Photo by Cia de Foto.

I got an email today from an individual suffering from occasional yet terrifying bouts of sleep paralysis, asking for my advice on the practicality of using lucid dreaming to deal with the experience.

Being that I’ve had relatively few sleep paralysis episodes beyond one incredibly weird sleep paralysis / alien / demonic experience back in 2007, I’m not inclined to give the best advice on the question of where lucid dreaming can fit in the picture.

So I thought it would be interesting to pose this question to everyone out there reading & ask you about…

• Your experiences with sleep paralysis?
  
• What helped you deal with it?
• Was it practical or possible to use lucid dreaming to alleviate the sleep paralysis experience? How so?

My hunch on bullet 3 is:

sort of.

The nature of Sleep Paralysis is so weird, I’m puzzled to how lucid dreaming can help out in the normal sense of dealing with something undesirable in a dream (such as becoming lucid and then confronting characters in a nightmare.)

As I understand it, lots of people experiencing the classic symptoms of sleep paralysis (an inability to move, pressure on the chest, presence of other entities ) — they already know that they are dreaming, right?

Or these individuals, amazingly, are even sort of awake in that their eyes are open and they see their actual bedroom, but the SP experience is overlaid onto this? ( This is how it was for me.)

So if you knew what you were experiencing was simply a dream, would you be able to move and overcome the sleep paralysis?

Curious to see if anyone out there has any advice to share. Thanks!
Photo by Cia de Foto.