You wake up - terrified pinned to your bed. Paralyzed, but not by fear. Genuinely paralyzed.
You’re fully lucid, but it’s hard to think clearly in this state of panic. You can’t move.
You can feel your heart pounding faster and faster inside your chest. Your eyes dart
across the room before falling on the clock that reads 11:59 pm. Less than an hour earlier
you were playing on your phone. Now, you can’t even move your thumbs. Your clock flickers
to midnight – transitioning before your eyes in slow motion.
That’s when you realize you’re not alone. Darkness creeps towards you swallowing the
room whole. A force of pure evil presses hard against your chest while your heart pounds
heavily from the other side of your ribs. The whole room is now shaking. The bed rumbles
with a deep roar. In a mighty effort, you forcefully attempt a scream - again and again,
but nothing comes out. You can hear yourself screaming at the top of your lungs – but
only inside your head, because you can’t even move your mouth. You cry out to your
god of choice, but to no avail.
You feel your body slowly lifting off the bed. Just as you’re about to be entirely
engulfed by darkness, you feel a slight tingling sensation returning to your fingertips. With
tremendous focus and energy first on your fingers, then your toes. You move them. Faster
and faster, but only a fraction of an inch each time. Then with one giant burst, you
regain control of your body and are once again alone in the room. You scour the house from
top to bottom, searching for anything out of the ordinary. All windows and doors are locked.
Your room is exactly as you left it when you departed on your journey to slumber-topia.
What the hell just happened? What you’ve just experienced is known as sleep paralysis
and is surprisingly common, but most people don’t have the slightest clue what’s happening.
In order to understand what’s going on, we need to take a dive inside the human brain
and learn what happens during sleep. As you rest, you cycle through five stages of sleep.
During the deepest stage, or REM sleep (in which dreams occur), your brain releases the
chemicals, GABA and Glycine which paralyze your muscles. This prevents you from reacting
violently to your dreams - from thrashing or rolling over and falling out of bed.
If you’re lurched from sleep during REM, there’s a small chance your muscles can
remain briefly paralyzed even though you’re awake. This lack of ability to move can trigger
a rush of adrenaline and a panicked state can ensue. Your brain is trying to fire signals
to your muscles to move, but experiences a desynchrony with your sense of proprioception.
In other words, your muscles are saying, we’re over here, and your brain is yelling, “You
shouldn’t be. Move over there.” But they don’t listen. This feedback mismatch can
lead to a sense of floating, or even in feeling like you’re outside your own body.
Meanwhile, your amygdala (the not-so-rational center for fear and emotion in the brain)
is going crazy. Terror rushes over you, but you’re not awake enough to think clearly
and rationally, and you feel threatened because you can’t move. In a certain percentage
of sleep paralysis cases, hypnopompic hallucinations can occur. These hallucinations can be auditory
and/or visual. But here’s where it gets interesting.
Historically what people hallucinate about has always been linked to their cultural exposure.
In Newfoundland, reports emerged of an “old hag” who would leave her body at night to
sit on the chests of her victims. In Nigeria, people hallucinated about devils. In Fiji and Mexico, it was
dead family and friends, and in Iceland, it was a succubus or goblin. In early Salem,
villagers reported sleep paralysis as the work of witches in the community. And after
unsubstantiated rumors of a UFO crash in Roswell, New Mexico sent a ripple through the media,
people began experiencing alien abductions which bore every marking of sleep paralysis.
Now if you’ve experienced sleep paralysis, fear not. It’s not dangerous, and according
to Scientific American, “20 to 60 percent of the normal adult population has experienced
sleep paralysis at least once.” It can happen to anyone, and is likely to occur when
a person is heavily sleep deprived or stressed. If you have irregular sleep habits, drink
too much caffeine or alcohol, eat heavy meals before bed, or sleep on your back, you’re
more likely to experience it. If sleep paralysis was demonic in nature, then this means demons
are summoned by Mountain Dew and thwarted by sleeping on your side!
I’ve had sleep paralysis many times, not because I’m some kind of gifted indigo child
caught in an out of body astral space and targeted on a spiritual hitlist, but because
I often have sleep deprivation from jet lag or working all night. The first few times
I was convinced it was demons, which was weird because this first happened at a point in
my life when I was actively pursuing God, praying and worshipping several times a day.
I had buried myself in scripture. Then I learned the science behind it, and after I
stopped believing in demons, I still had sleep paralysis, but this time I felt like burglars
were breaking in. Another time, it was ghosts (which was odd because I don’t believe in
those either), but once it was zombies, and then aliens coming to abduct me. On each occasion,
my body froze and my brain panicked.
After a few moments, I would lurch up in bed gasping for air. I would proceed to look around
the room before acknowledging it was sleep paralysis, going back to sleep with a newfound
appreciation for science. I have better sleep habits now, and haven’t experienced sleep
paralysis in almost a year, but the last few times I did, it was more annoying than anything else.
There were no accompanying hallucinations, and I just lay there waiting for it to pass.
My adrenaline levels were high, sure, but I was fully aware of what was going on.
Without understanding, even if just at a rudimentary level, what was happening in my brain,
I would likely still suffer from a fear of demonic intruders. But thanks to the hard-working
neuroscientists of the last century, this is one area of superstitious nonsense that
has been sentenced to execution at the hand of reason, and for that I am immensely grateful.
And tonight I will sleep peacefully.
Thank you to everyone who recommended that I tackle sleep paralysis and demon possession.
What types of supernatural claims would you like me to address in my next video. Let me
know either on social media here or in the comments below.
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