Hi folks.
Been a long time since i was online in this forum, but there’s something i’m really keen on knowing.
Since i started lucid dreaming about 4 years ago there has always been something that bothered me. i understand that you fall into paralysis when you fall asleep, BUT (and that really is a BUT) everyone knows that you move when you sleep. if you’ve ever watched a video of a sleeping person you can clearly see that he/she is moving. and i don’t mean like breathing, i mean real movement: turning around etc.
So it’s obvious i get something wrong. Please tell me.
The problem for me is… i really don’t talk a lot in lucid dreams because i’m afraid someone’s hearing what i’m saying and i don’t want that.
Thanks
Sleep paralysis is a function of the human body, which prevents the signals from our brain to reach our muscles. Therefore we can’t move while we dream. Of course though, vital muscles like the hearth, breathing systems remain intact and are not affected by sleep paralysis. This also includes eye muscles, so you can often see that eyes of a dreaming person are moving. However, arms, legs etc. do not move.
This happens when a person is in a REM-sleep state. If he’s in NREM sleep, the sleep paralysis is not active and will allow the person to move. Therefore, if a person is moving during sleep, you can say that he’s either in NREM phase of sleep, or he’s awake. It has been noticed that there are some kind of non vivid dreams during NREM, so the person could have some twitches etc. Also, you should know that during our sleep, we wake up around 5 times in total. During these short awakenings, we can freely move and change our postion etc.
If you are sure that the person is in REM sleep, and he is moving, that means he either just got into REM, or is about to get out of it. Sleep paralysis tends to be less effective when one has just entered REM, or when he’s about to wake up, or move into NREM sleep. I can’t say why he would move in the middle of REM though. There could be some sleep paralysis syndromes, but I don’t know of any such.