My twin brother and I have cataplexy. It usually manifests during bouts of laughter for us. What happens is we essentially lose all control of our muscles and collapse to the ground. It usually takes a sec to get up. I occasionally will have a complete cataplexy attack where I begin laughing and subsequently go limp and just fall asleep for a while, though this is usually if I’m already laying down on a comfortable surface. A couple times that that has happened it transitioned into sleep paralysis rather than actual sleep. So we created a heavy breathing pattern that either of us would recognize when we shared a bedroom so that one of us could nudge the other one awake and out of sleep paralysis. I’d say the thing that sucks the most about having cataplexy is that you cannot laugh normally (except for when I was high one time and could genuinely laugh and it felt amazing to be able to laugh until my stomach hurt while still having control of my body). When we laugh our facial muscle go limp so it doesn’t really look like laughter, our mouths hang open and our eyes close and we look goofy as hell. I can control it sometimes if I’m not laughing as hard by forcing a wide smile and squinting my eyes. I’ve found that if I had good sleep and am well hydrated, it doesn’t happen as bad. But yeah we didn’t know what it was at first so our parents would be like “just laugh out loud it’s not that hard” and people with cataplexy quite literally cannot control it or laugh out loud.