At the end of the 18th century, the painter Johan Heinrich Füssli finished one of his most emblematic works.
The painting, based on a painting by Giulio Romano, shows a sleeping woman with a demon sitting on her belly while the head of a horse appears between the fabrics that form the background of the scene. It depicted a fairly common sleep disorder: sleep paralysis.
The dreamlike and dark setting of this work called The nightmare makes the painting a perfect illustration of what could be one of the beasts of medieval European mythology: the incubusa demon that is associated with the world of nightmares and that supposedly has sexual relations with women who, being between sleep and wakefulness, lie motionless without being able to do anything.
Today, some researchers believe that the mythology behind the figure of the incubus and its female alter ego, the succubus, is actually a supernatural interpretation of a perfectly scientifically documented sleep disorder.
This disorder is calledsleep paralysisand Füssli’s painting expresses very well the sensations experienced while this curious phenomenon occurs.
What’s happening? Symptoms
The name of sleep paralysis is quite descriptive: It is a sleep disorder in which the person is unable to make any voluntary movement. This means that, for a short period of time, someone experiencing sleep paralysis will go through a state of consciousness between sleep and wakefulness and will only be able to see what is happening around them, without being able to perform virtually any physical action. He will be able to perceive what is happening around him in the place where he has rested, but he will not be able to move or ask for help.
Of course, sleep paralysis does not affect vital functions such as breathing and heartbeat, since these movements are involuntary. However, that does not mean that it is a very unpleasant and anxiety-generating sensation, among other things because It usually goes hand in hand with the feeling of not being able to breathe well. (By not being able to control the vocal cords well, it seems that the air escapes from our lungs without being able to do anything to remedy it).
Thus, it is common to have the sensation of suffocation or having difficulty breathing, but this is only a consequence of not being able to consciously control the muscles, and there is no real risk of drowning.
Sleep paralysis can occur with other factors of a subjective nature, such as hallucinations or the sensation of having strange or threatening presences nearby that stalk the paralyzed person.
This is mainly because it appears in a transition phase between sleep and wakefulness, and makes these hallucinations seem more real, as they occur in places that we know and that belong at least partially to the real world in which we have been lately. For example, at first we may realize that we are in the bed we slept in last night and therefore in the real world, the waking world, but then strange elements appear that are not possible in real life, such as levitating sheets, monsters, etc.
Common causes
Generally speaking, sleep paralysis is due to a lack of coordination between some areas of the brain and the part of the nervous system responsible for sending orders to the muscles that can be controlled voluntarily. This means that, even if the person has regained consciousness and woken up, his muscles are still not “connected” to the brain, because they are still in the inert state that occurs during the REM phase of sleep, while we dream.
During the REM phasethe fact of having our muscles isolated from what happens in our consciousness is useful, because otherwise we would move our body based on everything that happens in our dreams.
However, this usefulness disappears in cases of sleep paralysis and the mechanism responsible for separating muscles and consciousness turns against us, since we experience what has to do with wakefulness and sleep: the hallucinations typical of dreams. , and the immobility of the physical world in which we actually find ourselves sleeping.
Luckily, this is resolved in a short time, usually within a few seconds. In any case, when this phenomenon appears in a transition state between wakefulness and sleep, the perception of time could be somewhat altered.
In any case, the exact causes of this phenomenon are not entirely clear, and there is still much to investigate to understand its mechanisms.
Who could this happen to?
The different studies on the prevalence of sleep paralysis indicate that they are rare cases taking into account the number of times a person falls asleep throughout their life, but the number of people who will experience this parasomnia at some point of his life could be the majority. Specifically, approximately 60% of the population could go through sleep paralysis.
However, the negative effects of sleep paralysis are found in the subjectivity and sensations experienced by the person who experiences it, so having read something about this disorder could make this situation more bearable.
In any case, the fundamental thing is that although sleep paralysis is usually experienced in an unpleasant way, in normal situations it does not constitute a source of danger, nor does it lead to suffocation despite the fact that sometimes the lack of control over one’s own movements generates that fear of stopping breathing (a process automated by the nervous system itself and that does not depend on voluntary acts).
