Refusing the Dreamscape: The Frightening World of Sleep Paralysis, Night Terrors & Cataplexy Part One

I have to start by saying that I don't know how much I am genetically predisposed to these sleep disorders. I know my older sister used to sleep walk when she was little but grew out of it. There really is no way to tell how predisposed I am since doctors started me on Ritalin at age 3 and Night Terrors followed after about 3 years.

The effects of the Ritalin were scary. I was having screaming night terrors heavily at age 7 and was experiencing hallucinations while awake(I think) lying in bed.

There was trauma at home too so that didn't help, it made the night terrors worse. Most of the time, upon waking, I'd either be turned around in the bed, wound up in the sheet or like dangling halfway off the bed. I thrashed in my sleep. I just remember waking up in the weirdest, often the most twisted way, my hair in one giant snarl. Sometimes I'd wake up on the floor or wake up as I'm falling to the floor.

I think I stopped having night terrors at around 9 maybe. They had me on and off the Ritalin until I was 12.

And although I went into a deep depression that I didn't understand why it was happening until I was way, way older, I didn't suffer from any sleep disorder again until I was 16.

I'd run away from home and so my mother took me again to a psych doctor who diagnosed me clinically depressed and put me on an old class tricyclic Imipramine (Tofranil). This was still a few years before ssri's were introduced with prozac. That was in the springtime, late march I'd just turned 16 and by early summer-3 months after starting Imipramine-I was starting to experience different dream states.

At first, I'd no sooner lay my head on the pillow, wouldn't even be asleep mind you and I was experiencing the most vivid real life dreams/hallucinations. I would say they were hypnagogic hallucinations without the sleep paralysis. Those came a bit later.

But the hh were pretty neat actually, they were unnerving just a little but I was exhilarated by these experiences. I was also starting to have obe's too but that turned into something scary as the dosage of medicine went up. I was put up to a crazy high dose a day I wanna say 300 mgs.(can that be right?) a day if I remember correctly.

I'm pretty sure over that summer and following school year I experienced every kind of dream state at least once as this side effect progressed and got weirder and scarier.

After several months of these hypnagogic hallucinations and waking dreams and starting to have obe's but suddenly I was being blocked and redirected. I'm not sure how to explain this but it started to feel like I was being "prompted" out it because once I would start to leave my body something else was trying to pull me or prompt me into what felt like an artificial state.

Of course for the first few years of this I didn't know how describe it at all. I had nothing to base these experiences on. I could find nothing to describe these states in books at the time; hypnagogic/hypnopompic hallucinations wouldn't be something I'd read about until years, years later.

And still years later after that that I learned about the dreamscape. Either you know exactly what that is or that word rings no bell (hehe).

My doctor was clueless, he had no explanation for me. Which makes me wonder, did he even know this medicine was prescribed to people initially and still for treatment of the very thing it was giving me-sleep paralysis?

Well anyway the sleep paralysis started with the sense that I couldn't move or speak.

I've never felt like pressure on my chest or like there was a dark entity present. If there was anything present, they were observers but were to prompt me into that state or space.

I guess that's how the brain tries to make sense out of such nebulous, internal events. The brain will try to categorize events that it can't quite grasp and try to put a tangible(person, place or thing) where the abstract is or like the brain is filling a blank canvas with things its recognizes in order to keep it's integrity. In other words, in order to keep my little brain from blowing apart, outside of the exploding head syndrome, which everybody experiences, I gave the place a space by calling it anything and gave it personification, giving the whole thing purpose perhaps?

I did however feel like I was being prompted like I say, into a space that felt artificial. Not that it's "not real" but that it is real and the space is an artificially manufactured state or space.

It was years before I could articulate these particular experiences with any satisfaction of comprehension and understanding.

And yet as it would be happening again and again, night after night or during the day if I would take a nap I'd start to leave me body yet again but am halted or thwarted somehow from where I trying to go and redirected toward this artificial space.

It feels hinky from the gate. I buck every time "Hell no to whatever this is-NO! You're not taking me!" I didn't know how else to think of it at the time, I just kept refusing to Enter In.

Of course by this time I'm starting to question to this day actually, my sanity.

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End of Part 1