Imagine coming home from a long, hard day of work. All you want to do is go to sleep, have a great dream or no dream, and wake up feeling refreshed and ready to start your day. Instead of that, you wake up at an unknown time feeling weary in pitch-black darkness. You feel this weight on chest; you’re unable to move, unable to talk. Even though your spouse is right next to you, she is still sound asleep and cannot feel this strange sensation that you two are not alone anymore. You can’t see who or what is pinning you down. And when you try to take a deep breath to calm yourself down, you feel like you can’t. Like someone or something is choking you. This scenario is very common to those who have experienced sleep paralysis.
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Sleep
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A change in medication can cause sleep paralysis. In accordance with a study determining lifetime prevalence rates of sleep paralysis, it was found that 7.6% of the general population, 28.3% of students, and 31.9% of psychiatric patients experienced at least one episode of sleep paralysis (See Table 1)(Sharpless, Barber, 2011). Treatments
The main treatment is improved sleep habits (sleep hygiene) including going to bed at the same time every night, ensuring a comfortable sleep environment free of distractions, and avoiding caffeine before sleeping (Mayo Clinic, 2017). In any case, antidepressant medication can be used to help reduce or eliminate dream sleep (AASM, n.d.).
References
Adler, S. R. (2011). Sleep Paralysis : Night-mares, Nocebos, and the Mind-Body Connection. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press.
American Academy of Sleep Medicine. (n.d.). Sleep Paralysis – Diagnosis & Treatment.
American Sleep Association. (n.d.). Sleep Hallucinations - Research & Treatments | American Sleep Assoc.
Green, E. (2017). The Scariest Sleep Disorder Of All.
Webb, W. B., & Cartwright, R. D. (1978). Sleep and Dreams. Annual Review of Psychology, 29(1), 223-252. doi:10.1146/annurev.ps.29.020178.001255
Imagine you are in a boring lecture and you start to drift to sleep, usually you can manage to force yourself to wake up. This may be common occurrence but try to imagine falling asleep while driving or walking. These situations seem more rare. A narcoleptic’s body doesn’t care what it is doing when it goes into these paralyzed sleeping episodes. The sudden overwhelming feeling drives the narcoleptic person to fall asleep. One type of episode that they experience is called cataplexy, which is usually caused by some stressful situation or other common activities such as laughing or running (6). During these periods the person suffers from muscle weakness and paralysis. Although the person appears to be sleeping, they are still conscious, but unable to move. They can hear and feel but cannot react to stimulation. For this reason narcolepsy is a very dangerous condition to have without receiving treatment because serious vehicle accidents can result as well as an general inability to succeed in school (6).
“I became restless and was afraid to sleep for fear that my suppressed thoughts would appear in my dreams” (70).
Late one night, you’re having trouble falling asleep. It’s been storming all night, and the lightning has made it nearly impossible to lay your head down. The room is pitch black, save for the streak of moonlight streaming in through the curtains. All of a sudden, you hear something scratching at the window. You shrug it off, as it must just be a branch from the tree right outside. The sound of something shuffle around in your closet begins to echo in the room. You realize you’re standing straight up. Were you really that afraid? You lay back down, and realize you’re being an idiot. You close your eyes, annoyed at how little sleep you were going to get. You get comfy, and are finally ready to get to sleep. Gently, you roll over onto your other side. You feel breathe of warm air in your face. Your eyes pop open. A monster stands right before your eyes. Before you get the chance to scream, you’re knocked out. The bogeyman has arrived, and he’s come to put you to sleep.
So for an average sleep time of eight to ten hours, we go through this sleep cycle four to five times a night. In stage one of the sleep phases, we are in a light sleep that lasts anywhere from five to ten minutes. In this stage, our eyes are still moving slowly and our muscles are slowing down, but may still have sudden muscle contractions like as if we were being startled or as if we were falling down. People in this phase may not feel rested if they are awakened, and might not of felt like they were even asleep at all. In stage two of the sleep cycle, you have successfully fallen into a light sleep. During this cycle your heart rate has slowed down, and your body temperature has dropped. You no longer have eye movement, and your body is finally resting the parts it has used through out the day. The next stage, which is stage three is also combined with stage four of the sleep cycle. These two cycles together are known as the delta sleep or the deep sleep stage, and is a very important part of the sleep cycle. During these cycles your body repairs and re-grows tissue, strengthens the immune system and builds bone and muscle. In these cycle it may be very hard to wake a person up, and if woken they may feel droggy or “out of it” for several minutes. In these stages is when most people have night terrors, experience sleep walking, or sleep talking occurs. In an adults average time of sleep this takes up about fifteen to twenty five percent of the time of sleep. Lastly, there is the REM cycle, which is also known as paradoxical sleep. During this cycle is when most of your muscles are paralyzed, your eyes are moving rapidly, and your breathing, heart rate and body temperature are not regulated. Vital signs show that during this stage, the arousal and oxygen levels
As stated in the text book, hallucination during Sleep Paralysis also occurs due to the sudden high blood pressure in the human brain and the change in the membrane potential of the neurons in the visual and/or auditory cortex. What this means is that one person starts to feel fear or terror when under the state of paralysis, it causes the blood pressure in the brain to increase. The emotion of fear is stated to be perceived in a structure called amygdala in the brain. The amygdala tends to be a small structure which is deep inside the brain and has several distinct nuclei which are the following: medial, lateral, basal, and central. According to the article “Sleep paralysis episode frequency and number, types, and structure of associated hallucinations”, the lateral nucleus seems to receive input from thalamus and cortical sensory and association areas. Then after this happens, the basolateral nucleus integrate the input as fear and send the information to the central nucleus, from which a major output transmits through projections to the hypothalamus and brainstem autonomic areas.
Narcolepsy has been above looked for years beforehand knowing a patient has the illness, it is a quickly producing awareness and is continually altering people and their families lives. With nap materializing to be not merely the ultimate pastime, but additionally a survival imperative, the earth of nap scutiny is quite large, bragging countless disparate spans of study. By scrutinizing phenomena like nap disorders neurobiologists can yearn to comprehend the mechanisms of normative nap, in supplement to perfecting treatment for suffers. Narcolepsy is one such disorder that affects an approximated 250, 000 or 1 in 2000 Americans; comparable numbers are approximated for Parkinson's or countless sclerosis (mayo-foundation). An comprehensive, nevertheless oftentimes misdiagnosed illness (fewer than 50, 000 are cognizant of their condition), narcolepsy can be delineated by chronic daytime sleepiness, cataplexy, nap paralysis, and hypanogic hallucinations (rare-disease). The last three of the tetrad of symptoms additionally transpire in non-narcoleptic individuals; nap episodes are the main determinant in diagnosis. Merely 20 to 25 percent of narcoleptics tolerate from all four symptoms (mayo-foundation). This paper has countless goals, all of that involve elucidating the illness and its symptoms in disparate contexts. In order to do this nap will main be elucidated in a slight detail, pursued by a biological and psychological treatment of narcolepsy. Scutiny of narcolepsy and its implications for the upcoming displays steps to be grabbed in order to garner a larger understanding this particular brain/behavior relationship.
The discovery of rapid eye movement (REM) sleep suggested that sleep was not, as it was thought to be, a dormant state but rather a mentally dynamic one. Your brain is, in fact, very active in this state, almost to the level at which it is when a person is awake. Yet during this active stage in which most dreams occur, the movements of the rest of the body are completely stilled. To imagine this paralysis during dreams not occurring is a frightful image, since in many cases dreams are violent and active. When the neurotransmitters that control the movement of the body do not work properly the person develops REM sleep behavioral disorder (RBD).
THESIS STATEMENT: Narcolepsy is a sleep disorder that has a specific medical definition, life-changing symptoms, and there are ways in how people treat it.
Many people who suffer from psychological problems are often troubles with insomnia as a side effect because sleep requires an untroubled mind. Former United States Marshal, Teddy Daniels, believes he was assigned to find a missing person from a mysterious mental institution, Aschecliffe. Unfortunately, he suffers from a delusional disorder and is really a patient of the institution, known as Andrew Laeddis. He is considered a violent but intelligent patient who re-enacts a fake life that he has created for himself in which he believes that he is a detective trying to locate Andrew Laeddis, who supposedly murdered his wife. One night, as Teddy lies in the room with the other men he believes to be working with, he thinks to himself that “he couldn’t sleep. He listened to the men snore and huff and inhale and exhale, some with faint whistles and heard some talk in their sleep…Dolores. Everything he’d ever needed, and now it had a name” (Lehane 199&204). Although Teddy is not diagnosed with insomnia, he has some symptoms to suggest he struggles with a sleeping problem. The difficulty with insomnia is it cannot be cured with medication and requires effort from the patie...
Around 40 million (Sleeping Disorder Statistics, 2012) Americans suffer from chronic sleeping disorders, regardless of their age. Some common disorders are insomnia, narcolepsy, and sleep apnea. Individuals who suffer from insomnia have a difficult time falling asleep and staying asleep, resulting...
Parasomnia refers to a wide variety of disruptive, sleep-related events or, "disorders of arousal." These behaviors and experiences occur usually while sleeping, and most are often infrequent and mild. They may however happen often enough to become so bothersome that medical attention should be sought out. "Parasomnias are disorders characterized by abnormal behavior or physiological events occurring in association with sleep stages, or sleep-wake transitions."(DSM pg. 435)
Did you ever awaken and find yourself unable to move? Perhaps you sensed a presence in your room or a pressure on your chest. This is sleep paralysis. It is a common disorder that affects millions of people. Most believe it occurs as we are on the edge of REM sleep. The disorder has been connected with such hallucinogenic events such as alien abduction or an evil presence. Sleep paralysis is an inability to move or speak, occasionally accompanied by hallucinations, for up to several minutes upon awakening or just before falling asleep.
Sleep paralysis is a condition that occurs at either the onset or upon awakening of sleep. The medical terms for the two forms of sleep paralysis are hypnogogic and hypnopompic (1). When a person falls asleep, the body secretes hormones that relax certain muscles within the body, causing it to go into paralysis. Doing this prevents the body from acting out a person's dream, which could result in an injury. Sleep paralysis generally runs within one's family or in those who suffer from narcolepsy (2), but there is currently no explanation for why some people get it while others do not.
In this Forum on Sleep and Dreams, we will see how the diversity of academic disciplines can help to answer important questions about sleep and dreaming—questions that may touch the basis of human intellect. The Forum is fortunate in...