic in that population, which is most people, UM,
twenty to of those folks apparently will experience it at
least one pretty wide range. Some people experiencing experience it
very frequently. UM. And apparently if you have basically chronic UM, Yeah,

(27:45):
I think it's called severe and chronic sleep paralysis. So
severe is UM where it happens like multiple times in
a night, and then chronic is where that happens over
a period of six months. If you're one of those
poor s obs who has chronics of your sleep paralysis,
this can happen to you like up to twelve times
or more in a night. Yeah, because when you get

(28:07):
back to sleep, it will happen all over again, right, Yeah,
So that was one of the things when you're when
if you're moving a finger, blinking an eye, or making
a sound and you wake yourself up, you want to
actually get out of bed and get up and move around,
basically shake it off, because if you don't, you can
fall back asleep and the same thing is going to
happen again and again. Then even more mind boggling. Is

(28:29):
this one of the other traits of um sleep paralysis
or what it called false awakenings, right, which is some
straight up inception stuff where you think you're awake and
screaming but you're not. Right, then you wake up and realize, oh,
I was dreaming that I was awake and experiencing sleep paralysis.
So it's a bit of a mind bender. It is

(28:50):
including that these false awakenings, according to Professor French in
that video, can can be several layers deep. So when
you have an about of sleep paralysis and you finally
scream and wake up, you realize, oh I was dreaming, right,
you might experience it again and then you do the

(29:12):
same thing and you you you go through this multiple
times until you finally actually do wake up. But you
can go through sleep paralysis over and over again in
different layers of a dream. Yeah, and then you get
up and you go to work at your stupid cubicle,
and no one around he has any idea that the
living hell that you're experiencing or just the amazing journey
you've just been on with a rod. Uh. One thing

(29:34):
that really stinks is if you know to combat it,
like you said, to get up and fully wake yourself up,
that that could screw you. If you have a hard
time falling back asleep, you might be up for the night. Uh.
In this one person in here describe the feedback loop
of stress. A lot of times stresses what brings brings
it on, and then it becomes this self fulfilling prophecy

(29:54):
that you're stressed out about what's going to happen, which
makes it happen and you're just thinking, oh no, no,
not not again, not again, not again, And of course
that's when it happens, right right, right, So, like the
stress is messing up your sleep pattern and that's where
the whole thing comes from. Right. So, the first two
guys who were described in the Medical Nature by Silas,
we're Mitchell Um as having sleep paralysis. We're actually healthy.

(30:18):
But it was people with narcilepsy who ultimately lead to
basically the solving of the mystery of what sleep paralysis is.
And one of the characteristics of narcilepsy is something called
sleep on st r e M periods. Yeah that they
think that may be the key there. I I think
it's the key. Yeah, So what that is? Uh, you know,

(30:39):
we've talked a lot about r e M sleep that
usually happens about an hour or at least an hour
or more after you've fallen asleep. And what's happening here
is is so imp can we call it that? Yes,
sleep on st r EM periods is when you're experiencing
this r e M before that hour or so has passed,

(31:03):
Like right as you're falling asleep, you go straight into
the r M sleep. So, like I think in my
own private Idaho either Keyana Reeves or River Phoenix when
they like fell asleep, yeah, one of those said an arcolepsy, right, yeah,
one of them think so um, like their their eyes
kind of fluttered, okay, So like that was a perfect

(31:24):
perfect portrayal of narcilepsy because your eyes would flutter during
ri e M sleep, and it would happen immediately if
you had sudden nonset R e M periods. Right. So
the idea that somebody can fall asleep and immediately go
into R E M sleep rather than go through the
sleep cycles and the stages like you're supposed to, that
apparently is what accounts for is associated very strongly with

(31:51):
episodes of sleep paralysis with people with narcilepsy, with people
who have sore MPs. Because you don't have to have
narcilepsy to have sleep on set R e M periods.
It's a it's a trait of narcolepsy, but even people
who who don't have narcolepsy can experience that, and usually
it's when you're very stressed and your sleep pattern is

(32:13):
out of whack. Yeah, I think what I was trying
to say was that doesn't explain when you have of
sleep paralysis episode coming out of sleep, right, which is
the hip no pomp pick uh, But I think it
was probably who is it? Dr French, Professor French. Mr
French in the in the conservatory with the candlestick, uh,

(32:37):
Professor French. I think reasons that it doesn't fully explain it,
but it could relate because it's a similar state of
consciousness either way falling sleep or waking up. Yeah. So
basically exiting or entering R E M sleep suddenly into
this reality can can be attended by an episode of

(32:58):
sleep paralysis. Yeah. And they did some studies in Japan.
They actually elicited that sore MP. These are mean, yeah,
don't you think. I don't know how they would do that,
but they elicited sore and participants uh, and they used
sleep interruption in nine point four percent of the ones
induced had an episode of sleep paralysis. Yeah, but that

(33:19):
was that was UM going into sleep. Correct. They've not
figured out how to how to like you said, created
and bringing somebody out of R E M sleep, but
again associated with it, and what they think is going
on is basically this when you when you suddenly go
into R E M sleep from waking life, your brain

(33:41):
can get caught in this dual state of consciousness where
your brain is consciously awake, but it's also in the
exact same same UM state it's in when you're dreaming,
which your dreams take place in R A M sleep,
So you're in two states of justinus at once. That's

(34:02):
amazing to me, that's sleep paralysis, and the paralysis is
explained by the fact that another hallmark of r M
sleep is that you can't move your muscles are paralyzed.
It's cataplexy, right. Um, so that you don't act out
your dreams, so you're dreaming while you're awake, that's sleep paralysis. Yeah, or,

(34:23):
as Dr French says, wakefulness has occurred, but the body
and part of the brain are still in r M sleep.
Nuts it is, I can't. I want to have one
of these, Yeah, but it sounds so scary. Panic. These
are the words are used for it. I know I
want to have one, and I'm not taking it lightly
for people that suffer from it. I know it can

(34:44):
be awful, but I would like to like the exploding
head thing, like, now I know what that feels like. Yeah,
and I kind of like having these references in life, okay,
like personal references. You know. Sure, I remember we did
the slinky episode. You went out and bought it slinky.
That's not true. Um. So, like we said, how you
can break it is by trying to move small things,

(35:06):
clear your throat maybe. Um. Aside from that, you can
try and avoid it altogether. By if you're able to
have a really regular sleep schedule and stuff like that.
But if you're they make a good point. If you're traveling,
if you're in different time zones, if you have to
work the night shift, you have a kid, yeah, exactly,
waking up all night, you might uh kind of be
you know, at the mercy of the sleep paralysis. God. Yeah,

(35:29):
I was, Um. I was glad that they put that
in that realism because so many times whenever you're talking
about is sleep disorder, it's like the CDC recommends an
apple a day, and it's just like this is not helpful,
Like this isn't real. But this guy's like, yeah, you're
you're in trouble when your sleep's all jacked up and
you have sleep paralysis a lot. Yeah, what else is there? Oh? Um,

(35:54):
with narcolepsy in particular, and I mean there are drugs
that you can take, but they don't necessary early work
with sleep paralysis with with narcolepsy. Um sodium oxybate is
uh prescribed and I looked that up as g HB. Yeah,
but that's just for an eclepsy, not for sleep paralysis.
Right with the idea that if you cured the narcolepsy,

(36:14):
then you won't have the sleep paralysis. That I think
is how you could cure it. But that's only if
you have narcolepsy, not um isolated sleep paralysis. I think
the official recommendation, aside from all the little tricks that
we mentioned, is, like we said, hey, it's not gonna
hurt you, UM, try and reframe how this is in

(36:36):
your brain and don't be afraid of it. Welcome the incubus.
What if the band incubus was what showed up in
your room while you had sleep paralysis? You know. Another
way to treat this is for everybody to be nice
to everybody else and cut down on everyone's stress. You
never know who has sleep paralysis. They might think they're

(36:57):
being abducted by UFOs and antally probed every night and
are too freaked out to even mention it, which is
another thing that UM Professor French points out, like we
need to let people know about this because the more
people we know that this is actually harmless and fairly common,
the less stressed they're going to be about it when
it actually when they go to bed. So go out there,

(37:18):
you tell somebody about sleep paralysis, and then also be
nice to everyone you meet. Yeah, I posted a there's
a documentary about it. Um, I can't remember the name
right now, but I posted this documentary trailer quite a
while ago then Netflix. I can't remember what it's called,
but I know what you're talking about, like the dream
maybe something like that. It's got a pillow. But um,

(37:41):
I posted on Facebook a while ago, and uh, a
lot of people chimed in that had bouts of sleep paralysis. Yeah, yeah,
apparently it's very common. Yeah. I went and look through
the comments today. It was pretty interesting stuff. And my
heart goes out to everybody same here. And hopefully you've
learned just to sort of live with it, be a

(38:02):
dream sailor you live with it and write it out.
That would be kind of cool, though I'd be like
levitation on control it, incubus out, suck, give us in. Uh,
you got anything else? No, If you want to, um,
learn more about sleep paralysis, we'll just type those words

(38:24):
in the search bar because we have a very limited
amount here and how stuff works. So after you read
Robert Lamb's great thing, go check out stuff on the internet. Okay, okay, Uh,
And since I said whatever I just said, it's time
for listening to mail. Hey guys, I've been a fan
for years. I was introduced to you on a twenty

(38:45):
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home spend the weekend with his family. By the time
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We still had six to go. My friend put on
the latest episode of Stuff You Should Know and be
reveled in the glorious nous all the way there. Anyway,
I wanted to write and say thank you for saving

(39:05):
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I was feeling very, very unprepared for an exam, but
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I laughed at the time, but did a little merry
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(39:27):
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So thank you and boy he put seven exclamation points
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(39:47):
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(40:11):
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right sure, um as a nerdy neuropsych major from Melbourne.
Thanks a lot, Tigan. We appreciate that big time and
all the exclamation points. So those were very nice. Got
the lazy towards the end, but right I turned the
trail off. Maybe she broke the key. Maybe she has
an ecolepsy. Good point. Uh. If you want to get

(40:34):
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