What's Your Sleep Paraylsis?
I recently had an interesting conversation with a fellow member of the Granite State Skeptics. We were talking about sleep paralysis. Sleep paralysis is when you are awake, or certainly think you are awake, but you can't move. It's very frightening, and one of the more scary aspects of it is that a person having sleep paralysis tends to hallucinate. At the very least you are convinced something is real, and a feeling of panic can overcome the person with sleep paralysis.
Sleep paralysis goes something like this. You awake, and you know something is wrong. You then know you have to do something. There is a real feeling of fear, and the need for action. Your body just won't obey you, and the panic can build. Meanwhile whatever it is that is frightening you is in the room or house with you, and it is very real. Finally, after a bit, you simply fall back to sleep. When you awake in the morning, you first thought is often a memory of that fear. It was so real, you are frightened still by it. You aren't sure if it was real or just a hallucination of some sort.
My friend and I were talking about what our sleep paralysis experiences were like, and found that ours are very much the same. We don't have aliens come visit us. Ghosts don't show us. WE both get burglars. We can hear them in the house, they are going through our stuff. We both feel the need to get up and call the police or somehow keep the burglars from stealing all our stuff. And then we both also experience the simply falling asleep. A big part of sleep paralysis is that often the person just goes back into a deep sleep.
My friend said that she was glad her sleep paralysis is about burglars as she can then get up and walk around her home and assure herself that it wasn't real. Now remember, she is a skeptic, but this sleep paralysis fear is so real that she needs the reassurance of getting up and making sure nothing has been stolen. I also wake and check around to see if anyone has been in the house. For both of us, having our sleep paralysis fear be something we can so easily check on makes dealing with it easy. Imagine aliens or ghosts? How do you check to see if they are real or not? Certainly our brain assures us that what we experienced was real. It takes our skeptic brains to work out that even what we are sure is real needs verification.
Some of the die hard abductee promoters would point out that my friend and I are probably visited by aliens. Or if they are die hard ghost believers, we were visited by ghosts. Or if they are of a certain die hard religious group, demons or angels.
I don't know if we experience burglars as we are skeptics, and our minds are predisposed to reject a supernatural visitation, or if we are just lucky that's it's burglars instead of demons. But having gone though several burglar visitations I'm not so quick to dismiss the fears of those that have had alien visitations or ghosts. It's a very real experience, and when you awake you are left with that fear. It takes a knowledge that our brains can get up to some interesting stuff we can't control when we are asleep that reassures the skeptic that nothing unusual has really happened. Skeptics do have sleep paralysis. We do have odd things that happen to us. Sometimes we even answer the phone and know who was calling! But we take the time to educate ourselves, and to accept the unusual as just that unusual and not paranormal in nature.
