My brain needs a tune-up.

I have a few mental and physical problems -- allergies, the inability to pronounce words correctly, etc. -- but without a doubt the freakiest, at least to me, is a event that happens to me every few months: Awareness during sleep paralysis (which is usually, but somewhat inaccurately, called sleep paralysis for short). In normal sleep paralysis, which everyone has, when you go into REM, your body goes into a mode where it's unable to move -- a good thing, mind, so that you dream that you're Gus, the field-goal-kicking mule, you don't give a swift boot to your partner's butt.

But there's normal people, and then there's me. Awareness during sleep paralysis is exactly what it sounds like: After waking up at about 5:30 this morning, I had an episode where I was half-awake, yet unable to move any part of my body. I tried to move my arm, my fingers, my anything, but I was frozen still. Fifteen seconds or so later (although it felt closer to a minute), I was back to normal awakeness. Phew, I thought, still only half-awake, and I tried to get back to sleep. A couple minutes later, it happened again. A couple minutes after that, it happened again. Too sleepy to actually try to get out of bed (and thus waking up enough to ditch the paralysis), I had probably two-dozen episodes of 15-second paralysis in the space of about an hour, which might have been the most I've ever had at one sitting. (Usually after three or four, I'll go take a walk to shake it off, but for some reason, my mind kept on saying, "Hey, you're sleepy and don't want to get out of bed, and I'm sure this will be the last episode of sleep paralysis you'll have tonight, so just go back to sleep.")

Anyway, despite it not being a concern, medically -- it's considered abnormal bodily behavior, but not dangerous -- I still don't like it. It's really freaky.