During several periods of my life I have suffered from extreme haunting experiences during the night. I have been asleep and suddenly woken to find that I cannot move and that I am in a terrifying paralytic state. When this happens I can literally only move my eyes, I can see the room all around me but I’m too scared to look. Through the shadows in the room I am aware that I am not alone, sometimes I can see them, sometimes they are just lingering somewhere around me, and occasionally they attack. They sit on me, they push me into the mattress, invisible hands at times but vivid demonic entities at others; their faces staring into mine, their eyes wild and distorted. In panic I try to fight but still can’t move. Sometimes a prayer helps but I’m so utterly mortified by these demonic attacks that I cannot even speak. My tongue, it seems, is paralysed too. Eventually I scream and find that they have gone, my arms and legs aching in agonising cramps from where they have held me down; in fear I eventually get back to sleep.
How familiar does this sound from stories of possession, haunting, vampirism and alien abduction? Yet I have never been possessed; I have not once seen an alien; I know that vampires do not exist and my jury is still out on what a ghost is. Yet I still suffer from these attacks.
I am not alone. Stories of the supernatural are rife with such images. In Scotland there are tales of The Old Hag, which sits on you during the night; legend has it that the Devil himself would appear on our ancestor’s bed and play the violin until they forced him out; Greek myth tells us of the sex demons Incubus and Succubus who salaciously seduced their victims whilst they were asleep and our modern equivalent are the grey aliens that appear at our bed sides and operate strange acts upon us while we have been frozen in time. In all these stories there are similarities; being held down, feeling threatened and a fixation with the assailants eyes.
Yet would you believe that this is an extremely common occurrence and has nothing at all to do with anything supernatural at all?
The effects are simply caused by stress and tension in our everyday lives. This affects our sleep patterns and forces us into what is known as a hypnogogic trance state; more commonly known as sleep paralysis.
I first discovered this explanation in 1995 in the February – March issue of The Fortean Times (issue 79). Sleep Paralysis was raised in an interview with cult author and sub-culture spokesman Robert Anton Wilson, best known for his co-authorship of The Illuminatus Trilogy; a book that despite being spoof still can be found plagiarised as truth by conspiracy theorists, god bless them.
When asked what his view were on Alien Abduction (still a very hot topic in 1990’s Fortean before the coming of the millennium and the demise of The X files burst its bubble somewhat), Wilson replied that through his research he had found evidence that some cases were due to trauma caused by real life abuse yet, ‘Others, I think, start out as sleep paralysis - a state I have experienced twice in my 62 years. In pure sleep paralysis, you simply feel paralyzed and don't know whether you're dreaming or awake. In other cases, this is accompanied by a nightmare-like fantasy; in my two cases, this merely consisted of a fearful sense that something awful was in the room. In each instance, I awoke before it went further. But I think for some reason it might escalate to a real hallucination, in which the "something awful" becomes any kind of monster you have in your fantasy library - aliens, demons, whatever.’ (this interview can be found at http://www.frogboy.freeuk.com/raw.html)
For me this is among the best descriptions of what I have personally experienced. Of course I am not prepared to say that all things of this nature can simply be put down to sleep paralysis but it certainly holds food for thought. I, myself, found great comfort that this explained my night terrors and in fact it helped me to control them when they occurred again. Certainly I found that I recognized the symptoms as they started. With further development I could relax myself knowing that I was in a dream state. I learnt that I could beat the devil by waking myself up and out of the encounter in a relaxed way. What’s more and this may be considered quite sick by some peoples standards, I actually learnt that I could enjoy the phenomena and use it.Yes you read that right, I have used it.
I was an animation student in 1995 with a set brief to produce a short animated documentary. I was so fascinated in what Wilson had said that I did further research into the phenomena and used it as the subject for the film. Bizarrely it went on to be shown at the 1996 British Short Film Festival and I found myself being nominated for Young Narrative Filmmaker of the Year, which was kind of strange.
I’ve used it again recently, with it inspiring the subject of my current novel The Doppelgangers’ (excerpts available at my blog page http://jdchadwick.blogspot.com/). The novel is about a writer who is haunted by his characters, as they try to prevent him from writing his terrible novel and is based on one of my own experiences.
I had been writing a short piece that involved a character called Doris Fink who committed suicide by drowning herself in a canal. The evening that I had the visitation from her I remember having watched an episode of A Touch of Frost in which a woman was dragged from a canal. I can’t help but wonder how Wilson would have viewed the synchronicity of this; synchronicity being a huge interest of his.
That night I was awoken with the usual feeling of terror and that something was in my room; the door opened and in walked the drowned woman Doris Fink, straight out of my short story, dripping with stinking, stale water and bog weed hanging in her hair. She stood in the doorway staring at me, her misery seeming to be the reason for the visit as in theory I had killed her. Of course she looked identical to the woman from the episode of A Touch of Frost and somehow the two elements had merged in my head, become one and walked straight out of my ‘monster library’. At the time I was trying to keep a business together and working all hours that god sent trying to finish a contract before being sued. The stress of this no doubt had caused the sleep paralysis; in fact at the time I had been suffering from it quite regularly. On telling my then house mate and business partner about my encounter the next day, he then suggested that maybe she had turned up to let me know that the short story I was writing was crap.
Bingo, I now had a much better idea for a story.
I think that it’s quite interesting that other writers have also experienced similar things seeing their own characters in the flesh. Very famously Alan Moore claims to have seen his creation John Constantine twice; once after a magical ritual and once whilst having a cup of tea in a café. Of course I have no evidence that this was caused by sleep paralysis, but what is interesting is that I have recently come across conditions where having such hallucinations occur in the waking day.
On facebook the other night I was chatting to an old friend of mine who revealed that he had just been diagnosed as having narcolepsy and cataplexy. His symptoms lead to him having blackouts during the day, falling asleep whilst going about his everyday business and surprise, surprise intense sleep paralysis. The diagnosis, having had wires put all over his head and multiple scans, has shown that he has 3000 brain cells missing and so has been prescribed the maximum dosage of amphetamines that he is legally allowed to take, in order to prevent his malediction.
He told me that he can fall asleep anywhere and everywhere and even just suffer from the paralysis and the hallucinations whilst awake. When they happen they always have, as he put it, religious themes. He experiences inverted crosses on fire and demons crawling out of them and through windows to get him. Interestingly he is not religious at all. But then for me these aren’t really religious images, they’re more the kind of thing that you’d expect to see on a Morbid Angel or Slayer album cover. This friend of mine used to play bass in Death Metal bands but now he is actually an aspiring House DJ; music is the love of his life. For me it is fascinating that the Satanic Metal imagery has stayed with him inside his unconscious mind although he no longer plays that music and has totally shifted genres. I suppose that if he was to have sleep paralysis then rave culture couldn’t really haunt him. Got to say a rave is far more my idea of hell.
What this shows is that the monsters that we experience are very deeply rooted in what we have experienced in the past; it’s not just what scares us, it is actually based on what makes us individuals and what we have learnt from in our lives. If this is taken into account alongside my friend’s account that he doesn’t have to be asleep to experience his hallucinations, what can this also mean for a paranormal research group?
In theory any story of haunting or phenomena at night can be described as sleep paralysis and therefore any story of haunting at day can be appropriated to narcolepsy and cataplexy. Therefore are we all capable of having the occasional hypnogogic state occur as a one off, awake or asleep?
And if so can we easily explain the phenomena away as being nothing more than a horror raised from the depths of the victims mind?
If so when asked what their relationship is with this particular imagery that they have encountered would they say ‘Oh I saw that last night on TV’ or ‘Yes it’s a lot like something I have on an album cover’ or would they stick to their guns claiming that it wasn’t like anything else that they have discovered before. How will even being made to appear ill, drunk or just plain imaginative affect their answers?
If made aware of sleep paralysis can victims find a sense of comfort from it as I have. or instead will they dismiss it knowing that their experiences make them appear special, different and even bring them attention?
For me the more that people learn about the normality of such mental states the more that we can distinguish which experiences are simply hallucinations and which aren’t. From the small amount of research that I have done for this article I have discovered that approximately a third of all people have had sleep paralysis. This suggests that not only is it extremely common but that there are still regular people out there who haven’t experienced it yet but still could.
Of course there will always be those people who claim that psychologists have just discovered astral entities and are trying to fix them with diagnosis. But then there will also be that other group of people who claim that there is no such thing as the supernatural and all that there is psychology and hallucination.
What’s important for me is that I can accept my occasional night terrors as being completely normal alongside the more esoteric phenomena that I also experienced. However it does raise the question, and quite rightly so, as to whether it is perfectly normal psychological effects that people who claim to have mediumistic abilities experience.
Fascinatingly these experiences regardless of diagnosis have provided mankind with some of our most interesting and terrifying folklore and mythology. In a far off future the aliens of today will be the fairies of our past, so, long may these stories keep being reshaped as humans enter new eras and their terrors take on new contexts.
In conclusion to my blog here’s a thing to try; under the influence of the succubus today I will be writing about Raquel Welch, watching ‘One Million Years B.C’ and eating camembert before hitting the sack; knowing my luck I’ll end up with a Diplodocus on my bed.