"In the past 10 years, psychologist J. Allan Cheyne of the University of Waterloo in Canada has collected more than 28,000 tales of sleep paralysis. According to one of the chroniclers, 'The first time I experienced this, I saw a shadow of a moving figure, arms outstretched, and I was absolutely sure it was supernatural and evil.' Another person recalled awakening 'to find a half-snake/half-human thing shouting gibberish in my ear.' Yet another person reported periodically waking with a start just after falling asleep, sensing an ominous presence nearby. The tale continues: 'Then, something comes over me and smothers me, as if with a pillow. I fight but I can't move. I try to scream. I wake up gasping for air.'"
Having experienced sleep paralysis, there is no doubt in my mind that it constitutes a significant percentage of "abduction" accounts. The last time I experienced a "sense of presence" was late at night and I had the intuitive certainty that my bedroom had become a hive of unseen activity. I never suspected aliens or folkloric monsters, but it was distressing enough while it was happening.
As an episodic sleep paralysis "victim," I welcome scientific research into this bizarre phenomenon. I think dream-states have much to tell us. At the same time, I'm exasperated by the conventional debunking tactic that uses "sleep paralysis" to "explain" all alleged encounters with mysterious entities, many of which take place in full daylight and some in the presence of witnesses.
Sleep paralysis is undoubtedly part of the alien abduction puzzle. But the willful misidentification of the phenomenon at the hands of over-eager pseudoskeptics is a hindrance to both sleep psychology and close encounter research.
11 comments:
The story has one gross inaccuracy which really pisses me off:
Claims of abductions by space aliens trigger much controversy, media attention, and ridicule. The late Harvard psychiatrist John Mack fueled the hubbub by defending the accounts as descriptions of actual encounters with visitors from other planets.
In fact, John Mack never suggested any such thing. What he campaigned for was that people's abduction experiences need to be taken seriously and in their own terms, rather than "explained away" by behavioral psychologizing of the type described in the story. Unfortunately most science journalists tend to take the same tack as the writer of this story, which, as far as I'm concerned, renders their descriptions of whatever "science" they're writing about pretty worthless.
As to the behavioral psychology itself as described in the story -- more mind-brain misidentification. The researchers' perspective strikes me as analogous to saying, "My Intel Pentium chip opened Word for me...." Not inaccurate strictly speaking but also not going to yield any real understanding of the Windows operating system that actually manages the application. And what I really can't understand is why this mind-brain distinction seems so difficult for so many otherwise intelligent people to grasp. My theory is that it has to do with our essentially materialistic-empiricist mode of thinking about such things.
Sorry to get somewhat off the topic of sleep paralysis but hey, I react to what I react to.
That was indeed a potshot at Mack. Not that I'm in full agreement with Mack, but are we to accept that he wasn't aware of sleep paralysis and its rather superficial effects?
If we accept Vallee's concept that part of what we think of as the UFO/alien experience is something that seems to not always obey our usual notions of physical properties, why can't a certain range of brain frequencies achieved during sleep allow us to perceive Otherworld folk in a way that would be harder in normal consciousness?
I like that idea, Carol -- it has an elliptical, paranoid quality I can appreciate.
I think I've only ever experienced something like this once. I was apparently dreaming that I was asleep and woke up as my surroundings were not actually my bedroom but another room all together... And although I was actually 'concious' and was aware and in control of my thoughts and surroundings, it was still surreal, and I seen a shadow move outside the glass door to the room.
This sent me into a panic, especially since I couldn't move or force myself to wake up.
It wasn't the work of aliens I'm sure, but it was pretty freaky and cool :D
Mac said...
I like that idea, Carol -- it has an elliptical, paranoid quality I can appreciate.
12:30 AM
i'm surprised you haven't considered this thought already, mac. i think it's more interesting and provocotive than the normal 'alien' idea anyway.
I've had a few of what I guess you could call "sleep paralysis" experiences, or at any rate, maybe simply lucid dreams in which I seemed to wake up and then....
During one of these experiences, I became aware of a kind of ball of energy floating in the air near me on the bed. For some reason, I reached out and started shaping and molding the energy until it began to take the form of... my recently deceased cat! My "energy cat" then began to thrash around in the air so furiously that I got scared and let go of the energy before it was completely molded into a cat-shape. My thinking (I recall this distinctly) was, "I really haven't learned how to do this kind of thing yet. Better not mess with it." And I think I simply fell back "asleep" again!
WMB--
Very interesting recollection. Makes you wonder if dreaming can facilitate "conjuring" of some kind.
Well, I did miss my cat (gray tabby) an awful lot. That was almost certainly the "trigger." The interesting part for me, though, was how totally real it seemed. It did seem like I was lying there "awake" on my bed. I could feel the energy cat and, especially, its fury as it thrashed about in the air -- I was even afraid I'd be clawed!
And yes, it's occurred to me that one could use lucid dreaming to create "magical objects," etc....
I've always been fascinated by stories of "tulpas."
Me too. Some Tibetan lamas can apparently "materialize" them to the extent that other people can see them too. And if there can be such a thing as a "spontaneous tulpa" that could account for some you know what....