Ghost Buster TQP0022
Posted By Anney E.J. Ryan
I have a ghost story for you.
Late one night, my friend woke to her bed shaking violently. Someone, or something, stood over her bed and whispered in her ear: “Hey! Wake up!”
The girl pretended to be asleep until the shaking and whispering stopped. No door opened or closed, indicating that a physical person had left the room. Whatever it was just disappeared.
Is this a true ghost story or a lie? Possibly neither. It could have been sleep paralysis.
Sleep paralysis is a condition where a person, either falling asleep or waking, feels unable to move or speak. It occurs when s/he moves through the stages of sleep too quickly. It’s caused by anxiety disorder, panic attacks, post traumatic stress disorder, and insomnia.
During SP, the brain wakes up, while the body remains asleep. Because the sleeper is technically asleep, s/he feels paralyzed, although awake, and continues to dream. This is where the ghost sightings come in.
J. Allan Cheyne, psychologist at the University of Waterloo in Canada, has been studying sleep paralysis for the last twenty years. According to his testimonies and studies, sixty percent of SP sufferers experience “intruder” hallucinations, a creature sitting on their chest. Some feel like they’re floating, or having an out-of-body experience. Some claim to see hairy men, witches, demons and dark clouds in their rooms.
Consequently, sleep paralysis has been used to explain alien abductions too.
In Abducted: How People Come to Believe They Were Kidnapped by Aliens, Harvard Prof. Susan A. Clancy claims that alien abductions can be explained as sleep paralysis, and an overactive imagination. She also found that many alien abductees, as well as SP sufferers, were physically abused as children. Needless to say, when her book came out, Clancy’s subjects were not amused with her hypothesis.
I’m not either. I’ve had sleep paralysis since the age of six. While I’ve never seen a ghost or an alien, I can tell you that there’s no way anyone would mistake SP for a paranormal experience.
SP feels a little like being buried alive—minus the terror of actually being buried alive. It happens quickly. I am rudely sucked down into my mattress. A great white wave of static washes over me. I see my room, but hazy, as if through TV static. It’s like I’m lying in a glass casket, with just enough room to wiggle. My arms feel ironed to my sides, my torso, waterlogged. It’s not like being awake; it’s not like being asleep—it’s somewhere in between. Sometimes I hear voices humming. Sometimes I see creatures in my room.
Still, even as a six year old, I knew that demons were not REALLY hanging over my bed.
I wonder if Susan Clancy ever experienced SP. Her claims assume that her subjects can’t tell the difference between being awake and being asleep, between dreams and reality. Is her study valid, if based on a lack of confidence in the sleeper’s understanding of lucidity?
-AEJR
May 28, 2008 at 12:57 pm
Hmmm.
But aren’t you doing the same thing that the scientists are doing?
If it’s inaccurate to assume that everyone that has a paranormal experience is confused by sleep paralysis, isn’t it also inaccurate to assume that everyone that has sleep paralysis isn’t confused by it?
May 28, 2008 at 4:24 pm
i’ve had similar experiences with sleep paralysis and never thought it was alien related. still scared the crap out of me, though.
May 28, 2008 at 5:16 pm
I never thought my experiences with sleep paralysis were alien-related, either–but I’m also not predisposed to believing in it.
I also have regular, non-paralytic nocturnal hallucinations, sometimes.
Also, it turns out that sleep-paralysis features in not one, but TWO of my short stories that will eventually appear here.
Huh.
May 28, 2008 at 7:46 pm
When I was six and seven years old we lived in a big spooky house in Maine in Stephen King’s neck of the woods. During that time i saw and heard things that line right up with classic ghost stories–furniture moving by itself, cold spots, whispery noises, and one transparent figure at the foot of the bed.
I still get sleep paralysis. It’s scary and confusing but when it’s over I Always Know that it was just a dream. Even as a kid I could tell.
That stuff in Maine, well I cannot and will not try to explain it. Spirits of the dead, Aliens, Bizzare meteorological event, or just some jerk with fishing line and a kazoo; I’ll never know but it wasn’t just my imagination.
May 29, 2008 at 1:23 am
Hey TQP
Duh.
May 30, 2008 at 1:42 pm
The word essay is derived from the word “assay” which means “to try.” essays are attempts at figuring something out, hypotheses. So yes, I am making assumptions, trying out theories, because that’s what essays do.
May 30, 2008 at 5:34 pm
Well, all right, but look what you said: “I can tell you that there’s no way anyone would mistake sleep paralysis for a paranormal experience.”
If you’re testing a hypothesis, and you say, “If we assume that this is true, what are the consequences? What necessarily must also be true if this assumption is true? What if this assumption is false? What must necessarily be true, then?” That’s one thing.
But it’s something altogether different to definitively say that your own experience is necessarily representative of the universal experience–especially when, after throwing out the initial hypothesis of sleep paralysis, you don’t replace it with anything (i.e., you say, “this is necessarily false; I don’t know what explanation there is, but this one isn’t it.”)
Hypotheses are not just assumptions, they are conditional assumptions that you use in order to solve problems.
June 2, 2008 at 7:42 pm
i didn’t offer any other possible reasoning for ghost stories and alien abductions because that’s not the point of the essay. The point of the essay was to give my experience, my perspective. Please don’t write my essays for me.
As for using one’s own personal experience to prove an argument, writers have been doing that since the classics. It’s a form of argumentation. Go back and skim your freshman comp textbook; you’ll see it’s there.
There’s only so much I can do in 500-700 words, darlin. I mean geez, it’s just a blog.
June 2, 2008 at 8:28 pm
I never took Freshman Comp.
It is, quite frankly, a miracle that I’m able to string two sentences together, or begin a thought with something other than the word “dude.”
June 3, 2008 at 1:44 am
how did you get through college w.o having to take comp? it’s a gen ed! everyone has to take it.
June 3, 2008 at 1:34 pm
My college had no gen ed requirements. No majors, no tests, no grades, no god-damn service, buy something or get the hell out.
We had a farm center where they kept sheep, though, and some kind of attack llama that could fight off the coyotes.
August 21, 2011 at 10:53 pm
Good points all around. Truly apeprictaed.