Does Sleep Paralysis Explain Alien Abduction?

Sleep paralysis has become widely known as a common sleep disorder in which the body becomes paralyzed (as it commonly does during dream sleep to protect people from injury) but the person falling asleep is not totally asleep yet.

Instead, during sleep paralysis, the experiencer is trapped in a state of twilight sleep, somewhere in between full consciousness and dreaming.

While in this between-state, the person typically experiences terror, the sense of a malevolent presence in the room, and a heaviness or pressure on the chest or body, as if being held down or paralyzed by that entity.

In some cases the person is only dimly aware of a sinister presence and sees nothing except, possibly, a shadow. In other cases the person sees what look like alien creatures, demons, or paranormal entities. The experience ends when the person wakes up or falls asleep completely.

Sleep paralysis is often put forward as an explanation for alien abduction reports. Before aliens became the bete du jour, people reported being 'hagged' (ridden by an old hag, which was understood to be form of witchcraft), or said they had been attacked by an incubus or succubus--demons that preyed on a semiconscious person's sexual energy.

It's tempting to say, "oh well, now we understand that this is a medical problem called sleep paralysis," but in fact, as long ago as 1989, respected academic folklorist David Hufford was making a reasoned argument that 'sleep paralysis' is a descriptive term for what appears to be a consistent discrete phenomenon that we don't really completely understand.

Hufford's book, The Terror that Comes in the Night, based on his academic study entitled "An Experience Centered Study of Supernatural Assault Traditions." revolutionized the academic study of folklore. Previous to Hufford's careful philosophical analysis, it was assumed that folkloric tales were primitive (read: false) ways of understanding things that science could easily explain better.

In fact, science does not have a great explanation for some things that trigger folkloric explanations, and neither does the study of folklore.

Sleep paralysis or 'hagging' (in the language of folklore) is one these cases.

The casual and superficial debunking of paranormal and UFO or alien phenomena often includes scientific 'explanations' that are actually descriptions that are no more accurate than the folklore explanations that preceded them, of phenomena that we just don't understand very well.

A description is NOT an explanation, and it is even less an argument against the validity of an experience.

Sleep paralysis is a fascinating phenomenon. I myself have experienced it several times when I was much younger. It really is a terrifying and weird experience, but the leap from that experience to the experience of an alien abduction is huge, despite the intriguing similarities.

Before we start snickering at these things, it would be so great if we could look into them with an open mind. And I need to mention here that many respected scientific and academic minds have ask for the same attitude.

We might just discover something nobody expects.

And isn't that what science is supposed to be about?

The Significance of Time in UFO Sightings and Alien Abduction Experiences

Time distortions play an important role in many UFO sightings and in nearly all alien abduction experiences. For example:

• Abductees report episodes of 'missing' time and time distortion most of the time. Sometimes they find themselves unable to account for several hours on a routine trip. Sometimes abductees report feeling like days have passed during the experience when the actual amount of time that passed was hours or minutes.
• UFO sightings are also sometimes accompanied by time distortions. One especially fascinating distortion (which is by no means universal) involves the stoppage of time. Watches, car ignitions, and digital displays shut down in the presence of a UFO, but often time itself also seems to have stopped. When the vehicle clock is checked again, the sighting seems to have occurred outside of time, as if time itself had stopped, not just the watch.
• When UFOs at a distance are sighted by pilots and others, the motion of the UFO is often described as jerky or "like a stone skipping on water." In other words, the UFO does not always move in a straight fluid line. Instead it seems to appear one place, then another, then another, with gaps in between, in much the same way that film appears when the reel is slowed way down. Kevin Arnold, who is often credited with the having seen the first UFO (I think this is not correct but it is a standard description) explained the movement of the objects he saw as jerky in this way. Some observers describe it as the UFO 'blinking in and out.'
• When veteran ufologist John Keel first reported the Men In Black phenomena, he noted that the way these 'men' dressed and spoke, as well as the cars they tended to drive, were 'off' in terms of time. That is, the clothing was from the 40s or 50s, the cars were from that era also, and the slang used was dated to the point of being sometimes comical.
• One of the most frequently used non-explanations of UFO sightings and alien abductions is temporal lobe epilepsy. The temporal lobe is the part of the brain that processes incoming verbal information and memory, and also, our sense of time.

It seems to me that this might be a clue to what is going on with at least some the more unusual sightings, the ones that can't be explained in other ways. I'm not sure the answer is as simple as 'time travel'. But I do think that in many of the stranger examples, distortions of time are important.

Theoretical physics has already discovered that time is more than a sequence of causal events arranged like a line through space.

Human beings perceive time this way, but that isn't how physicists necessarily understand it. We have to be careful about taking complex ideas and reducing them to New Age blather, but then again, it seems that something genuine is going on here. We just don't know what it is.

Yet.

I'd like to go on, but I'm not a physicist and I don't have... um, time.

But it's something to consider, no? 

My Weird Alien Dreams

At the age of 36, in the middle of what I took to be a normal life, I awoke inside the following bad dream:

I am sitting at a kitchen table with my brother, who in real life is one year younger. In the dream, we are eight and nine years old or so—not quite into puberty, but not little kids either.

The table belongs to one of those 1950s Formica-topped dinettes, the kind with grooved chrome side trim, metal legs, and matching chrome chairs with red vinyl seats. 

(Today these retro sets are popular fixtures in soda shops, hamburger joints, and Atomic home décor. When I was a kid, every household had one.)

The Formica table, my brother, and I are all suspended in black space. The scene reminds me of one of those 1950s existential stage plays in which the theater goes completely black except for a spotlight on an actor or two who blather on about (supposedly) deep stuff.

My brother is wearing pajamas, also from the 1950s, the seersucker kind with cowboys and Indians and lassos printed all over them. His expression is blank and a little strange. I reach out to shake his shoulder, as he seems to be in some sort of trance, and just as I begin to stretch out my hand I hear a voice inside my head hiss, “Don’t touch him!”

But it’s too late.

By the time I hear the voice I’ve already touched his shoulder. The moment my hand makes contact, he is suddenly not my brother anymore but some alien creature with huge deep eyes as black as space itself, only much, much deeper and vast beyond imagining. ‘Hypnotic’ is a shallow word for these eyes—They are infinite and alive, dark in a way that almost gleams or shines.

I recognize this creature. In fact to this day I can see its face clearly and vividly. I have never forgotten it. The face is so real that in the dream it feels hyper-real, as if it is somehow more real than everyday reality, and it is clear to me right away that the warning voice and this thing are in fact one and the same.

The thing has staged this scene somehow for my benefit, but my touch has destroyed the illusion and now I am face to face with it instead, locked in its gaze. It is nearly impossible to explain how this feels, but the moment includes extreme terror, paralysis, and the sense of being completely controlled by this other being.

The creature’s skin glistens golden or slightly green-golden, iridescent, like the skin of some colorful Amazon frog. The eyes take up most of the bulb-shaped head. There is no nose to speak of and no proper mouth.  Beneath the eyes, which dominate the entire top half of the face, in the place where the mouth and nose should be, a network of what looks like veins or ridges or some kind of wrinkled skin disappears into an almost nonexistent neck.

Then suddenly this thing, which has no mouth, smiles. It smiles with its eyes somehow and yet it feels like the whole face smiles. The smile is transmitted telepathically in some sense, and yet looking at the face it is still clear that it is in fact smiling—in somewhat the same way you know that a dog is smiling even though dogs don’t have human features.

The smile is not reassuring at all, but weirdly sickening and terrifying. I sense that the creature means to reassure me by smiling, but the smile is so ‘off’ that it only deepens my terror. 

                *************

The dream ends abruptly. I wake to find myself sitting bolt upright in bed, shaking and drenched in sweat. Relieved that I’ve only been dreaming after all, a deep unease and mild nausea settles in nonetheless.

I am convinced against logic that this vignette has not been a normal sort of dream but something dreadfully familiar and all too real, and I now feel as if I am losing my mind. Yet my experience is so visceral I cannot make myself chalk it up to hallucination.

The next night, a follow-up nightmare seems tailor-made to validate these fears:

In this second dream I believe that I am just waking up, as if I am not asleep at all but am in my normal bedroom about to start my day. Standing at the foot of my bed is the creature from the night before, only this time, I sense that there are others with him nearby, even though I can’t see them.

The minute I see this creature again I am frozen in terror. I can’t move and I can’t cry out. The thing is absurdly dressed in what looks like a very ornate, heavily embroidered medieval red robe, and is holding a thin white metallic rod about a foot long that is slightly pointed at the end. The tip of the rod glows.

This thin rod looks exactly like the sort of ‘magic wand’ a stage magician might use as a prop, and the ridiculous ornate costume that the thing is wearing heightens that absurd association. I seem to already ‘know’ that this rod holds a charge of some kind—I recognize it--and I immediately begin to plead in my mind with the thing to please, please not touch me with it.

Of course it does touch me with it, and the second that it does, I am no longer frozen in my own bed but find myself running hard through a downtown alleyway at night, still dressed in my bedclothes.

Just as in the scene from the night before, the run through the alleyway feels hyper real—more real than real—I can feel the cold night air on my skin and I recognize the location.

I come round a corner (I am ostensibly running from this creature though I don’t see it anywhere) and run smack into a street person, a man, in very dirty clothes and wearing an odd expression. He smiles in a way that is oddly reminiscent of the smile on the thing in the other nightmare, but he’s clearly human. I can smell him, and he doesn’t smell good.

“Are you all right?” he asks me solicitously, and reaches out his hand. The minute his hand touches my shoulder (again, much like in the dream the night before where I reach out to touch my brother’s shoulder) I wake up.

                *************

Once again I wake from this dream in my own bed, drenched in sweat, short of breath and more than a little nauseous, still smelling this street person and still stuck with the sick feeling that none of this is a dream, that it’s all way too real and way too horrible.

That same day, I return some books to the public library downtown and check out some new ones. The books I check out are about trauma, PTSD, and multiple personality. I hold a BA in psychology and have a legitimate academic interest in these topics, but my interest is also personal. I’m trying to figure out if I’m cracking up, and if so, exactly what the nature of my insanity is.

I’m about to walk out the door when I feel a hand on my shoulder. I wheel around, and standing there in front of me is the very same bum from my dream, still smiling that odd, inhuman (but not really threatening, just weird) smile, still dressed in the same dirty clothes and still smelling really bad.

“Are you OK?” he asks, and then goes on, “I was worried about you last night.”

I run, literally run, out of the library without responding.


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Well, there's more to this story, a lot more, but I won't go into it here.

I wonder how many people have these odd experiences and never discuss them for fear of ridicule. I have been unable to completely swallow the ET hypothesis when it comes to alien encounters, and weirdly, since all this happened I have found some of the weirder, more ridiculous elements of my dreams (like the wand, the ornate clothing, the wrinkled 'mouth' of the creature) repeated in other people's stories, giving the whole thing a sort of credence that is not exactly welcome.

One thought I've been entertaining lately now that the movie Inception is in theaters is that someone or some thing may well know how to move in and out of other people's dreams for a purpose. This idea is not as fantastic as it sounds. In fact, modern scientific culture is the first in history to NOT believe that such things happen routinely.

That being the case, it does make you wonder WTF.

More later.