Sleep paralysis and the Frontal Cortex

7/10/2014: Six months later...
IMAGE: MatthewMeyer

My previous entry (well one of them) was one of the most Euphoric dream I had ever had. I think it is appropriate that I now take the time to describe the most terrifying. I think this dream happens to particularly stand out in the sense that I was able to avoid the worst of what was in store for me, through a kind of hybrid in-dream lucidity. Until now, I simply could not have explained this: it was phenomenally unique but lacked a framework for further exploration. However, some recent research produced by an associate has thrown me just over the threshold of compression and I can now suspect what might have happened. Exciting stuff, for a dream researcher of any creed or colour.

Sleep Paralysis: a simple enough phenomenon. When coming out of a deep stage of NREM sleep, you sometimes find yourself experiencing a kind of false awakening, and confusing the resulting REM artefacts for waking reality. A menacing presence is then felt, usually as some form of monster or ghost. Sometimes it is a loved one who approaches; before turning sinister. Lying there awake in bed (though not actually awake) the urge to run and flee is met with sudden bodily paralysis, making the whole ordeal ineffably more terrifying still. The genuine belief that the dream stage is over, and that this experience is waking reality then lifts the terror to extreme levels. You finally wake up (this time for real) with a heart rate high enough to give an Olympic athlete a cardiac arrest. Or were you always awake, and just hallucinating? The whole question of whether it was a false awakening or just dream content (hypnagogic hallucination) creeping through into waking reality for a number of seconds is very much of a moot point here, believe it or not. In these cases, the normally sharp distinctions between waking and dreaming reality are blurred to become part of two overlapping systems. Welcome to sleep paralysis. Night terrors. Succubus. Kanashibari. Many names: one singular, perplexing phenomenon.  

Such cases are potentially unique in that you experience a kind of false positive lucidity. A false what? Well think on this if you will. When we are awake, we can reliably question ourselves "Am I awake?". If you can answer this (or indeed if you can even ask the question) the answer will probably be yes. Ask yourself right now... you will probably know the answer! As for why we cannot ask ourselves this very same question while we sleep; there is quite a delicate explanation that I will leave the hungry reader to follow in their own time. But it does involve the parts of our brain that allow us to stand back from ourselves (our frontal lobes) and their diminished state of activation during sleep. In the cases of night terrors; it is quite curious that one actually thinks one is awake but secretly is not. Not simply assuming wakefulness, but they can actually pause and can say "thank god that dream is over and my day has started. Wait, that's an interesting monster trying to disembowel me!". This is virtually unprecedented, and throws the whole notion of dream/wake logic on its head. It screams, of course, of a renegade frontal cortex. The following was my experience.

I was dreaming some forgettable dream about something; then woke to find myself lying in my own bed. I pondered with whether I should get up or go back to sleep, and lay there balancing the proposition. I relented, and decided to return to my slumber. To hell with productivity, I am a university student! As I slowly drifted off to sleep, I heard the wind blow through my kitchen window and rattle a bamboo strip mural of the Chinese kitchen God that normally hangs on the opposite side of a brick wall that borders my bedroom. This snapped me to attention, killing my slumber and started to I grow frustrated. But the wind had stopped now. So, once again I let myself drift back into sleep, and alas, once again the wind picked up and rattled the wall hanging. This time, however there was a quaint whispering noise that accompanied the wind and I came to attention violently. This was weird. Fuck, that was scary whatever that was!! I thought as I lay there on edge. Was this all in my mind? I had no idea. I paused for a moment. Aaah, to hell with it. And back to sleep I went. It's not like I even believe in ghosts anyway.

This time, as I drifted off to sleep, I was pulled into a relaxed slumber quicker than I had imagined. It was like rolling down a hill on some kind of wheeled device and not entirely appreciating the magnitude of the gravitational acceleration. I resisted falling into it, pulled out, then allowed myself to fall back in... existing on the edge of this event horizon like riding a strange sine wave. It was quite fun, like suppressing a sneeze and then encouraging it again; the thrill of control mixed with the pleasure of relinquishing it, well the best of both of them really. And though I could control it, there was an ineffable lag to how this control operated, and whatever my volition produced was a few seconds late in its effect. Yet the siren call of the slumber operated on my willpower in real time; making the whole exercise uncannily dangerous: I could ride the sine wave down with enough leeway to pull it back up, except might find myself wanting to change my mind when the time came to escape. And all the while, the deeper into the relaxed comatose I drifted, the louder and more lifelike the haunting whisper and rattling wind became. And it scared me in a way I cannot describe, but so long as I was master of this game there was just too much enjoyment to be had in surfing the uncanny valley between these stages of the unknown.

After a while curiosity won me over. I decided I didn't really believe in ghosts anyway, so I might as well just fall asleep and see what happens. Or perhaps I simply just loss of control over the physics involved (in whatever I was indeed manipulating) and simply crashed the whole thing through the very diminished state of cognition I had put myself in. Either way; I let the feeling carry me over a little too far and the haunting chattering whisper grew to a loud curdling breath. And it was unmistakably horrible. Think of that fog horn sound in Inception; this sound could have launched an A grade Christopher Nolan film (and a dozen counterfeits) had I actually had the means to record it. Then again I was dreaming; so who actually knows how good it was and how much the Amygdala was simply pitching in. I could hear the sound radiating from somewhere inside my kitchen, and as it grew louder it would simultaneously move laterally along the kitchen wall towards my doorway, always halting before coming into view (as I pulled back from the edge).

Now, it was coming through my doorway and approaching me. And it was black. Formless. It was pure evil. In a state of sheer terror, and with every bit of willpower I could muster, I tried to force myself back awake. And yet the lag was now so profound I could not make the ghostly entity back off, it kept advancing as my brain struggled to accelerate back to life like a 10 ton truck. And then I finally experienced it: I was lying there completely paralysed! And the ghost was upon me. And I was now past the threshold of awareness and falling fast asleep while on the surface of reality, the ghost was free to do as it pleased. It felt like what dying must feel like. With one last effort, I forced myself back to attention and the black ghost did finally back off, the wind died down and I woke up. I was lying there with my heart racing, in a pool of my own cold sweat. Somehow I had won.

And so I got up, got dressed and went about my day. Some time later (after what felt like hours) I seemingly woke up again. Yes, readers... just like my I dream of Anima entry, I had actually experienced a false awakening the first time and did not know it. The ghost approaching me was synchronous with my entry into a dream within a dream though thinking I was awake, I did not know this. Which possibly explains why it was so dangerous and terrifying: my brain did not know how to handle such a paradox without taking some very sensitive and delicate physiological information partitions and essentially smashing them. So what was going on? Emergence delirium and sleep paralysis alike would seem to both involve functional connectivity changes in the frontal cortex during reorganisation of the brain's self-reference networks. Both can involve a kind of intense fear or paranoid delusion however in the case of sleep paralysis; the negative emotions are granted visual manifestation too, making matters considerably worse for the recipient. Given it is is the job of the frontal cortex and associated posterior parietal regions to produce visual images out of virtually nothing in the dream stage (and some would argue: during waking life too) this is entirely understandable. However what strikes me very clearly with both cases is that the frontal lobes have a lot of explaining to do.

What and why they should explain, is a question that I keep asking myself. Over-active brain regions, bordering on seizure threshold can produce some very interesting cognitive changes indeed: Temporal lobe epilepsy would have to be the gold standard. The research by my associate has linked these phenomenon to something that certainly appears to resemble a frontal lobe seizure. Beyond that, I could only speculate. But it does tempt me to ask if the functionally separated frontal networks (experienced during REM sleep) could be failing to properly re-integrate on wakeful emergence, and in the process, to excuse my language... freaking the fuck out. Of course, the brain is actually very good at this (freaking out). Phantom limb syndrome, amphetamine psychosis and PTSD are all prime example of what the brain can do when its afferent inputs do not make for a congruent experience.

And what would a primary consciousness, rooted in the hard integration of Limbic system and Thalamus, make of a frontal cortex that was quite literally loosing its cool? I expect something along the lines of this. As these two divided entities of our dreaming consciousness self re-enter a state of mutual information sufficient to be recognisable as the waking thought, the reciprocal nature of feedback between the two would reliably ensure that the emotional centre was bombarded with confusing and manipulative signalling from a frontal cortex that had utterly lost control of itself. For this is what the frontal cortex does best: micromanage and inhibit our emotions, and these seizure like impulses would have to be interpreted by the limbic system at least in some kind of sense. I suspect the intense fear and emotional association of approaching supernatural entity is exactly how an awakened primary consciousness would interpret a minor seizure emanating from the frontal region.

This network would in turn produce negative recurrent signalling back to the frontal cortex, that might very well (in its over-active state) interpret these emotions to bring about a hallucinatory visual reality to match. Which of course would make plenty of sense: for again, this is exactly what the frontal cortex does so well in waking reality. I admit I know little enough about seizure and the EEG measurements that quantify them to proceed further; but watch this space. I'll be coming back to this subject soon.

Unlike my other dream entries to date, I have little in the way of soft philosophical ramblings to end this piece. I know I am dealing with things I do not fully understand and yet have experienced myself in their full phenomenal intensity, making the problem a frustrating one. This simply drives me to understand, and bring my comprehension to new heights. And this is what I will now do. If there is one thing I draw from all this: do not mess with the frontal lobes; for whatever it is they are doing, they mean serious business. And while I still don't fear ghosts; I may just grow to fear the brain parcellations that so effortlessly creates them in my dreams. Because those really can scare me if they want to.