What is the difference between sleep paralysis and lucid dreaming

In the vast majority of cases, sleep apnea is accompanied by snoring, with the exception of central sleep apnea, which occurs due to problems within the brain. This is extremely rare in incidences of sleep apnea.

This can manifest itself in a variety of different ways. Some people may not be able to move their bodies. Other methods such as rice socks, a hot water bottle, or a heating blanket may cause you to overheat or get burned.

Parasomnia definition A parasomnia is a sleep disorder that causes abnormal behavior while sleeping. The behavior can occur during any stage of sleep, including the transition from wakefulness to sleeping and vice versa. If you have a parasomnia, you might move around, talk, or do unusual things during sleep. Catathrenia: Moaning and Groaning During Sleep. Catathrenia, or nocturnal groaning, is a relatively rare and undocumented parasomnia, in which the subject groans during their sleep — often quite loudly.

This disorder is long lasting, and seems to occur nightly in most people. Newborns tend to grunt as they get used to having bowel movements. Doctors sometimes refer to this as grunting baby syndrome. To pass stool, an adult often relaxes their pelvic floor and uses the stomach muscles to apply pressure which helps to move the stool through the gut.

And occasionally, the sounds and movements that can accompany REM sleep, or the transitions into or out of it, might trick you into thinking your babe is awake.

Sometimes you will find it wears off in a few seconds. Other times it may appear to get the better of you - but stay strong and focus on those tiny movements. You own this. As soon as your brain receives adequate signals that you are awake, it will shutdown the REM atonia. You will quickly be able to move your whole body again, and the hallucinations will disappear in an instant. If sleep paralysis is something that bothers you, consider learning how to lucid dream.

These skills can help you turn what is currently a problem into a way of controling your own internal dream worlds! Uniquely, this borderland sleep state acts like a gateway to the world of conscious dream control. You're already halfway to a lucid dream because your body is, technically, asleep while your mind is consciously aware. These are also hallmarks of a lucid dream. You lack full immersion into dream imagery. In sleep paralysis, your eyes are open or part open and you're "stuck" in your real physical body as opposed to frolicking through a meadow in your limitless dream body.

On having your brain coordinate movements with a dream body and experiencing that internally generated dream world. The actual process of transforming sleep paralysis into a lucid dream is simple - but does require some detailed explanation if we're looking at all the possibilities.

The good thing is, once you've learned how, you can gain control over the dream and instantly direct it away from anything fearful and toward any beautiful dream scene your imagination can conjur!

Finally, remember that sleep paralysis, though sometimes startling, can't hurt you. It's a vivid experience of the mind and you can put it to good use. I know I do. That means he writes about lucid dreaming, awareness - and other gooey stuff like the nature of consciousness and cosmic existence. Join me at World of Lucid Dreaming Academy. A lot has happened in the last 5 months.

But how did we go from business as usual to changing the face of the entire lucid dreaming supplements industry? When I was first taken on-board as Chief Lucidity Officer in , one of the first things I was tasked with was taking a good look at our operations and giving things a bit of an overhaul. Want to become a skilled and knowledgeable Lucid Dreamer by taking a Mindful approach? Awaken the potentials of your mind and integrate with your dreams through the guided meditations in this truly awesome app.

Lucid Dreaming and Mindfulness actually share the same origin. Prior to model testing, data screening i. Similar to confirmatory factor analyses, structural equation modeling utilized bootstrapping with 1, resamples. Statisticians caution against correlating error terms, unless appropriate justification exists Byrne, Model 2 — Hypothesized structural relationships between Auditory and Visual Hallucinations, paranormal experience, lucid dreaming, nightmares, and sleep paralysis.

Auditory and Visual Hallucinations also demonstrated a moderate positive correlation with paranormal experience 0. An alternative model Model 3 constrained the regression paths from Auditory and Visual Hallucinations to lucid dreaming outcomes to zero, thereby examining the influence of paranormal experience whilst controlling for Auditory and Visual Hallucinations.

Although this model reported weaker fit compared with Model 2 i. These findings inferred that Auditory and Visual Hallucinations was a significant positive predictor of lucid dreaming and its related facets, whereas paranormal experience was not. However, paranormal experience was a significant predictor when marginalizing the influence of Auditory and Visual Hallucinations.

In addition, paranormal experience, and Auditory and Visual Hallucinations demonstrated a positive association with one another. Examination of zero-order correlations revealed weak positive relationships between proneness to reality testing deficits IPO-RT and sleep-related variables lucid dreaming, nightmares, and sleep paralysis.

Explicitly, higher levels of self-oriented, subjective information processing style were associated with greater perceived control within lucid dreams, Nightmare experience and recall, and incidence of sleep paralysis.

Although as predicted, paranormal measures positively correlated with proneness to reality testing deficits, relationships between belief and experience and sleep measures varied as a function of dissociated state. Specifically, paranormal belief correlated weakly with sleep paralysis and nightmares. Whereas, paranormal experience demonstrated similar weak relationships with lucid dreaming and sleep paralysis. These outcomes aligned largely with previous research. Notably, Glicksohn who reported positive relationships between paranormal belief and subjective paranormal experience, and between subjective paranormal experience and lucid dreaming.

Furthermore, Glicksohn also observed that paranormal belief was not associated with lucid dreaming. In the context of this article, this makes intuitive and conceptual sense because experiences focused on perception of productive phenomena i.

Paranormal explanations notwithstanding, from a psychological perspective experience s directly inform conclusions about the existence of supernatural forces Irwin et al. Contrastingly, beliefs do not require an experiential basis. Accordingly, they are abstract and less tangible than subjective paranormal experiences. This supposition is consistent with previous work that found that reporting of spontaneous paranormal experiences was associated with openness to and exploration of psychological space Holt et al.

This is also congruent with the finding that internal sensitivity predicts propensity to psi experiences Honorton, In turn, these factors may also explain in part the relationship between paranormal experience and lucid dreaming.

Examination of the predictive model provided further insights into the relationships between lucid dreaming, reality testing and paranormal experience. Although, paranormal experience correlated moderately with Auditory and Visual Hallucinations, it did not significantly predict nightmares and sleep paralysis.

Controlling for Auditory and Visual Hallucinations resulted in significant predictive relationships between lucid dreaming, nightmares, and sleep paralysis. Given that Auditory and Visual Hallucinations demonstrated positive significant relationships with lucid dreaming, nightmares, and sleep paralysis, it is likely that this explained the majority of the variance when predicting the sleep-related outcomes.

Auditory and Visual Hallucinations possesses thematic correspondence with lucid dreaming i. Hence, examining IPO-RT subfactors in the current study provided theoretical insights, which further understanding of the connection between lucid dreaming control and cognitive-perceptual individual differences arising from thinking style. Other elements of reality testing i. The finding that paranormal experience predicted lucid dreaming in the absence of Auditory and Visual Hallucinations accords with Glicksohn Considering the content of sleep-related measures, lucid dreaming items were highly associated, whereas nightmare items demonstrated only weak and moderate relationships.

This pattern of results indicated that aspects of lucid dreaming maintaining conscious awareness, dream body control and design of dream surroundings were more coherent and closely aligned than features of nightmares frequency, distress, and dream recall. This was compatible with item level content, which in the case of nightmares sampled a spectrum of construct content.

A potential limitation of the present study was the use of self-report measures to assess dissociated experiences related to REM sleep. Although this is a well-established and frequently used approach, critics have questioned the accuracy of measurement instruments, particularly the degree to which they provide valid insights into complex cognitive-perceptual processes.

In the context of sleep, there is evidence that suggests that self-report measures provide valid snapshots of sleep-related behaviors. For instance, Biddle et al. However, they also found that indifferences, such as those observed in clinically heterogeneous samples could produce biased estimates. In such circumstances, the use of objective measures is necessary.

Within the present study, there was no evidence of systematic bias in sleep behavior. Hence, it is reasonable to assume that the self-report measures provided reasonably valid insights into factors related to incidence and frequency. Moreover, there remains concerns about the extent to which self-report measures provide accurate assessments of reality testing Denovan et al. Reality testing is a complex cognitive-perceptual factor that involves both knowledge of and control of cognition Larkin, ; Schneider and Artelt, These underlying mechanisms are not easy to assess consciously.

This a problem that applies to cognitive functions generally. Accordingly, researchers often report weak relationships between subjective and objective measures of cognitive performance Reid and MacLullich, ; Buelow et al. Noting this, future studies may wish to assess reality testing via concurrent measures to ensure that the outcomes reported in this article do not reflect an artifact of the measure used.

Although, it is worth noting that the IPO-RT has proved psychometrically robust and is commonly employed by researchers. Generally, the use of self-report measures facilitate studies such as the present one because they are expedient, easy to administrate, accessible, possess wide reach, easy to score, and do not draw upon researcher assessments Bell et al.

Despite the robust methodology of the present study and its outcomes being consistent with corresponding research, there are potential limitations that restrict extrapolation of findings. One foremost concern centres on the use of a cross-sectional design, where data collection occurred at one point in time. Critics point out that it is impossible to establish causality via cross-sectional designs.

This prevents definitive conclusions because outcomes may result from other unaccounted variables. In addition to this, observed relationships were small and require cautious interpretation. This issue is not unique to the present study, but is a problem inherent within studies examining relationships between sleep-related factors and personality generally see Denis and Poerio, ; Aviram and Soffer-Dudek, Notwithstanding these concerns, conclusions were consistent with hypotheses and previous research.

Noting concerns, future work could evaluate the current findings via a longitudinal study. The inclusion of multiple time points enables the observation of factors across time and ensures greater measurement consistency.

This approach is beneficial to theory development because it will reveal the extent to which sleep-related states are temporally stable, and provide insights into the degree to which cognitive-perceptual personality factors, such as Auditory and Visual Hallucinations and preferential thinking style subjective, intuitive, intra-psychic, etc.

Furthermore, use of longitudinal models enables the development of causal models. A further potential limitation within the present study was the failure to screen for sleep-related conditions and psychiatric disorders. In the case of sleep-related conditions, researchers have linked narcolepsy with changes in dream mentation.

Particularly, higher dream recall frequency and lucid dreaming Dodet et al. Recent work has also reported an association between narcolepsy and creativity Lacaux et al. Narcolepsy is a chronic sleep disorder characterized by excessive daytime sleepiness, disrupted nocturnal sleep, REM sleep occurring at the onset of sleep, and cataplexy sudden loss of skeletal muscle tone in response to strong emotional stimuli Singh et al.

Although narcolepsy is rare 1 in 2, people; Scammell, and therefore unlikely to have a significant effect on the results of this paper, subsequent research should screen for potentially conflating sleep-related conditions. In addition to this, future work could also control for psychiatric disorder.

This is important because conditions such as psychosis can effect lucid dreaming Mota et al. Moreover, these variables correlate positively with belief in the paranormal Irwin et al. In the current paper, these factors were unlikely to have influenced the reported outcomes because the sample was non-clinical. Regardless, it is important that future related work controls for these variables as they potentially influence incidence and experience of lucid dreaming.

Another possible limitation was the recruitment method used. In terms of sample composition, this approach has typically produced large data that were commensurate with equivalent studies see Dagnall et al. Furthermore, there is no reason to believe that these samples are not reflective of the general population.

This is especially true as the constructs indexed were psychological rather than ability based. Although this approach reduced variability with correlations, it avoided conflation by including participants who had not experienced lucid dreaming. In the case of the focal variable, lucid dreaming intensity, this is a major concern since there is a discrete difference between experiencing absence vs. Combing these elements in analysis has a distorting effect on intensity by drastically reducing mean values.

Noting these concerns, succeeding research should attempt to replicate outcomes with different more heterogeneous samples, and compare experiencers vs. Overall, the present study provides a firm foundation for subsequent work on dissociated experiences related to REM sleep. This could consider incidence alongside factors such as control, intensity and content. Research might also usefully examine cultural and age-related differences. AD and ND focused theoretically, analyzed the data, and developed the article.

KD collected the data and reviewed the draft. The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest. National Center for Biotechnology Information , U.

Journal List Front Psychol v. Front Psychol. Published online Mar Kenneth G. Author information Article notes Copyright and License information Disclaimer. Drinkwater, ku. This article was submitted to Consciousness Research, a section of the journal Frontiers in Psychology. Received Dec 19; Accepted Feb The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author s and the copyright owner s are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice.

No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms. This article has been cited by other articles in PMC. Associated Data Data Availability Statement The datasets generated for this study are available on request to the corresponding author.