5

Sleep Paralysis and Memory

The Obstacle Is the Gateway

image was living by myself in an old house in Virginia while working in the military, fixing aircraft on the graveyard shift. The stress of the constant work and the strange work schedule didn’t allow for me to sleep as well as I would have liked. During the day, when I normally slept, my roommates would often make noises that would startle me awake. In one such case I thought my friend had jumped on my back and pinned me onto my bed. He then started to breathe in my ear, which upset and frightened me even more; I was unable to move under his incredible strength. The harder I tried to move, the harder he pushed me down and the more intense his breathing became.

Eventually I was able to break free, and in that instant I realized: I was alone. I had been asleep the whole time and imagined the whole thing.

This terrifying experience began my search to discover what had happened. After months of research and reading, I discovered what sleep paralysis was, why I was experiencing it, and how to manage it so I could stand up to my fears and regain power over my dreams.

Not to discourage anyone, but dreaming can be scary. Let’s get the tough part out of the way first.

Many people who dive into lucid dreaming soon encounter emotionally troubling themes and images. To make matters worse, dreamers may often wake only to find these frightening images coincide with an alarming inability to move.

Sleep paralysis is such a common phenomenon among lucid dreamers that you owe it to yourself to find out about it before you dive in.

WHAT IS SLEEP PARALYSIS?

In his book Sleep Paralysis: A Guide to Hypnagogic Visions and Visitors of the Night, Ryan Hurd defines the state as a “harmless period of immobility, derived from muscle paralysis or atonia, [happening] every night as a natural side effect of dreaming sleep.” Understanding sleep paralysis can relieve some of the anxiety you may experience when you go through it yourself.

Sleep paralysis happens when our bodies are going to sleep but we are still partially awake. This happens because of the brain’s transition from rapid eye movement (REM) to non-rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep. During that transition, we are often still dreaming, yet are aware that the transition is happening. The result can be hallucinations that can range from unwelcome visitors to a feeling of being watched. Dreamers usually describe sleep paralysis as a combination of feeling paralyzed, sensing a presence, and seeing terrifying creatures.

Being paralyzed during sleep may be alarming, but it’s natural. In a conversation with psychologist Rubin Naiman, Ph.D., a clinical assistant professor of medicine, as well as the sleep and dream specialist at the University of Arizona Andrew Weil Center for Integrative Medicine in Tucson, he assured me that “as frightening as [sleep paralysis] might be, it’s perfectly safe.” In fact, our bodies immobilize us during sleep so that we don’t act out our dreams. Sleepwalking is an example of what can happen when this mechanism fails; however, sleep paralysis should not be feared. Research has traced sleepwalking to a part of the brain called the pons. Sam Kean explained: “Deep inside the reptile brain sits the pons, a hump in the brainstem an inch long. When we fall asleep, the pons initiates dreaming by sending signals through the mammal brain to the primate brain, where dreams stir to life. During dreams, the pons also dispatches a message to the spinal cord beneath it, which produces chemicals to make your muscles flaccid. This temporary paralysis prevents you from acting out nightmares by fleeing the bedroom or taking swings at werewolves.”

During sleep paralysis, we can wake up and hallucinate images on top of our external environment. It’s similar to an augmented reality of the brain.

Individuals report that sleep paralysis automatically instills a sense of dread regardless of what they see or experience. This may be due to a hyperactivation of the amygdala, the part of the brain considered to be the brain’s fear center. Amygdala activation may be responsible for feeling troubled by nightmares in conjunction with sleep paralysis.

WAYS TO STOP SLEEP PARALYSIS

Researchers are still unsure why some people experience sleep paralysis and some don’t. Where the research does essentially agree is that lucid dreaming techniques increase the likelihood that you will experience sleep paralysis. Some lucid dreaming techniques such as the Wake Back to Bed (WBTB) method and the Wake Induced Lucid Dreaming (WILD) technique (which we will talk about in later chapters) encourage the practitioner to feel the effects that resemble or mimic sleep paralysis.

While there is no known way to prevent sleep paralysis, there are a few things you can do to help reduce your risk of sleep paralysis:

If you do experience sleep paralysis, there are a few things you can do to break free:

Many of these techniques can be explored further in Ryan Hurd’s book Sleep Paralysis: A Guide to Hypnagogic Visions and Visitors of the Night, a well-researched book on the subject of sleep paralysis.

THE POWER OF SLEEP PARALYSIS

The power of fear is strong. Fear makes us do amazing things, and it can also lead us to do terrifying things. Fear is used as a tool, a motivation, and even a weapon in the media, in marketing, and in war. To those exploring their consciousness, sleep paralysis allows us to come face-to-face with the most frightening experiences we can imagine. We can practice confronting and accepting those fears—and remove their power.

In the Tibetan Book of the Dead and the Egyptian Book of the Dead, this fear is described as the gatekeeper to the afterlife. Jung describes this same fear using the archetype of the shadow. Texts from traditions as diverse as alchemy, Freemasonry, and Christianity all talk about overcoming the shadow by facing fear in the archetype of death itself. Sleep paralysis can be disturbing, but to reap the benefits of lucid dreaming, it’s a necessary risk.

SLEEP PARALYSIS SEEN IN A DIFFERENT LIGHT

Accepting sleep paralysis is a large part of overcoming it. Accepting the unknown and that there are things we can’t control is often enough to remove the fear. Sleep paralysis is a test to know whether we are ready and willing to move through fear and other aspects of ourselves that we don’t want to see or feel the need to control.

Imagine seeing a scary movie for the first time, yet you magically know the entire movie, beginning to end. It wouldn’t be nearly as scary; it may even ruin the fun. The same goes for sleep paralysis. If you accept that the experience is going to be strange, scary, and odd, you can neutralize some of the fear.

There’s a deep life lesson in sleep paralysis, too. How often in life do we simply react before we understand what’s actually happening? We do this out of fear or out of a reluctance to take in information we don’t want to see or that we can’t control. In sleep paralysis and lucid dreaming we practice being a mediator of the unfamiliar. The more we practice compassion toward ourselves during sleep, the more we’re able to be compassionate during the rest of our lives.

Sleep paralysis provides a perfect opportunity to notice that you are aware while dreaming. Holding on to that awareness, you can jump-start the lucid dreaming process by allowing the dream to take place while simply observing it. Viewed in this light, sleep paralysis can be a key that both unlocks lucid dreaming and releases you from phantom fears.

MEMORY AND DREAM RECALL

The average person dreams four or five times each night and remembers one or two dreams. Not every dream is a long, cinematic story; some are simply a brief sound or flash of light. But dreams they all are, nonetheless. We dream the most during REM sleep, but we may also dream during NREM, or non-REM, sleep. In his book An Introduction to the Psychology of Dreaming, Kelly Bulkeley explores NREM states in depth, including David Foulkes’s work on identifying phenomena in NREM dreams, which are typically more bizarre, less story driven, and sometimes nightmarish.

Obviously, it’s not having dreams that’s challenging but remembering them.

In this chapter we explore some concepts about memory, how memory is formed in dreams, and how we can improve our ability to remember—all to increase our chances of becoming aware in our dreams and then remembering the experience later.

How we remember dreams is currently unknown. There are many theories, each contributing a different piece to the puzzle. If we look at them together, we can start to identify clues to how we are able to remember our dreams and then develop practices to support dream memory.

LONG-TERM POTENTIATION

To understand dream memory, it helps to understand how memory works in general. This process still isn’t fully understood, but one popular theory involves the concept of long-term potentiation, or LTP. This occurs when synapses (these are the spaces that connect neurotransmitters in the brain) continue to fire over an extended period in a specific pattern. The continued activation creates a strengthening of that synapse to its neighboring synapses. This strengthening creates a memory. Inactivity of that synapse, on the other hand, can cause long-term depletion (LTD) and weaken the bonds between that synapse and those around it.

Because of the important role of LTD in long-term memory, most research into LTP has focused on the hippocampus as the seat of memory formation. Why does this matter to us dreamers? The hippocampus is essential to dreams because of its participation in converting shortterm memories (the experience of the dream itself) into long-term memories in other regions of the brain so that when we wake, we can remember the dream. Specific neurotransmitters and hormones that the brain releases either allow for LTP or LTD in the hippocampus. Little is understood about these chemical processes; however, some recent work by Dr. Allan Hobson, a psychiatrist and dream researcher at Harvard Medical School, adds more clues to how dream memory works, which we’ll outline next.

ACTIVATION-SYNTHESIS HYPOTHESIS

During REM sleep—the stage when we have the most dreams—there is an uptick of the protein acetylcholine in the brain. This chemical has a role in strengthening synapses. In Alzheimer’s patients, for example, the breakdown of mechanisms that produce acetylcholine has been associated with memory loss. The increase of acetylcholine may be at least in part why we remember dreams.

This theory has its caveats, however. In a typical night we go through numerous sleep cycles, each of which lasts about ninety minutes and includes most or all of the sleep phases, including REM. This raises several questions: If we have several sleep phases each night, and REM happens in each phase, then why is it so hard to remember every REM phase? Why is it harder to remember dreams earlier in the night, or when we don’t register being awake after a REM phase? It’s not just about acetylcholine, then.

Though memory formation in dreams does increase in late night or early morning REM stages, this shows us that dreaming is yet a more complex process than simply the supply of acetylcholine in the brain.

Glutamate is another neurotransmitter being studied for its role in memory, particularly its relationship with Alzheimer’s disease. This excitatory neurotransmitter acts in tandem with the depressant neurotransmitter GABA: when glutamate is active in the hippocampus, GABA is lowered. Studies have found that when substances such as those found in alcohol and marijuana bind to the GABA receptors in the hippocampus, we find an interesting result: the inability to form new memories. If we allow for these intoxicating substances to wear off, dream recall rebounds.

Acetylcholine and glutamate seem to be two of the heavy hitters when it comes to building new memories of all kinds. Further research points to hormones as another huge part of the equation.

Oxytocin: The Pineal Gland Hormone

The pineal gland has a somewhat romantic association with dreaming and with altered or higher states of consciousness, thanks in part to its relationship to dimethyltryptamine (DMT), which has been found to naturally occur in the pineal gland of rats. Also referred to as the third eye, the pineal gland contains hormones that are involved in the sleepwake cycle, specifically melatonin and vasotocin, or oxytocin. There is little research on oxytocin and its role in sleep per se, but it does have immense relevance for memory and dreams.

REM sleep is activated when melatonin releases oxytocin during sleep. Additionally, oxytocin is involved in the modulation of GABA and glutamate in the hippocampus, affecting the central nervous system. Melatonin is most active early in the night and declines as the night progresses and the pineal gland converts serotonin into melatonin. The balance of this oxytocin-melatonin-serotonin cocktail may contribute to the fluctuations in our ability to remember dreams.

Cortisol

Another contributing factor to memory recall that is often overlooked is the hormone cortisol. Like melatonin and oxytocin, cortisol also follows a circadian rhythm and is involved in memory formation in the hippocampus. High levels of cortisol can result in hippocampus dysfunction, which in turn can lead to memory issues.

A stress hormone, cortisol can be reduced with mindfulness meditation and exercise. Practices such as dream journaling, listening to binaural beats, and reality checks may also affect the cortisol levels in the hippocampus, which may be why these practices seem to improve dream recall.

A DREAM RECALL PILL?

Galantamine is a drug commonly prescribed to Alzheimer’s patients to provide many of the compounds found to support memory. Studies dating back to 2006 have also established it as highly effective in dream memory formation and as a lucid dreaming supplement. Individuals taking it can become more aware of their dreams, control their dreams, and remember dreams after waking. Most researchers associate galantamine’s ability to inhibit the enzyme acetylcholinesterase with why it is effective in its ability to improve memory recall. Acetylcholinesterase breaks down acetylcholine, and studies have shown that acetylcholine is directly related to memory recall in the brain, so the reduction of acetylcholinesterase may improve memory formation. Galantamine, however, also increases glutamate in the brain, which is also related to memory formation. This makes it a very powerful tool for memory improvement.

I have personally used galantamine and have had noticeable results. In chapter 29 we will look more closely at galantamine and its impacts, effects, and potential, but please know that it is important to consult your doctor or health professional before using any supplements to ensure that they are safe for you to use.