SLEEP PARALYSIS or DEMON POSSESSION

SLEEP PARALYSIS - DEMON POSSESSION

BY: RYAN HURD

If you have ever woken up in the middle of the night and found you can’t move, or even cry for help, you have experienced sleep paralysis. If, during this bizarre paralysis, you suddenly felt that someone—or something —was watching you, you have come face to face with the waking hallucination known as the Intruder. And if all this happens and then a ghastly creature resembling a gnome or a night elf crawls onto you to whisper sweet impish nothings into your ear, congratulations, you are one of the lucky ones to know the Incubus.

And you’’re not alone.

Sleep Paralysis (SP) and its associated visions, known as hypnagogic hallucinations (HH), are still a mystery to medical science, even though 40% of the world’s population has experienced it at least once in their lives. Although a common symptom of narcolepsy and other sleep disorders, sleep paralysis can also be induced in healthy dreamers due to factors like sleep deprivation, jet lag, or too much cannabis before bed.

Normally in REM sleep, the body is paralyzed to prevent us from acting out our dreams. In sleep paralysis, the REM paralysis persists momentarily after we have “woken up.” But we’re not really awake—rather we are aware in a fugue state in between dreaming and the waking world. We literally project the dreamscape onto the landscape of our sleep environment.

The apparitions associated with sleep paralysis include aliens, angels, and ancestors, depending on your cultural upbringing and your level of fear. Like lucid dreaming, this nightmare is really a co-creation between the dreamer’s (or visionary’s) expectations and the murky-murk of the unconscious or perhaps the collective realms beyond the personal mind.

It’’s truly an extraordinary conscious state, but not many people talk about it because to be haunted by demons in the 21st century, this Age of Information, is to be doubly cursed.

I’’m not sure what’s more disturbing, though: that around the world millions of people are visited at night by ghoulish entities who want to torment/sleep with us, or that, in a recent diagnostic survey, over half of psychiatrists admitted that they would diagnose a person who reported a typical sleep paralysis dream (can’t move, can’t breathe, stinky demon sitting on the chest) with some kind of psychosis such as schizophrenia.

As Hufford himself has said in an interview in the 2008 documentary Your Worst Nightmare, “We have erased knowledge of these experiences from the cultural repertoire while these experiences are continuing to happen. That’’s dramatic. That’’s a level of social control that’s very impressive.”

Indeed, sleep paralysis visions are a normal, healthy part of life for thousands of psychics, shamans, and explorers of the deep mind. Like lucid dreams and psychedelic encounters, SP visions present gifts and opportunities, once you get used to all the existential horror, spontaneous kundalini blasts and first chakra freak-fests. My hope is that we can begin to reclaim this lost lexicon and learn from one another about these freaky underworld visions that have helped shape our myths and fairy tales.

What follows is an excerpt from chapter 4 of my ebook Sleep Paralysis: A Dreamer’s Guide. This chapter explores the psychological theories currently in vogue about the Apparition, as well as a quick look into the role sleep paralysis apparitions have played in history.

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