Connecting Sleep Paralysis with the Supernatural

Something which I've not written about here is my sleep life,  partly out of fear of being labled a flake. I've always had a rather rich, dramatic, dysfunctional sleep life, including lush technicolor dreams, lucid dreams, exquisite nightmares, sleep paralysis, and what my physician recently told me are out-of-body experiences.  Up until about a year ago, my associated emotion with most of this was fear.  But, after talking to my physician, I've tried to view it differently and go with the flow, especially the experiences I identify as out-of-body. 

Anyway, I was pleased to come across this article from Science Weekly about sleep paralysis, titled Night of the Crusher, which connects the clinical phenomenon with what many people describe as a supernatural and, mostly terrifying, phenomenon.  There's a lot in the article that made me say, "oh yeah...I've had that happen a million times."

Sleep paralysis embodies a universal, biologically based explanation for pervasive beliefs in spirits and supernatural beings, even in the United States, Hufford argues. The experience thrusts mentally healthy people into a bizarre, alternative world that they frequently find difficult to chalk up to a temporary brain glitch.

This is an area of study I've often wished I had more time to pursue.  My senior capstone paper in anthropology was titled A Cross-Cultural Analysis of the Near-Death Experience, and at the time, was a fairly fresh topic.  A few years after that,  there was a lot more main stream information on NDE's and OBE's. Maybe I'll dig it out and post it here. 

I'd welcome hearing from others about this, or about being pointed to well-researched resources (please--no websites with pictures of dream-catchers). 

Comments

[Peacock and Paisley Holistic Healing]

Blog some more on this! The spiritual and the physical are definitely intertwined.

[Dan Burke]

I have experienced many episodes with this. I don't know if this blog is still active so if I could write back to someone who is experienced in this traumatizing experience I would greatly appreciate it. juburks2000@hotmail.com

thanks

[Shivonne]

I have been having sleep paralysis on and off for 10 years. The first being when I was 14. This is also accompanied by what feels like an OBE. It has been happening for so long that I can now control if I leave my body or not and when I come back. I haven't ever left the house but I always wonder what would happen if I did. Could I find my way back again?

[Suzi]

i just found out there even was such a thing as sleep paralysis, and i've had it since i was a young child. GREAT blog entry, its a relief to know other people experiance the same thing.

if you have a myspace, i have a blog on S.P. that i would like to hear your opinion on. the site is located at www.myspace.com/darkness__light

[sleep disorders]

One-third of all adult Americans--about 50 million people--complain about their sleep. Some sleep too little, some fitfully, and some too much. Although one-third of our lives is spent asleep, most of us don't know much about sleep, not even our own. We don't even know exactly why we sleep, other than--like an overnight battery recharge--sleep promotes daytime alertness. Sleep problems profoundly disturb both sleeping and waking life.

Some useful resources to help you out from all kinds of sleep disorders
http://www.nhlbi.nih.gov
http://www.sleepdisordersguide.com
http://www.stanford.edu

[DIY website design]

I don't know much about sleep paralysis but i've certainly experienced plenty of lucid dreaming. If you're not sure what they, this is when you control what happens in your dream. If someone doesn't do what you want you just change the dream senario such that they have.

It's great fun because you get to do whatever you want for just a couple of minutes- be that flying or whatever. It's always a drag to wakup and have to do things the usual way.

[Douglas Cootey]

Wow. Fantastic blog entry. I cover insomnia from time to time in my blog, but I've never covered sleep paralysis. Probably because 1) it hasn't happened to me during my blogging epoch, then 2) when it did happen again last week it was far too terrifying and personal to discuss. Maybe I should change that. I just put it out of my mind and moved on since there was nothing I could do about it.

A therapist once coldly explained to me that sleep paralysis is nothing more than the mind awakening during deep sleep, usually during the REM dream cycle. The paralysis is simply caused by some parts of the brain being asleep while other parts were awakening. Oh, I felt sooo much better. I didn't spend much time with that guy. He was always more interested in his opinions and theories than anything that was actually going on inside my head and he gave no care for my heart.

At any rate, I never realized that other people associated the supernatural with sleep paralysis. I remember vividly my first episode. I was 15 years old and the dream came complete with a spooky soundtrack and poor lighting. It involved the Spirits cast out of Heaven and where they currently resided. The witch in the dream (I never dream about witches!) said "Don't you realize? They're here. All around us." Then I "felt" three raps on my head and awoke in the dark unable to move. It had a profound effect on my life at the time. Sleep was never the same for me...

I haven't had spooky dreams linked with sleep paralysis since I became an adult almost 20 years ago. But I remember them. And the experience isn't any less terrifying when it occurs, though as an adult I recover without trauma - perhaps because I am simply used to them now.

Great blog entry!

~Douglas

~=~
http://thesplinteredmind.blogspot.com

[Brian]

IIRC, Carl Sagan wrote about this connection in The Demon-Haunted World.