{"id":618,"date":"2015-02-16T05:24:12","date_gmt":"2015-02-16T13:24:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.eskimo.com\/~nanook\/nook\/?p=618"},"modified":"2015-02-16T05:24:12","modified_gmt":"2015-02-16T13:24:12","slug":"old-hag-syndrome-sleep-paralysis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.eskimo.com\/~nanook\/2015\/02\/16\/old-hag-syndrome-sleep-paralysis\/","title":{"rendered":"Old Hag Syndrome \/ Sleep Paralysis"},"content":{"rendered":"

I experienced the so-called “Old Hag Syndrome”, otherwise known as Sleep Paralysis last night for the first time in my life, repeatedly, and I now understand why it is so horrifying to those who suffer this regularly.<\/span><\/p>\n

It started with partially coming into consciousness believing my wife had returned home.\u00a0 I felt movement on the bed, and then I thought she was crawling over me to get to the other side of the bed, except she didn’t move off of me, and it felt like a crushing pressure.\u00a0 As I opened my eyes and realized nobody was there, I still felt this pressure and I couldn’t move.\u00a0 At this point, even though I had never experienced this before, I’d read about it enough times to know what was going on and so I just kept trying to move, wiggle a finger, eventually my brain stem restored connectivity to the rest of my body, the pressure went away, and I could fully move.<\/span><\/p>\n

However, as soon as I started to drift off to sleep, I’d feel the pressure come back on me as if someone had crawled up on the blankets.\u00a0 I tried everything, different positions, taking off all of the blankets except the sheets, but every time I started to drift off to sleep it would come back.<\/span><\/p>\n

Eventually, I tried to just embrace it, instead of thinking of someone trying to smoother me, I thought of when I was a young child and it was cold and I had extra blankets to keep warm, and the warmth and comfort they provided, and drifted back to sleep and the next time I awoke it was a normal awakening.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I experienced the so-called “Old Hag Syndrome”, otherwise known as Sleep Paralysis last night for the first time in my life, repeatedly, and I now understand why it is so horrifying to those who suffer this regularly. It started with … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-618","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","wpautop"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eskimo.com\/~nanook\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/618","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eskimo.com\/~nanook\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eskimo.com\/~nanook\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eskimo.com\/~nanook\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eskimo.com\/~nanook\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=618"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.eskimo.com\/~nanook\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/618\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eskimo.com\/~nanook\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=618"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eskimo.com\/~nanook\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=618"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eskimo.com\/~nanook\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=618"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}