Thursday, July 22, 2010

Sleep Paralysis

Ah, another morning. You open your eyes and stare at the ceiling. Time to toss those covers aside and start the da-- Wait... what's this? Your arms don't seem to be moving. Or your feet. And HOLY SHIT! There's a monster in the room! And that bastard must have glued your entire body to your bed!

Well, that or you're suffering from sleep paralysis. Also referred to as "devil on your back" by Africans, "the dark presser/assailer" in Turkey and "on the pig's back" by the Irish.

Wait, What the fuck?

As you fall asleep, several things happen. First, your conscious mind is set to low-level functioning. Next, your body is immobilized so that you can dream of doing things like running, without actually running into your bedroom wall like the dog in that YouTube video.

Then, your brain cycles in and out of REM. Occasionally, your conscious mind wakes up, but forgets to include other parts of your brain, usually just seconds before the REM is phased completely out. The result is that for the next few moments, you get to watch the dream, or rather nightmare in most cases, played out as a vivid hallucination right before your very much awakened eyes.

Oh, and that part about you being immobilized? That's still there, hence the "paralysis" half of "sleep paralysis." Not only do get to watch the demonized spider-crabs on your ceiling eat a tiny kitten just above your immobile body, you are completely helpless to do anything about it when they come for you.

But, you can tell the difference between real life and some stupid waking dream, right?Apparently not, this condition seems to explain the whole alien abduction phenomenon, and several thousand years worth of ghost stories and demon encounters.

So yeah, its pretty fucking real.

Can it Happen to You?

It's already happened to some of you reading this. Surveys show that about one out of four people have experienced it, though who knows how many more: A) had it but didn't know what it was or 2) forgot about it or wrote the whole thing off as a dream.

Then again we don't know how many of the ones who claimed to have had it were actually abducted by aliens instead, so it probably balances out.

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