Sleep Paralysis Again

Last year I wrote about a sleep paralysis experience I had, see: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.co.uk/2015/03/sleep-paralysis-and-shadow-people.html. I am struck by sleep paralysis regularly, on average about once a month, usually when I'm in a light sleep, in the early morning or when I'm napping. It's very common and a well understood neurological disorder. It's caused by the mechanisms in the body of sleep and wakefulness overlapping. There's a function in our brain which paralyses the skeletal muscles when we fall asleep; this prevents us from physically moving in the way we do in our dreams. When this is not working people sleepwalk. Sometimes when we wake up, this paralysing mechanism continues to work when it shouldn't, leaving us wide awake but unable to move. For me this involves just a few minutes of discomfort every so often, but occasionally I experience additional phenomena, like the black hooded figure I saw at my bedside that I describe in the above link. Last Saturday it happened again. I was staying with Ustane at her house near Nottingham and was asleep in her bed as usual. I awoke with early morning light shining in through the window. I recognized the usual symptoms of sleep paralysis; I couldn’t move any part of my body except my eyes, I couldn’t speak and I couldn’t awaken properly. I then saw a figure standing by the bed on the far side. It looked like a small thin woman wearing a dark blue dress. She had black hair tied up tightly in buns. She had a pale face with thin lips and small eyes. She was leaning over to her right with her arms hanging by her sides and she trembled as if suffering a seizure. I eventually managed to awaken fully and the apparition vanished. Ustane was nowhere to be seen. We had gone to bed together at about eleven PM the night before, but she had later got up and moved to the spare bed in her daughter’s room. This was not uncommon because I sometimes snore loudly and she finds it difficult to sleep next to me as a result. I left the house before she woke up because I had to catch an early bus to Nottingham. I was heading for the coach station because I was travelling to Manchester for the REPCON conference, see: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.co.uk/2016/02/repcon-mc.html; I don’t know if there’s a connection there, seeing as discussion of sleep paralysis came up during the event’s proceedings. Strangely it was not until the afternoon that I remembered what happened that morning, and there was another peculiar postscript. After the conference on Monday morning I returned to Ustane’s place and she told me something very interesting. The reason she had moved to the other bedroom on Friday night was not because of my snoring; it was because I had woken her up in the middle of the night and told her: “There’s a Chinese lady standing over you beside the bed!” I don’t remember this incident during the night and I’m certain the experience I’ve related took place in the morning just before I woke up. So did I have two visions during my sleep that night?

See here for additional background: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.co.uk/2011/12/benylin-and-sleep-paralysis.html.

And: http://hpanwo.blogspot.co.uk/2011/11/london-skeptics-in-pub-141111.html.

And: http://hpanwo.blogspot.co.uk/2011/04/paranormality-by-prof-richard-wiseman.html.

And: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.co.uk/2013/11/consciousness-beyond-individual.html.