How Sleep Paralysis Works, or The Worst Thing That Can Happen While You're Sleeping

should Know Frondhouse Stuff Works dot Com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark with Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and Jerry is over there. So the stuff you should know the podcast. Something large on my chest. It's the devil. It's the devil is hey, Chuck, you okay, what happened? Uh? You were just having what's known sleep paralysis, buddy, whoa, it was close to it, but my touch, my gentle touch, broke you out of it. That actually sees me. I'm

just kidding people. I was acting. That was stagecraft. Yeah, and we were well, we weren't debating because I was wrong, but we were talking about whether or not we had done this yet we have not. Uh like I said it was wrong. We've bitten around the edges of it so much they feel like, yeah, I feel like if you pulled every little bit of sleep paralysis out Of all the episodes where we've talked at it, talked at it, we talked at it, not about it, you go away

sleep paralysis. Well, the most recent one was either Exploding Head or night terrors, um, and we specifically stopped talking about sleep paralysis so that we could save it for the actual episode. Those are always good ones. So finally here it is like we'll be on an interesting train of thought and say no, no, no no, no stop. Yeah, that's exactly what we did too. I remember the first time this came up was in trans magnetic stimulation, the

thinking cap one. Yeah. Well, it's pretty interesting stuff and it's been around a while. You know. UM, the word nightmare, we use that to describe like bad dreams. It's actually incorrect usage. Nightmare was originally intended specifically to describe sleep paralysis because night means night, then mar a or mayor and may e r e. That extra e in there really messes it up. But it's old English, so I don't know if I pronounced it correctly. Or not. Neither

does anyone else alive, so it doesn't matter. But that um that specifically means an incubus, and an incubus was a type of devil, like the one that was just sitting on your chest, A male, a sex craze male demon who would well, I'm just making assumptions here, who would come to you while you were sleeping and sit on your chest and maybe kill you, try to kill you and you couldn't do anything about it. Uh. Yeah, I'm into I'm into the succubus and the incubus. I'm

I'm open minded. But that's exactly right. The incubus is the male version of the succubus, or the old sex crazed tag that sits on your chest. So this, this whole idea of of this has been around for a very long time. It's steeped in the supernatural, and we're only just now starting to figure out what sleep paralysis is. And to me, it's even more interesting now that we understand it a little more. Yeah, I did not know the exact definition of incubus until this research, and now

I hate that band even more. Yeah, I think sex mail demons. I wonder if that's what they were going forth. They were just like that sounds cool. No, I'm sure they knew well. I'm hats off to them for realizing that. Yeah, you know, making a medieval era. Nod In might have just thought it sounded cool. Who knows whom you're thinking? You're right, I clearly know nothing about good band names. That's not true. I thought you always come up with good bad names. I don't know if other people agree

they're good to me? Has someone been No? Okay, no, no one's talking no, no, no I should say about that. No. But my own band name is not No, I like it. But El Cheapo we're named after a gas station. Where El Cheapos are I know, in the South, like South Carolina and like I've seen him in Savannah coastal Southeast. I thought that was a coincidence, they're l cheap. No, no, it is. It is a coincidence, it is, But people

send me pictures of El cheap out gas stations. Okay, the light in So you're not named after a gas station because then we would be x on Mobile because that's a great band. Everybody loves. What have they ever done? Nothing? All right? So, um, the the strict definition. I guess it's not strict, but the definition we're going to give. And where did you get this article? This is good? Oh yeah, we better shout this out. This is straight

out of the British Psychological Society's journal. I could tell it was British it was, yeah, because they say Wildston stuff like that. Way off. Um, but it was written by Julia Santamorrow and Christopher Cee French, and I believe they're both sleep paralysis experts. I know for sure Professor French is because I also saw a video of him on vimeo, UM, just basically talking about this and he

had a sweater on. This said expert pretty much. Uh So sleep paralysis how they define it, and I agree, it's it's a period of transient, consciously experienced paralysis, either when going to sleep or waking up. And um, I think I was under the misguided notion that it was almost always in the transition of waking up. And it sounds like it's even more common when you're going uh into sleep and that is the hypnagogic stage as opposed

to the hypno pompic stage coming out. So I think I don't know, Well, I got that impression, but I think I was wrong. I had the same impression. Yeah, probably came from us each other. So have you ever had sleep paralysis? No? Um, but I did want to mention that I did. I told you I had an exploding head syndrome experience. After we did that show, like two or three nights later, it happened to me for the first time ever. Yeah, I was worried about getting

this last night. I don't want this. Well that that's a bad way to go about it. Yeah, because I will get it in your head. We should say it's actually, like you said, it's kind of common, right. Well, I mean it depends on who you ask. I've seen everywhere from a third a half of people that might experience this at least once. But I think as far as chronic uh, chronically, it's not nearly that common. No, it's

something like, um, do we have stats on that. Yeah, they're in here somewhere something like three percent, three to six percent of the general population experience what's called isolated sleep paralysis. And that's if you don't have an arcalepsy. Yeah. That was the big thing I didn't realize is that sleep paralysis is a major symptom of narcolepsy, which we should do. And that came up and I was like, well, let's just replaced sleep paralysis as the show we gotta do. Yeah.

I had a great aunt, great aunt Laura from Mississippi that had an arcolepsy No really, Yeah, and I didn't get to see her a lot in life. This was my father's mother's sister. Um, but I remember very specifically, my brother and I go in like one time to Jackson, Mississippi or Tupelow, I think where she lived when I was like twelve, and she would do that, you know, she would nod off while talking to us and back up and finish her sentence. So it was like she

wasn't even aware that she doted off. No, And um, of course, you know, I thought it was funny at the time. It was a little kid, But I'm sure there's a lot more to it than that. Sure, it can probably be quite dangerous, I imagine. So yeah, I would guess kind of hard to come by a driver's license if you are diagnosed with narcolepsy. I don't think Laura drove. Yeah, she was one of those that probably wouldn't have driven anyway. You know, she's like like a

Strickland type. You know, I don't want to drive, Come pick me up. She was just like we had to take the keys for my grandmother, that kind of thing when she was drinking. No, when she was when she was got to an age where she could drive safely. Yeah, it was she was were like, Grandma can't drive anymore. You know. In Japan they have these very prominent like magnets or stickers that you put on a car. Um.

One's like a triangle. I can't remember what the other one is, but one means kind of um, but no, not at all. It's UM. One me this is a new driver, like usually a teen driver, so everybody steer clear. And then the other means this is a very elderly driver, so everybody's steer clear. I would love one of those in my car. It's like, I don't understand why this isn't universal. Yeah, you know, it makes perfect sense. I would like one just to keep people away from me,

just to leave you alone. Yeah, you put on like, like, uh, what was the guy's name from Phantasm? I don't know, Angus something. Yeah, you put on a little wig like his. It's a little skull cap while you're driving, just to really drive at home. H that was a an accidental pun. Just now. I didn't catch it. I said, you put it on while you're driving just to drive it home, to drive the point home. Yeah, And I made a really good accidental pun when we were talking about hunting

and I said, my dad didn't hunt. I said, it's not like he wasn't he was trying to take a stand, or he wasn't trying to take a stand as in a deer stand. Totally miss that, all right. So the deal with sleep paralysis is how you know that you're experiencing it is, uh, you can open your eyes, you're conscious, but you are aware that you can't you can't move, you can't move your body. I mean, it kind of varies between severity and individual experience, but the common thing

is is that you can't move. You feel paralyzed. Sometimes you can't even make a noise. It's that bad. And and the problem with not being able to make a noise is that it particularly sucks in instances like this because you want to scream. Because most of the time when you are experiencing sleep paralysis, you are in the grips of terror like you wouldn't ever normally experience. You're scared out of your mind. You have an impending sense of death. Um. And you have all sorts of hallucinations,

basically of every every sense could conceivably hallucinate. Right. You have auditory hallucinations where you hear something in the room with you. There's I should say, there's also like a sense of presence, like another thing. Yeah, there's something in the room. Usually it's something that means you harm, so you sentence presents. You might also hear it. You probably also see it, and it can be anything from like that succubus or incubus sitting on your chest, um, both

the things. You're getting a little kinky, right, You're like, you're both here. I didn't think you'd find out about each other. And you'll let me wake my wife. But I can't move right, So you're just sitting there laying like this is getting weird. She's gonna be so mad. Uh uh. And then uh, you can smell them, you can taste them. There's something called gustatory hallucinations. Um. And then also the sense of feeling like moving and um of pressure on your chest, like you feel all this

stuff like you're experiencing it. Yeah, and um, I think pressure is one of the big ones, like someone sitting on you, uh and not allowing you to move so um our own. Robert Lamb wrote an article about this oner site too, not about the full thing, but about like why is it? Uh, why are they demons usually? And that was kind of one of my questions, that

why is it usually a malevolent spirit? And why isn't it, you know whatever, some fantasy which is like a rod saying like hey, you want to go play cats or something like that, that would be yours? No, okay, isn't he like the most hated man on the planet now for some reason? Oh? I mean he kind of went his end of his career. He was not very well Like why what did you do? I didn't pick up on that he did a lot of steroids and lied

about it for years. Oh gotcha, Yeah, gotcha. He was like a repeat offender that consistently was like doing steroids. I see, I don't know why these drug testers saying I did. They're like you have a syringe in your arm, um, Robert said. And you know, he didn't like make the U up, but his research indicated that um, someone's beliefs

going into it might conjure up these negative connotations. And when the experience itself is marked by like a pulse rate increase in labored breathing sometimes and these, it doesn't lend itself to like a good experience, right right, because um so, Professor French concurs with Robert right. He's he was saying, like the fear being usually a hallmark of the sleep paralysis. Paralysis experience is not just you're afraid because you can't move and there's something in the room

with you, that's part of it. But he's saying, you're a migdala is also hyperactive, right then, So you're experiencing fear on like its own terms. It's like its own freestanding symptom that that even if like this, even if it was lucky the lepre Con, you'd still be super afraid that he was in the room with you kind of thing, because you're you're like that region of your brain that's that's delivering these jolts of fear to you is working over time. Then it becomes that bad leprechn movie.

Yeah yeah, I was she in that. Yeah, yeah, I never saw those I never did either. Um. Well, it also said speaking of movies that like your own, like what kind of pop culture you're into, Like all this stuff can play into it because they are. It's sort

of like an extension of a dream. So, um, if it's you know, agitated by like labored breathing and rapid pulse rate and a nightmare, then it's not going to be uh, you know, a rod floating in onto your chick with the baseball, unless you're super scared of him, then it might be. So let's take a break, man, then we'll come back and talk about some of like the cultural interpretations of what the heck is going on here. Okay,

it sounds good. Yeah, so Chuck, remember we were talking about like how nightmare is like an old English term for sleep paralysis. It's been around for a while and there's and it's basically it seems to be universal and so since it's an interpreted by the person based on like what their culture believes in. Um, there's been like different interpretations of sleep paralysis throughout history and cultures around

the world, and they're pretty interesting. Yeah, and I and most of them the common thread here is that ah, and even in modern terms, they're described this way sometimes, but definitely in the olden days, it's almost always some sort of supernatural thing like a witch or norwe I'm sorry. Newfoundland they called it the old Hag, which is creepy just hearing that. Uh. And China the ghost oppression because apparently the Chinese believe that you're you're very vulnerable your

soul is when you're asleep. So I think that's sort of the common thread here there all these countries. There was I took an anthropology class and I can't remember what it was talking about in general, but one of the things that seemed to pop up around the world was something called spirit intrusion, Like when you were sleeping, your spirit got up and walked around, and if like the tether between your spirit and your body was severed, you were like anybody could come and possess you. And

it was a big like that. That was a big explanation for mental illness in cultures around the world. So I thought that was interesting that that was also an explanation for um, for sleep paralysis too. Yeah. I think it kind of depends on whatever the the leading ghoul is in your country in region, because in Europe. Of course in the fifteen hundreds through the seventeen hundreds, it's gonna be witches. You were witch ridden. Uh. That was

at one of the witch trials in seventy seven. Uh. This woman testified her about her husband in bed and he said he was laying there stiff, barely drawing breath, and he woke up and he said, my Lord Jesus helped me, Oh fiery, which is took me to Mara Maros and they put six hundred weight of salt on me, which we're laughing at. But if you break it down, that has all the hallmarks of all the different hallucinations, whether it's traveling or the weight on your chest or

you know, the all these tactics. Yeah, hallucinations like wrapped up into one nightmare with exclamation points. Yeah, there weren't in Uh. I thought this is pretty interesting. In um St. Lucia, the Caribbean island, they have a term called Cookema and they think that it's a little unbaptized babies who are haunting the area that are that are causing sleep paralysis or doing all sorts of horrible things to you while you're sleeping. But you're not sleeping, we should be. I

want to restate this again because it's a little confusing. Yeah, when you're experiencing sleep paralysis, you're laying there and your eyes are open, and you know that something's in the room with you. Maybe it comes over and climbs on your chest. When it does, you can feel its breath in your face. You can smell and taste its rank breath. You can feel the pressure of it laying on your chest. It's staring you in the eyes, and you cannot move.

Not only can you not move, you can't make a sound as much as you're trying to scream your head off because you were scared out of your mind. And this experience can last from a few seconds to I've seen up to ten minutes, and from anecdotally, each second of those ten minutes feels like a decade because you're just so scared and it's just going on and on and on. So um, it makes total sense that you would say, ah, there was a spirit in my room last night. Yeah, because if not, you're you think I'm

losing my mind, right, So let's blame it on. I mean, we'll get into some of the other reasons, but blame it on something else, right, Like in in Japan kind of shabari um is now they believe that it's evil spirits messing with you. Same thing in Korea with how we knew Alita, how we Nulita? Yeah, I thought that was pretty good pronunciation. And like we said, though, these are all sort of versions of the same thing, um, no matter where you go, which I always find interesting,

like these sort of universal regional things. And then most recently though the and this is where I think we first came into sleep paralysis with the trans cranial me that stimulation episode. Was that, um, it's to blame for basically every UFO abduction account. Oh yeah, was that where

we talked about it? For sure? Um, they have done studies and they found that if you, ah, I think, if you believe in alien abductions, if that's part of your belief system, then you're more or did they do the study of people that experienced sleep paralysis and all of them believed you know, maybe in UFOs. I think they did the reverse of people who have report having

been abducted by UFOs they experienced sleep paralysis. Okay, they have a higher frequency of experiencing sleep paralysis so they just the people study this and they just fold their arms again. Okay, right, yeah it was an alien but there, I mean apparently in the UFO lore, the sleep paralysis has been accounted for. So like you when you're abducted, you remember being paralyzed before and after. Um, but you they wipe your memory of the actual like abduction out,

but they leave the sleep paralysis. And like I remember an X files. I think when Fox Moulder's sister was taken, like she was levitated off the bed and like just stiff as a board, floats out the window. That's classic sleep paralysis symptoms where you can't move and yet you still feel like you're floating and you're moving your levitating, or that there's six hundredweight of salt being put on your chest. Um, I love salt, so that might not be a bad thing. He'd be like, this is delicious

and terrifying. It up towards my tongue, that that'd be the part that was making you crazy. I couldn't get to it. Uh. They say it usually occurs when you are lying on your back in bed, although it can occur in any position at all. Because one of the accounts this article is school because they have first hand accounts. One of the guys was laying on his stomach and he felt the de and the incubus I think on his back um or maybe it was a succubus. I'm

not sure. Um. And you can break it. Sometimes it happens on its own. Sometimes, Uh, you can break it on your own on purpose, they recommend, and this is a good idea. I think they recommend to try and like instead of saying I gotta get up and run out of here, they say to try to like just blink or like lift your little finger or just any conscious movement that you can get can break that thing. Yeah, And apparently the moment you do that, the spell is broken. Yeah.

Um is how it's been put forever. Um. Herman Melville was the first, I think to write about this, and Mobi dick Ishmael recounts sleep paralysis again. Yeah. And then I think twenty five or fifty years later, the first time, um it shows up in the medical literature. Silas Weir Mitchell, who we know from The Exploding Heads and right. He also he also described that for the first time to this guy was like knocking out the paras omnia is left and right, um, but they both used this terminology

that the spell is broken. All it takes is just the slightest stir and and the sleep prowsis is over with. But the problem is you can't move, you can't make a sound. Um. They said to even try to clearing your throat. Yeah, but even that can be challenging. But supposedly if you can even get just a little bit going you you wake yourself up a little bit, and then you can do it a little more and more and more, and then all of a sudden you're screaming

and you've woken yourself up. Or if you can make a sound or a signal or something to get your partner help, something to notice that you are in the midst of sleep prowesses, all they have to do is just like touch you and it brings you back to reality or this reality. Yeah, and it's not one of those things where you know it's dangerous to wake someone up experiencing sleep proalysis, right, and it's like totally fine. Yeah, that's the other thing about it is as terrifying and

horrifying and just what a horrible experience it is. It's physiologically it's harmless aside from raising your blood pressure. Yeah, I mean I guess you could always like trigger up cardiac arrest or something maybe. But right, well, supposedly it mimics, um, having a heart attack in some ways, so you actually could be having a heart attack and and think it a sleep paralysis or um. I think it also mimics epilepsy in some ways. Um. But if it is just

actual sleep paralysis, it's harmless. Well yeah, and I know we did mention this. It might have been the trans magnetic transcranial magnetic yeah, yeah, simulation where they recommend one of the things is to just tell or it might have been night terrors. Tell people just to like learn to embrace it and go with it and then it doesn't because sometimes it can be a joyful experience. It's not always tear. Yeah, and maybe if you roll with it, you can control it a little bit more. It was

it was exploding head syndrome. That's just just learning that it's actually harmless, the same thing like let people. Some people just got over it immediately, um, and then other people, um yeah with this have learned to actually enjoy like the feeling of levitating or floating, and it all comes down to hearing that it's harmless, and hearing that it's harmless relieves stress, and stress is actually what brings both

of those things on. So they're related in some way, and we'll we'll get down to the scientific nitty gritty after this break. Huh chuck, sir, if you're trying to eat better, all right, tune. What's what's really going on here? Old hags aside? Uh, well, I guess we should talk about narcolepsy a little bit because this is one of

the I guess side effects of narcolepsy. Um. There are actually a couple of them, sleep paralysis and then what's called vivid hypnogogic hallucinations, which is when you're falling asleep like we talked about. And apparently if you're narcileptic about seventeen of narcoleptic or people who have narcolepsy, is it

wrong to say narcoleptic? Probably? Probably. I think with any any condition or disease, don't like identify the person, right, Yeah, it's somebody with it, that's right, So somebody with narcailepsy. And I want to hear from you people. By the way, some people who who have NARCOLEPSI will be like, hey, I'm an arcileptic. I don't care, and other people will say like, kudos, right for saying people with narcilepsy, UH

seventeen experienced sleep paralysis. If you are stricken with narcolepsy, experience those vivid hypnogogic hallucinations and UM, it pretty much as individual as far as UH is how much you're going to have these and how much you experience it, whether you're have narcolepsy or not. UM. But if you are non narcalyptic in that population, which is most people, UM, twenty to of those folks apparently will experience it at least one pretty wide range. Some people experiencing experience it

very frequently. UM. And apparently if you have basically chronic UM, Yeah, I think it's called severe and chronic sleep paralysis. So severe is UM where it happens like multiple times in a night, and then chronic is where that happens over a period of six months. If you're one of those poor s obs who has chronics of your sleep paralysis, this can happen to you like up to twelve times

or more in a night. Yeah, because when you get back to sleep, it will happen all over again, right, Yeah, So that was one of the things when you're when if you're moving a finger, blinking an eye, or making a sound and you wake yourself up, you want to actually get out of bed and get up and move around, basically shake it off, because if you don't, you can fall back asleep and the same thing is going to

happen again and again. Then even more mind boggling. Is this one of the other traits of um sleep paralysis or what it called false awakenings, right, which is some straight up inception stuff where you think you're awake and screaming but you're not. Right, then you wake up and realize, oh, I was dreaming that I was awake and experiencing sleep paralysis. So it's a bit of a mind bender. It is including that these false awakenings, according to Professor French in

that video, can can be several layers deep. So when you have an about of sleep paralysis and you finally scream and wake up, you realize, oh I was dreaming, right, you might experience it again and then you do the same thing and you you you go through this multiple times until you finally actually do wake up. But you can go through sleep paralysis over and over again in

different layers of a dream. Yeah, and then you get up and you go to work at your stupid cubicle, and no one around he has any idea that the living hell that you're experiencing or just the amazing journey you've just been on with a rod. Uh. One thing that really stinks is if you know to combat it, like you said, to get up and fully wake yourself up, that that could screw you. If you have a hard

time falling back asleep, you might be up for the night. Uh. In this one person in here describe the feedback loop

of stress. A lot of times stresses what brings brings it on, and then it becomes this self fulfilling prophecy that you're stressed out about what's going to happen, which makes it happen and you're just thinking, oh no, no, not not again, not again, not again, And of course that's when it happens, right right, right, So, like the stress is messing up your sleep pattern and that's where the whole thing comes from. Right. So, the first two guys who were described in the Medical Nature by Silas,

we're Mitchell Um as having sleep paralysis. We're actually healthy. But it was people with narcilepsy who ultimately lead to basically the solving of the mystery of what sleep paralysis is. And one of the characteristics of narcilepsy is something called sleep on st r e M periods. Yeah that they think that may be the key there. I I think it's the key. Yeah, So what that is? Uh, you know, we've talked a lot about r e M sleep that usually happens about an hour or at least an hour

or more after you've fallen asleep. And what's happening here is is so imp can we call it that? Yes, sleep on st r EM periods is when you're experiencing this r e M before that hour or so has passed, Like right as you're falling asleep, you go straight into

the r M sleep. So, like I think in my own private Idaho either Keyana Reeves or River Phoenix when they like fell asleep, yeah, one of those said an arcolepsy, right, yeah, one of them think so um, like their their eyes kind of fluttered, okay, So like that was a perfect perfect portrayal of narcilepsy because your eyes would flutter during ri e M sleep, and it would happen immediately if

you had sudden nonset R e M periods. Right. So the idea that somebody can fall asleep and immediately go into R E M sleep rather than go through the sleep cycles and the stages like you're supposed to, that apparently is what accounts for is associated very strongly with episodes of sleep paralysis with people with narcilepsy, with people who have sore MPs. Because you don't have to have narcilepsy to have sleep on set R e M periods.

It's a it's a trait of narcolepsy, but even people who who don't have narcolepsy can experience that, and usually it's when you're very stressed and your sleep pattern is out of whack. Yeah, I think what I was trying to say was that doesn't explain when you have of sleep paralysis episode coming out of sleep, right, which is the hip no pomp pick uh, But I think it was probably who is it? Dr French, Professor French. Mr French in the in the conservatory with the candlestick, uh,

Professor French. I think reasons that it doesn't fully explain it, but it could relate because it's a similar state of consciousness either way falling sleep or waking up. Yeah. So basically exiting or entering R E M sleep suddenly into this reality can can be attended by an episode of sleep paralysis. Yeah. And they did some studies in Japan. They actually elicited that sore MP. These are mean, yeah,

don't you think. I don't know how they would do that, but they elicited sore and participants uh, and they used sleep interruption in nine point four percent of the ones induced had an episode of sleep paralysis. Yeah, but that

was that was UM going into sleep. Correct. They've not figured out how to how to like you said, created and bringing somebody out of R E M sleep, but again associated with it, and what they think is going on is basically this when you when you suddenly go into R E M sleep from waking life, your brain can get caught in this dual state of consciousness where your brain is consciously awake, but it's also in the exact same same UM state it's in when you're dreaming,

which your dreams take place in R A M sleep, So you're in two states of justinus at once. That's amazing to me, that's sleep paralysis, and the paralysis is explained by the fact that another hallmark of r M sleep is that you can't move your muscles are paralyzed. It's cataplexy, right. Um, so that you don't act out

your dreams, so you're dreaming while you're awake, that's sleep paralysis. Yeah, or, as Dr French says, wakefulness has occurred, but the body and part of the brain are still in r M sleep. Nuts it is, I can't. I want to have one of these, Yeah, but it sounds so scary. Panic. These are the words are used for it. I know I want to have one, and I'm not taking it lightly for people that suffer from it. I know it can be awful, but I would like to like the exploding

head thing, like, now I know what that feels like. Yeah, and I kind of like having these references in life, okay, like personal references. You know. Sure, I remember we did the slinky episode. You went out and bought it slinky. That's not true. Um. So, like we said, how you can break it is by trying to move small things, clear your throat maybe. Um. Aside from that, you can try and avoid it altogether. By if you're able to have a really regular sleep schedule and stuff like that.

But if you're they make a good point. If you're traveling, if you're in different time zones, if you have to work the night shift, you have a kid, yeah, exactly, waking up all night, you might uh kind of be you know, at the mercy of the sleep paralysis. God. Yeah, I was, Um. I was glad that they put that in that realism because so many times whenever you're talking about is sleep disorder, it's like the CDC recommends an apple a day, and it's just like this is not helpful,

Like this isn't real. But this guy's like, yeah, you're you're in trouble when your sleep's all jacked up and you have sleep paralysis a lot. Yeah, what else is there? Oh? Um, with narcolepsy in particular, and I mean there are drugs that you can take, but they don't necessary early work with sleep paralysis with with narcolepsy. Um sodium oxybate is uh prescribed and I looked that up as g HB. Yeah, but that's just for an eclepsy, not for sleep paralysis.

Right with the idea that if you cured the narcolepsy, then you won't have the sleep paralysis. That I think is how you could cure it. But that's only if you have narcolepsy, not um isolated sleep paralysis. I think the official recommendation, aside from all the little tricks that we mentioned, is, like we said, hey, it's not gonna hurt you, UM, try and reframe how this is in your brain and don't be afraid of it. Welcome the incubus. What if the band incubus was what showed up in

your room while you had sleep paralysis? You know. Another way to treat this is for everybody to be nice to everybody else and cut down on everyone's stress. You

never know who has sleep paralysis. They might think they're being abducted by UFOs and antally probed every night and are too freaked out to even mention it, which is another thing that UM Professor French points out, like we need to let people know about this because the more people we know that this is actually harmless and fairly common, the less stressed they're going to be about it when

it actually when they go to bed. So go out there, you tell somebody about sleep paralysis, and then also be nice to everyone you meet. Yeah, I posted a there's a documentary about it. Um, I can't remember the name right now, but I posted this documentary trailer quite a while ago then Netflix. I can't remember what it's called, but I know what you're talking about, like the dream maybe something like that. It's got a pillow. But um, I posted on Facebook a while ago, and uh, a

lot of people chimed in that had bouts of sleep paralysis. Yeah, yeah, apparently it's very common. Yeah. I went and look through the comments today. It was pretty interesting stuff. And my heart goes out to everybody same here. And hopefully you've learned just to sort of live with it, be a dream sailor you live with it and write it out. That would be kind of cool, though I'd be like levitation on control it, incubus out, suck, give us in. Uh,

you got anything else? No, If you want to, um, learn more about sleep paralysis, we'll just type those words in the search bar because we have a very limited amount here and how stuff works. So after you read Robert Lamb's great thing, go check out stuff on the internet. Okay, okay, Uh, And since I said whatever I just said, it's time for listening to mail. Hey guys, I've been a fan

for years. I was introduced to you on a twenty four hour road trip with my best friend when I picked him up from the naval base and delivered him home spend the weekend with his family. By the time we were halfway home, I'd been awake from us thirty hours. We still had six to go. My friend put on the latest episode of Stuff You Should Know and be reveled in the glorious nous all the way there. Anyway, I wanted to write and say thank you for saving

my butt. I am a neuropsychology major studying in Melbourne, Australia. I was feeling very, very unprepared for an exam, but was reassured by mother that my knowledge base was much wider than what I was taught in class, thanks entirely to my beloved and off reference Stuff You Should Know. I laughed at the time, but did a little merry jig at my desk when I opened my paper to find questions and answers that I knew thanks to you, guys, So thank you and boy he put seven exclamation points

there that translates world now. Upon learning that I passed with flying colors with a you my mother caught bought me a card on the front reads I want to listen to all the podcast you do. Mhm. For a moment I thought that maybe I talked about you guys too much, but promptly dismiss the idea. So thanks for the show, for the awesome podcast. Four exclamation points from one academic to several others. Three exclamation points. They're starting

to dwindle. Many many thanks. That is from Tigan. Thanks Tegan, who uh describes herself. I guess Tigan's a lady's name, right sure, um as a nerdy neuropsych major from Melbourne. Thanks a lot, Tigan. We appreciate that big time and all the exclamation points. So those were very nice. Got the lazy towards the end, but right I turned the trail off. Maybe she broke the key. Maybe she has an ecolepsy. Good point. Uh. If you want to get in touch with this, like Teagan, you can tweet to

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