Thlog #6

Week six is kicking my butt and I am not excited to enter regular midterm cycles once again. Our next writing project encompasses the difference between academic research articles and non-academic research articles. I have made up my mind about my topic and I decided to talk about sleep paralysis. After having two episodes of this since the start of the quarter, I came to a conclusion that it would probably be best to study this phenomenon through writing about it. First off, it was very difficult for me to find different disciplines that talk about this topic because for the most part they all offer a scientific approach. So, I decided to get more specific with the type of studies associated with sleep paralysis. I found two articles: one focused on the psychopathology(the study of mental disorders) and how it is associated with specific medical specialties (e.g. orthopaedic: focuses on injuries and diseases of a person's bones) of an isolated sleep paralysis experience and the other examines the psychological reasoning behind this strange experience.  I found both articles to be very interesting because they offered different insights about the same topic. The psychology article was suggestive of a method that can be applied by people who experience sleep paralysis. This method that the author names focused-attention meditation combined with muscle relaxation (MR Therapy), explains that by focusing on a comforting thought during sleep paralysis, one can erase the horrifying hallucinations and ghost-like figures that have intruded the bedroom. These articles educated me and in a way relieved me of the crazy dreams and not-so-dreamy hallucinations that I have come across. Although my experiences do not come close to some of the ones I have been reading, it's good to learn about the potential causes and ways to aid this traumatizing experience.