I no longer fear waking. My entire life, I have dealt with sleep paralysis. If you don’t know, sleep paralysis is a condition where you wake, terrified, unable to move. Wikipedia has a good article on it, as usual. I just learned to live with it up until a few years ago. I was living with my future wife, who would see me hyperventilating, and shake me awake. At this point, I was just happy I didn’t have to lay there in fear. Time passed, and I began to feel bad for those who didn’t have wives to wake them up. I also worried it would happen on a business trip or vacation. The answer, as usual, was staring me right in the face.

Everyone should get married! Ha. No, the clue was the sound I always heard when this happened. The sound of my own terrified heartbeat. That was it. When in the throws of sleep paralysis, your heart rate increases.

I immediately went out and bought a cheap heart-rate monitor with vibration. I bought mine here in koreatown cheap at an import store. They are also available cheaply online for around 30$. Oregon scientific makes an excellent one thats around 40$. I would have paid a fortune. It works like a charm. My heart rate increases, the vibration alert goes off, and IT JOLTS ME AWAKE. Bam. I thought about patenting the idea, but you can’t really patent the use of a device that already exists, so I’m posting it here and letting the world know. I don’t know if it will work for everyone, but it works for me.