[FredZarguna]

There are two chemicals, glycine and GABA that paralyze your skeletal muscles when you're in REM [dreaming] sleep, which keep your body from acting out your dreams, and potentially causing you to hurt yourself. The interactions between large muscles and involuntary systems are complicated when you're on the verge of being conscious, and your conscious mind -- which tries to make sense of everything, even things that don't make sense -- will attempt to interpret your asphyxiation as something happening in the external environment.

The combination of these two things: paralysis of large muscles and confusion as you emerge from consciousness leads to very weird effects; it's one theory for why some people believe they've been abducted by aliens. One of my roommates in college was struggling to breathe and could neither breathe nor move for almost five minutes, all he could do was make increasingly frantic "humming noises" as he lay there helplessly in bed. We finally decided to throw very cold water on him, which actually brought him out.

[yarddog]

Thanks, that is interesting.

When I was in college, my room mate who 50 years later is still a good friend, did something strange.

In the middle of the night he suddenly rose up in bed almost like a monster coming to life. He then jumped out of bed and assumed a fighting or maybe defensive stance and yelled out something which sounded like “Larch”. It actually frightened me a bit and I yelled “George”. He immediately woke up, slapped his forehead and went back to bed. We were room mates for two years and never had a problem. He is now married with a bunch of kids and grand kids.

It really was strange.

[VerySadAmerican]

I used to have sleep hypnosis. It’s very scary.