Imagine being trapped in a twilight zone between wakefulness and sleep, unable to move or speak. Welcome to the eerie world of sleep paralysis, a phenomenon where the mind is awake, but the body is not. Let's delve into this terrifying encounter.
Sleep paralysis is a condition in which a person awakens from sleep but is temporarily paralyzed, unable to move or speak.
Around 20 percent of people experience sleep paralysis at least once in their life
- One potential treatment is to learn to control the content of our dreams
- How does sleep paralysis happen and why does it accompany the strangest hallucinations?
Neurological Origins of Sleep Paralysis
Sleep paralysis often occurs when we wake up while still in a stage of sleep, called rapid eye movement sleep (REM), during which most vivid dreams occur.
- During REM, a part of the front brain called the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, central to our ability to plan and think logically, turns off.
- To prevent us from acting out such intensely “real” dreams during REM and potentially hurting ourselves, our brain has a brilliant solution: it makes our bodies temporarily paralyzed.
Fear feeds terrifying sleep paralysis
Literature is closer to science than one would think
- One’s beliefs about sleep paralysis can profoundly shape the experience
- In one study, Devon Hinton and I found that in Denmark, people regard sleep paralysis as something trivial caused by the brain, whereas Egyptians often hold very specific cultural and supernatural beliefs about theirs
- Egyptians experiencing sleep paralysis not only fear it much more than Danes do, but they also have longer episodes and on average experience sleep paralysis three times more often
- These findings strongly indicate that beliefs have radically transformed the experience – a form of mind-body interaction – causing not only psychological fear but also conditioned physiological fear of sleep paralysis
Becoming a ghost
Sleep paralysis can sometimes cause eerie sensations of floating outside one’s body or looking down upon oneself from the bedroom ceiling.
- In certain cultures, such out-of-body experiences are attributed to the “soul” – a type of “astral travel” where the spiritual self projects itself into an alternative realm of existence, but they can be produced in the brain as well.
Control your dreams: a cure for sleep paralysis?
A more radical approach to overcome the fear of sleep paralysis is by “literally” turning your back on the terrifying monster, by sliding into a lucid dream – that is, a dream in which you are aware that you are dreaming.
- Being able to manipulate the content of one’s sleep paralysis hallucinations and REM-dream imagery could give the experiencer a sense of control over the situation and might therefore be therapeutic.
Seeing a ghost
The creature often appears simply as a dark shadow, similar to the human size and shape.
- It can also include detailed features, such as a scary demonic face with animal characteristics, like sharp teeth and cat eyes, and it goes by different names around the world.
A disturbance in the brain’s body map
Neuroscientist VS Ramachandran and I recently proposed a neurological explanation for why we see this shadowy creature during sleep paralysis.
- We might have a “hardwired” template or “body template” in the right parietal lobe of the brain that is connected to the emotional and visual centers in our brain, causing us to be attracted to body shapes similar to our own
- A person with a missing arm may experience phantom limbs, meaning that they feel the presence of missing limbs
- Occasionally, when the temporoparietal junction is disrupted using an electric current, instead of having an out-of-body experience, the person senses a shadowy figure
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