Reaccuring dream

You're right about the timing too - these events tend to occur either while falling asleep or when going into lighter sleep at the end of the night.

The condition is quite strongly hereditary, though not necessarily so. It might be interesting to ask around in your family to see whether any of them admit to having had it. I eventually found out that my father and half his family had it, but he never told me till shortly before he died, when I was in my early 40s. The reason? The family thought it was a sign of insanity they ought to keep quiet about! I served for a few years in an on-line group of informal "counsellors" helping youngsters who'd just started experiencing this, and you'd be surprised how often I heard the same story of families suppressing what could have been reassuring information.

You'll find the attacks get less frequent once you're less worried about them, but you're probably in for the long haul. It tends to improve with age, but never completely goes away. The main thing is to try and identify what triggers attacks. This is a very individual thing, but there are some common factors. In my case the worst trigger is getting too hot in the night. Others find their attacks are triggered by eating too late, eating certain foods, drinking alcohol in the evening, getting over-tired or, paradoxically, sleeping too much. Plus many other things.

There's a lot of evidence that this is an electro-magnetic or even geo-magnetic phenomenon affecting the temporal lobes of the brain in sensitive individuals. You might want to google Michael Persinger, one of the few scientists who've researched it. This being the case, changing the orientation of their bed works for some people, as does distancing themselves from wi-fi outlets or even fuse boxes.

Try and find out what might be triggering your attacks, and try not to get too scared. You're not going crazy and you're not being attacked by anything scarier than your own unconscious mind.

I have the issue of getting hot and then cold, eating late at night since I stay up late, I always have a glass of wine some nights after I put my kids to sleep, and sleep way to much sometimes taking multiple naps during the day.

When I was younger I would talk with my dad about nightmares and often my younger sister would have very silimar dreams to mine. My dad is a minister and would assume we were either making them up for attention or allowing demons into our thoughts.

I already knew that in the 70s and 80s sleep paralysis was being put down to alien abduction on that side of the Atlantic. If you read Witley Strieber's book "Communion", on which the film of the same name was based, it gives several perfect descriptions of sleep paralysis attacks. It seemed obvious to me from the first chapter that this was what he was suffering from, not alien abduction.

Unfortunately, by the late 90s, with the rise of Christian fundamentalism, we found that young Americans were being told they were suffering from demonic possession. A few - from the more extreme churches - had even been subjected to exorcisms.

As a Brit, I initially felt a bit sniffy and superior about that, of course, but then I realised that our way of handling it - suppressing the whole thing because "we don't talk about that" - was equally unhelpful!

Don't worry if you don't find any other family members with the condition. It does tend to be hereditary but these things always have to start somewhere.

Sleeping too much is another of my triggers. In fact, I used to be more likely to have attacks during daytime naps than at night. Wine is yet another trigger for me. I long ago left the UK and now live in a country where it's normal to drink wine every day. I find one or two glasses in the evening are very helpful, but it only takes the slightest exaggeration for wine to actually become a trigger.

The one good thing that all sufferers seem to agree on is that it fades with age. I'm the age of your grandma now, and only get about three or four attacks a year.