It's late at night and you're having a pleasant dream.
Maybe you're reliving one of your favorite memories, or you're having that dream where
you're a flying superhero again, saving the world from destruction.
Perhaps you're a knight in shining armor, fighting off a fire-breathing dragon- but
not for the hand of a helpless maiden, because this is the 21st century and maidens are more
than capable of saving themselves.
Suddenly though, your pleasant little dream escape starts to turn dark.
You get a growing feeling of dread and foreboding, your nice fantasy slowly turns into a nightmare.
You wake with a gasp, happy to flee from the dark dream... but realize you're woken into
a real-life horror.
You can't move, you can barely breathe, and no matter how hard you try your limbs refuse
to respond to your commands.
You lie in bed panting for breath, completely paralyzed, and there in the darkness of your
room you swear that you can see a vague figure.
It seems to be watching you...
smiling even... and then in a flash, it's gone and you can move your body again.
You tear out of bed and throw the lights on, but you're all alone in your room without
another person in sight.
It's estimated that about 15% of the population has had an experience like the one we just
described, and if you're one of the lucky ones who hasn't, your time may be coming.
For millennia this phenomenon, now called sleep paralysis, has been associated with
one particular evil being, a female demon ripped straight from the pages of the world's
most ancient texts, and today known as the Night Hag.
According to science, this phenomenon is not an evil demon visiting you and poisoning your
dreams, or trying to kill you.
Sleep paralysis is a purely natural phenomenon that happens when you wake up but your brain
hasn't fully alerted the rest of your body that it's time to wake up.
If you've ever watched someone else sleep... then you're kind of a creeper.
Just kidding, but if you've seen someone jerk around in their sleep, or perhaps watched
a dog kick and paw and whimper as they dream of chasing squirrels, then you're well aware
that sometimes our body responds to what the brain is pretending we're doing in our dreams.
Scientists aren't quite sure why we dream in the first place, and the fact that less
intelligent animals such as dogs and cats do it means that it isn't a simple byproduct
of our greater intellectual capacity and ability to imagine.
Some believe that dreaming is the brain's safe way of working through troubling memories,
or to give itself a break from the stresses of real life.
Others believe that dreaming is the way that the brain processes information and helps
it to learn from mistakes or develop new strategies to past problems.
Others yet believe that dreams are largely meaningless, and are a random mixture of memories
and imagination with no discernible purpose, just something the brain does while in stand-by
mode.
What we do know though is that in order to protect you while dreaming, the brain automatically
paralyzes your body.
That's so when you're thrashing around in your dreams fighting off a grizzly bear with
your bare fists, you don't start throwing haymakers in the real world, and maybe break
your hand on a wall.
Have a particularly vivid dream of running a marathon and your body might start running
in real life, straight off a cliff or into a predator.
Some people believe that the act of sleepwalking is actually the brain failing to fully do
its job properly and shut the body down.
It's clear then that this 'sleep paralysis' is pretty important for our safety, and the
safety of anyone sleeping next to us.
Waking up in the midst of sleep paralysis however can be a traumatic and terrifying
experience.
The brain has accidentally forgotten to throw the on switch to the other parts of your body,
and so when you try to move you are unable to.
Because you have so little control over your body, your breathing feels shallow and labored,
and this gives the impression of a great force sitting on your chest.
Stuck in a waking state where the brain is still partially dreaming, people have even
described auditory and visual hallucinations that appeared completely real to them- in
fact some believe that sleep paralysis perfectly describes the alien abduction phenomenon.
That's science's answer at least, and given the fact that it's 2019 and we still don't
have flying cars, are you really going to trust science?
Of course not.
Before the sleep paralysis theory, this phenomenon was directly attributed to the legendary night
hag.
A demonic being who would visit men and women and sit on their chests, infecting them with
terrible dreams and draining their life force.
What's startling is that the night hag is present in every single culture on earth,
and the various qualities attributed to her as shockingly similar.
She is often described as a female figure, some claiming she is a demon and others that
she is a ghost, and she pins her victims down and steals their breath.
The night hag seems to have existed for as long as humanity has been around, and she
is mentioned in the world's most ancient texts.
She is generally believed to be Lilith, the original wife to Adam who did not wish to
be his second and left the Garden of Eden.
Others believe that Lilith was never human in the first place, and was in fact a demoness
who preys on men and women alike.
Whatever her real origin, she appears in the Bible, the epic of Gilgamesh, and even the
Dead Sea Scrolls.
She is also featured prominently in the mystical Jewish tradition of Kabbalah, and men all
across the ancient world were warned to be wary of her presence.
Not just men though, as the vengeful Lilith would often seek out pregnant women and newborn
children and try to kill them in their sleep.
In some traditions Lilith is even described as having breasts full of poison instead of
milk, which she feeds to newborn infants.
The name Lilith is believed to be a derivative of the ancient Sumerian word for Lilitu, which
were female demons and wind spirits.
Beautiful and seductive, men were nevertheless warned to keep their distance from these temptresses,
as they would often attempt to reproduce with men and then kill them shortly after.
Able to bear children with either humans or animals, the night hag prefers to reproduce
with men and then disguise herself as a human to give the child away for adoption, returning
later to transform its daughters into night hags once they have reached puberty.
In the Jewish Zohar, which is the foundation for the mystical tradition of Kabbalah, Lilith
the night hag is mentioned a whopping twenty seven times.
These depictions support the idea that she was Adam's first wife, but refused to see
herself as subservient to Adam and rebelled against God by showing him great disrespect.
Saddened by Lilith, God cast her out of the garden of Eden and then formed a new woman
for Adam directly from his rib, as Lilith had been made from the same dust as Adam had
been originally.
Given the traditional view of these ancient cultures which held women in very low regard,
it's no surprise that Lilith's refusal to be subservient forever to a man was seen as
evil.
Christianity doesn't believe that Lilith was the first wife of Adam though, and certainly
doesn't believe that she was thrown out of Eden for refusing to be subservient to Adam.
In fact in the New Testament Jesus regularly treated women as equals in ways that modern
audiences don't realize would've been shocking and even alarming for the contemporaries of
the authors who penned these books of the Bible.
This indication of equality from the son of god indicates that the Bible's Lilith couldn't
possibly have been the first wife of Adam and the creation of a God who clearly didn't
see a difference between man and woman.
Thus the brief mention of Lilith in the Old Testament is likely a reference to the Lilith
being a demon, and though she was not well described in the text she would not have needed
to be as every ancient reader of the Old Testament would have immediately recognized the Lilith
figure.
One of the first documented mentions of Lilith though comes from the Epic of Gilgamesh, written
around 2,000 BC.
This Epic was the world's first known superhero story, and tells the story of a mighty warrior
named Gilgamesh who performed many heroic deeds.
In one part of the story, the hero helps the goddess of love and war cut down a tree in
order to fashion a throne for herself, but as the wood is split open they discover that
it has been inhabited by a trio of evil spirits, the serpent, the Zu-bird, and the demoness
Lilith herself.
In an epic battle, Gilgamesh defeats the serpent and Zu-bird, but only manages to force Lilith
to flee into the desert, unable to overcome her.
Sometime around 400 BC, Lilith once more appears in another major historical work, this time
the famed Dead Sea Scrolls.
These manuscripts were discovered in sealed up caves along the Jordan River and predate
many books of the Bible.
Here Lilith once more makes an appearance in a hymn which was believed to be used for
demonic exorcism.
In this hymn the reciter attempts to purge a victim of demonic corruption, naming Lilith
by name.
The Talmud, one of the world's most ancient religious texts and written between the 6th
and 3rd century BC also mentions Lilith.
Here she appears as a long-haired demon with wings who could seduce men and have sex with
them in their sleep, often undetected.
Ancient religious figures even went so far as to warn that men should not sleep alone
so that Lilith would not visit, and possibly slay them in their sleep.
Leaving her mark across the ancient world, Lilith also appears in the from of countless
charms and trinkets all meant to ward off her nighttime attacks.
A limestone plaque dating back to the 8th century BC is translated to read, “O you
who fly in the darkened rooms, be off with you this instant, this instant, Lilith.
Thief and breaker of bones.”
These types of charms would often hang in the rooms and houses of pregnant women or
newborn children, which were believed to be Lilith's favorite prey.
Because she was seen as a sneaky predator, it was believed that if Lilith found the charm
she would flee the house, knowing that she had been identified and possibly be discovered
by its inhabitants.
To this day people claim that they are visited by nighttime demons, and despite modern explanations
for sleep paralysis, some are not satisfied that this phenomenon is purely natural.
Many people still believe that succubus, female demons which prey on sleeping men, and incubus,
male demons who do the same to women, are a very real phenomenon.
Famously, a 1980s horror film called The Entity tells the allegedly true story of a woman
who was prey to an incubus, a male night hag.
Doris Bither was a single mother living in Culver City, California in 1978.
She moved into a house but was warned by a Mexican neighbor that the house was evil and
she should stay away from it.
Plagued by personal problems, Doris experimented with a Ouija board and often used drugs and
alcohol while trying to communicate with spirits.
One night, Doris was physically attacked and raped by an unseen entity, and the attacks
continued happening over the course of several months.
Shockingly, they would even occur in front of her children, who would later testify to
the veracity of their mother's claims.
Stories about female and even male night hags have been with us for millenia, and while
science has a ready explanation for the phenomenon of sleep paralysis, it falls a little short
when it comes to physical sexual assault by unseen beings.
Yet was Doris Bither's story purely fiction, and if so, why did all of her children claim
to have seen some of these attacks, or even been on the receiving end of bites and scratches
themselves?
Is the night hag a real phenomenon, or is Lilith and her coterie of demons nothing more
than our overactive, fearful imagination?
Until science can definitely disprove the existence of paranormal forces, we'll leave
it up to you to decide.
Have you ever experienced sleep paralysis?
Do you think the night hag story is nothing more than the sleep paralysis phenomenon?
Let us know in the comments!
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