When the Body Freezes but the Mind Is Awake: Sleep Paralysis, Paralysis Dreams, and the Messages We'd Rather Not Receive

Monday, April 21, 2025. This is for Lisa, who asked.

Sleep paralysis is the uncomfortable overlap between biology and metaphysics, the moment when your brain reboots before your body catches up.

The lights are on. No one’s home.

You’re conscious, pinned, and—if you’re unlucky—hallucinating that something else is in the room with you.

This is not a metaphor.

It’s the central nervous system behaving like a terrified bureaucrat who lost the protocol.

In scientific terms, sleep paralysis occurs during transitions into or out of REM sleep, when the body’s natural paralysis (REM atonia) persists even as the brain becomes alert (Cheyne, Rueffer, & Newby-Clark, 1999).

The result is temporary immobility, sometimes lasting seconds, sometimes minutes, often accompanied by vivid hallucinations.

The experience is ancient, common, and often terrifying. Modern neuroscience blames REM dysregulation. Earlier humans blamed demons. And to be perfectly honest, the older version makes more emotional sense.

The Dreams of Freezing: When Paralysis is Symbolic, Not Neurological

What about the dreams where you're paralyzed but not awake? Where no jinn or hag has you pinned—just an invisible force, a thick air, a refusal from the body to cooperate with will?

These dreams may not be neurological but metaphorical. A dream of being frozen may represent a waking-life situation in which one feels helpless, voiceless, or trapped (Hill, 2004). Recurrent dreams of immobility often signal unresolved emotional conflict, blocked agency, or remnants of a traumatic freeze response.

Trauma science offers a compelling explanation.

The "freeze" response—part of the fight-flight-freeze-fawn repertoire—emerges when neither fighting nor fleeing is possible.

It’s an autonomic form of playing dead, and it’s evolutionarily hardwired (Van der Kolk, 2014).

Peter Levine (1997) argues that trauma is not the event itself but the trapped survival energy that never got released.

Dreams of paralysis may be attempts to process what the waking body still holds in tension.

In more recent neurobiological terms, the phenomenon may relate to dorsal vagal shutdown—part of the autonomic nervous system's strategy for handling threat through immobilization and dissociation (Porges, 2011). The dream of paralysis, then, becomes the nervous system’s rough draft of an unspeakable story.

Before Freud Got to It, Folklore Did

Long before sleep researchers rigged up polysomnography machines, cultures around the world developed vivid and terrifying explanations for sleep paralysis. Most featured a hostile presence. Some featured a moral warning.

In Newfoundland, the experience is attributed to the "Old Hag."

In Brazil, it’s Pisadeira, who tramples your chest while you sleep.

In Japan, kanashibari refers to being bound by spirits—often due to improper ritual observance.

And in 18th-century Europe, the night hag sits astride your chest, her suffocating weight a metaphor for guilt, lust, or unresolved sin (Hufford, 2005).

Even in modern contexts, studies show these experiences are highly shaped by cultural belief systems.

People who believe in spirits are more likely to interpret sleep paralysis as a supernatural attack, and those interpretations increase distress (Jalal, 2016).

It’s hard not to wonder whether these cultures understood something that clinical language still hasn’t captured: that the most frightening part of paralysis is not the immobility—it’s the isolation. Something is happening to you, and no one can hear you scream.

What to Do When Sleep Is No Longer Safe

Although disturbing, sleep paralysis is not dangerous. But recurrent episodes or symbolic paralysis dreams may be a signal that something deeper is worth addressing.

Evidence-based strategies include:

• Maintaining a consistent sleep schedule, particularly increasing REM-rich sleep (Sharpless & Doghramji, 2015).

• Avoiding stimulants and screens before bed.

• Sleeping on your side. Back-sleeping increases likelihood of episodes.

• Practicing relaxation before sleep, including breathwork and body scans.

Some clinicians encourage clients to train themselves to focus on moving a small body part—like a finger or toe—as a way to regain control during an episode.

From a therapeutic standpoint, paralysis dreams may respond well to trauma-informed approaches. Modalities such as Somatic Experiencing (Levine, 1997), Internal Family Systems (Schwartz, 2021), or EMDR are designed to release stored survival responses that keep replaying in dreams and the body.

In dream-focused therapy traditions, such as Jungian or Gestalt models, paralysis is treated not as an error but as a message.

The paralysis isn’t merely fear—it’s the unconscious dramatizing a stuck narrative.

You cannot speak in the dream because you aren’t speaking in life.

You cannot move because something essential has been immobilized. The dream plays it back until you pay attention.

Final Thoughts: The Nervous System is a Storyteller

Freud said dreams are the royal road to the unconscious.

In the case of sleep paralysis and frozen dreams, it may be more accurate to say the unconscious is using your body as an exclamation point.

These episodes are not meaningless. They are attempts to articulate conflict, helplessness, unprocessed terror, or the slow erosion of agency.

In a culture that rewards constant motion and punishes vulnerability, dreams of being frozen are deeply countercultural.

They suggest that the soul—or the brainstem—is saying, “I am not safe to move. I am not yet ready.”

The task is not to ignore the paralysis but to decode it. Because behind every frozen dream is a story looking for release.

Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.

REFERENCES:

Cheyne, J. A., Rueffer, S. D., & Newby-Clark, I. R. (1999). Hypnagogic and hypnopompic hallucinations during sleep paralysis: Neurological and cultural construction of the night-mare. Consciousness and Cognition, 8(3), 319–337. https://doi.org/10.1006/ccog.1999.0394

Hill, C. E. (2004). Dream work in therapy: Facilitating exploration, insight, and action. American Psychological Association.

Hufford, D. J. (2005). Sleep paralysis as spiritual experience. Transcultural Psychiatry, 42(1), 11–45. https://doi.org/10.1177/1363461505050712

Jalal, B. (2016). How common is “sleep paralysis” in different cultures? Sleep Health, 2(4), 236–237. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sleh.2016.07.006

Levine, P. A. (1997). Waking the tiger: Healing trauma. North Atlantic Books.

Porges, S. W. (2011). The polyvagal theory: Neurophysiological foundations of emotions, attachment, communication, and self-regulation. W.W. Norton & Company.

Schwartz, R. C. (2021). No bad parts: Healing trauma and restoring wholeness with the Internal Family Systems model. Sounds True.

Sharpless, B. A., & Doghramji, K. (2015). Sleep paralysis: Historical, psychological, and medical perspectives. Oxford University Press.

Van der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. Viking.