Why is my iMac suddenly lagging on my user account?

Hi,
This morning, I woke my iMac from sleep to find that it was running super slow... Applications that would open in the blink of an eye are now taking up to 5 minutes, that is if they even open, as now applications are sometimes just not responding, resulting in me having to force quit. It is basically impossible to use.
Another problem is that I've noticed that I cannot see the contents of my external hard drive. It shows up in finder, I can read and write [i tested by transferring files to it, worked fine], but if I click on it, nothing shows up, like all of the files have been hidden or something.
However, when I use my brothers user, I can view the contents of the hard drive [he also has an admin acount] and the computer does not lag at all! I am confused as to what happened, as the whole system was working perfectly yesterday.
I am doubtful that it is a ram problem, as I have 8gb of ram and dont use heavy applications very often [the main one is Logic]. I havent installed or uninstalled any programs recently either.
Running a late 2011 iMac, OSX 10.7.5, with 8gb of ram.
What has gone wrong here? Any ideas?

This can be caused by many things, the most obvious items are a HD that is too full. OS X really needs 10-15% of the total HD space available. You can check that information by opening a Finder window, then highlight the HD and click Command I (I as in Ivan.)
Another popular thing is you may not have much Free RAM, you can open Activity Monitor (Applications - Utilities - Activity Monitor) and click the System Memory tab, look to see how much FREE RAM the system has. Also look and see if there are any applications using a large percentage of the CPU, look in the %CPU column and you can see.
In addition you can also just restart the computer or restart in Safe Mode which will clear some caches, it's possible one may have become corrupted.
Finally you can read the Spinning Beach Ball of Death article, this will help you locate exactly what is the cause of your SBBOD.

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Checking Journaled HFS Plus volume.
Checking Extents Overflow file.
Checking Catalog file.
Invalid sibling link
Volume check failed.
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I'm trying to again right now...now in the Disk Utility window it says:
"Verifying Volume 'Macintosh HD'
Checking Journaled HFS Plus volume.
Checking Extents Overflow file.
Checking Catalog file.
Invalid node structure
The volume Macintosh HD needs to be repaired.
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