• Question: How can you get sleep paralysis?

    Asked by anon-188268 to Alex on 15 Nov 2018.
    • Photo: Alex Reid

      Alex Reid answered on 15 Nov 2018:


      Hi Chicken McFlurry! If you think of different sleep stages as gears in a car, then your brain moves through different ‘gears’ while you sleep. These are the different sleep stages you can have. Sometimes a car can get stuck between gears! This is not a deliberate design of the machine, it just sometimes happens. In the case of sleep paralysis your brain gets a little bit stuck between Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep and wakefulness. Your body goes very floppy in REM sleep (kind of paralyzed) so if your mind ‘wakes up’ before your body, you can feel trapped. This can be quite an unpleasant sensation, but it usually passes very quickly!

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