Question: I experience these dreams once in a while, sometimes when I’ve been under a lot of stress or other times just out of the blue. Sometimes it will happen when I first try going to sleep, other times it will happen when I try to take a small nap in the middle of the day, and other times it will hit me when I’m trying to wake up after being asleep for a while. Normally I have dreams of being in my room and being unable to move. And it takes a gigantic effort to even try and move. Although at the time this is happening I don’t know this is a dream/hallucination I can actually force myself to move under some strain. And when it seems as if I succeed, I find myself right back in the same position from before.
This will happen anywhere from ten to maybe twenty times before I start to feel panicked and as if I’m going to suffocate because I cannot even control my own breathing. When I try to speak or scream it comes out as a whisper. At the same time I will either see things or people moving around me or have a feeling of being threatened by someone in the room with me who I can’t see. I try to wake myself up, because I’ve known what this is for a while, but it never works. I’m always stuck in it until my body decides when it will let me wake up. They’re not frequent enough to warrant concern of narcolepsy, but I have discovered that whenever I am under a great deal of stress or if I haven’t been eating regularly, they happen. So for me it’s a matter of staying healthy. Sometimes months will go by before I have another one. Still scary though. And I hate it.