Using Hypnagogia as a ghost theory
As many of you may already know, we here at GhostTheory subscribe to a more skeptical mindset. A mere logical and headstrong sense when we review cases. There are many explanations that we like to use when debunking cases or evidence presented to us or the world. Like a swiss army knife that is full of an useful arsenal of tools, we have our own arsenal of explanations that are best used to explain what many consider paranormal events.
I’d like to talk about Hypnagogia, or as it’s more commonly referred to, Sleep Paralysis.
Now note that this will apply to the majority of cases were people will either be in the state of sleep and be awaken or be in the drowsy stages leading to sleep.
In a Hypnagogic state, an individual who is in the REM phase of sleep (Rapid Eye Movement) which is the most profound state of sleep, is awakened and their body remains in a paralyzed state. It’s been reported that terrifying hallucinations sometimes come from this state. Where a person is aware of their surroundings and can recognize objects near them, but then interpret the body’s reaction or paralysis to that of a dangerous situation. Hallucinations range from demonic, angelic to ghosts and other unworldly beings around the individual (Alien visitations/abductions).
“Dream Caused By The Flight Of A Bee Around A Pomegranate Only Seconds Before Awakening”
-Salvador Dali
How does one go from being asleep and dreaming of being in your favorite movie scene or a night club full of beautiful women who are all over your (don’t ask, I was watching ‘El Cantante’ the other night) to that of a demonic being standing at the foot of your bed or Aliens abducting you?
Environmental or external influences for one.
I remember as a child when my grandmother (not a very pleasant woman) would “tuck” us in for sleep, but had her own way of getting us to be quiet. She would tell us that if we were not asleep by a certain time, there were these “witches” that would turn into owls and scratch or peck out our eyes if they heard children awake in the house. She would mock the “witches” cackle and scare us kids. She would also tell us the story of “La Llorona”. The weeping woman. Which is a legend throughout the Americas with many origins and premises. The one we heard was of this lady who drowned her children (for unknown reasons) and would then commit suicide after realizing what she’s done. Her ghastly spirit would roam the town/city looking for her lost children. Snatching any child who was not inside their home asleep.
Now after hearing this “bedtime story” I would try my hardest to fall asleep. At times I would wake up in the middle of the night and being scared when listening to the house settling in or other noises that I swore were the witches cackling.
Even though I never (as far as I can remember) experienced a hypnagogic event, I’m sure this is a major reason why scientist and researchers think that ghosts are explained by sleep paralysis. Makes sense.
So can we say that the influences of bedtime stories of zoomorphing Wicca practitioners (do we call them wereowls?) and women suffering from postpartum psychosis and/or Munchausen syndrome by proxy disorder (La Llorona) are enough to explain ghosts? No, we cannot.
Hypnagogia can better explain bedside or bedroom ghosts or Alien abductions, but it does not explain the other reports of apparitions of awake, coherent and sober individuals.
In general, Hypnagogia helps us explain our physiological responses that can contribute to paranormal phenomenon, but I find it difficult for it to explain other paranormal cases.
Written by Javier Ortega - javier@ghosttheory.com
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In regard to aliens or alien abudction there are two exceptions.
The first is that aliens could be causing the necessary corollary discharge required in order to induce sleep paralysis, which paralyzes their victim. That may be one of the main ways they are able to subdue their victim.
On that same note, a good scary dream delivered by someone else rather than a dream of your own mind’s design, could set sleep paralyzes off as well.
REM sleep dreams rarely if ever get a chance to be saved in one’s long term memory and if sleep paralysis begins in that particular dream, the dream is forgotten completely due to fear. That dream could have been the key to the ‘fear’ that was instilled, which starts the corollary discharge ball rolling.
My last abduction included my husband and his two teenage kids. We all knew what happened and don’t doubt it for a second. We were in a tent camping and we were marched out of the tent and not under our own will. It was as if we were possessed, as crazy as that sounds, and that someone else was making our decisions for us be it turning to the right, to the left, whatever.
I just got done talking about this elsewhere so here’s a copy/paste of other possibilities.
Aliens use stealth when it comes to hiding in our airspace. On that same note, you’ll find that aliens use stealth in everything that they do, which includes abduction and current day paranormal visits.
a.) What they do to us will always mimic what medical science already has a name for. That’s all part of their stealth and they do not go outside of those boundaries or doctors would have to keep looking while scratching their heads, i.e., sleep paralysis is one example. And it’s only one too because there is a long list of symptoms.
Instead however, the doctors medicate for whatever symptoms are present even though the medication is useless. Or is it, the aliens did mimic so maybe they caused that particular problem, which now needs to be medicated. It may go both ways.
b.) I swear that aliens have a motto that says, “make it as kooky looking as possible so they won’t repeat it, since if they do, they’ll experience ridicule and won’t do it again or often anyway”.
In other words, I think that there is a greater possibility that sleep paralysis can be induced in a paranormal situation by another. One would have to have experienced such however in order to truly believe that it’s possible since the statement alone is very ‘out there’.
More importantly though, nobody in science has 100% factual information yet on sleep paralysis. As of today (Dec 29,08), its causes are still not found to be absolute. Many papers have been written, and there are some facts. The pieces of the puzzle are all there but they can’t finish the puzzle because even they’re still puzzled.
So there really are no answers yet.
Atrueoriginall,
Although I agree that Aliens and paralysis can coincide in the same argument, I find it difficult to believe that Hypnagogia does not explain most Alien abduction claims.
Here is an example:
I wrote this article yesterday. This morning, at around 3:30am I had vivd dreams of just family gatherings…I woke up and got myself some water, and started thinking about the article I wrote and Hypnagogia itself. I went back to bed and around 4:00am was awoken when I felt a hard slap on my right calf. Just as soon as I was waking up from dreaming that my brother was possessed by a ghost of a child. It scared me enough to be awake since.
This is a prime example of the article I wrote yesterday about how external matters can easily induce Hypnogogia. I’m sure no one “slapped” me, it was all in my head.
Although we can not be sure, just like you said, there are no real answers.
I’m in bit late on the discussion (saw the link on about.com’s paranormal area just recently) but since I have experienced sleep paralysis I thought I’d weigh in. This was more than ten years ago but I still remember it pretty well.
In my mid 20’s I was being treated for depression and other non-psychotic mental illness through a combination of “talk therapy” and medication. One of the medications had a side effect of potentially producing vivid dreams and/or night terrors (I did deal with night terrors often as well).
The instances of SP were unusual and almost a nightly occurrence while I was on this medicine. Some nights were benign. I would feel as if I was awake, I knew the exact time as shown on the cable box clock and yet I would try to move and find I could not. When I eventually would wake and be sure I was awake (many times I would believe I was awake only to discover I still could not move) I could see that my “dream image” of the clock’s time was correct. The SP also would only happen if I fell asleep on my back, shortly after I went to sleep, and often I would wake thinking I had been struggling to “break through” the paralysis for a long time to find fifteen minutes or less had passed since I had initially gone to bed.
The scariest SP occurrence for me happened once that I can recall. Again, it was like the others, where I knew the time etc. Only this time there appeared to be a ghoul of sorts on top of me. It was black/gray with a skeletal face and straggly hair. I recall thinking of it as a corpse, but it was definitely more than just a dead body. I knew I was sleeping, I knew I was having one of my “episodes” but it still scared the heck out of me because it felt real. I felt as if someone or something were on top of me. Back then I had not heard of sleep paralysis, nor had I heard of “Old Hag Syndrome”, of which it appears to have been a classic case.
The house I used to live in (and where I had these dreams) did have unexplained happenings that we all believed to be ghostly in nature but the ghoul thing was purely from my mind. It’s strange to realize just how unusual our brains can be.
Mickey,
Ah yes, the “Old Hag Syndrome”.
I’ve read countless stories of these type of dreams or hallucinations. It must be terribly scary to have this type of sleep paralysis.
You brought up a good subject. People under certain medications, like the ones you were on, do report the same symptoms or visions. I did not add that to my article given that it was mainly focused on Hypnagogia during a sober state.
I hope you are doing better now. Thanks for sharing your story!
Frankly, the alien theory makes a lot of sense to me, but then I’m also inclined to hope there IS intelligent life out there. Somewhere. Then again, at this point in my life I’m also halfway convinced that aliens, ghosties, demons, et cetera can all be explained by the manipulation of non-linear time by some far future version of ourselves, who have come to grasp the properties of time and travel on a far more articulate scale than we entertain even on the big screen.
Regardless of my own personal opinions, I’ve had a single Hypnagogic episode (that I can recall without a good hypnotherapist, at any rate) and although it happened over 20 years ago, I can resurrect it with startling clarity, despite its inherent surrealism.
Coincidentally or not, the house I was living in at the time (I was 18 and only months away from moving out on my own) was considered “haunted” due to the wild variety of strange incidents experienced by myself, my mother and sisters. On this particular August night, I remember it was inordinately hot. In my room in the finished attic, the window beside my bed was open, but there was not a breeze to be had. I was just laying there, almost willing the sheer, gauzy summer curtains to stir with the promise of wind when they suddenly shot straight out, horizontal above the floor, as if a hurricane were switched on outside the window.
I was amazed, awed and then…afraid. Once the amusement at seeing the impossibility of those curtains standing at attention passed (and it passed right quickly, mind you) I became instantly cognizant of the fact that something was NOT RIGHT. At this point, the foot of my bed began sliding wildly right, then left, as if it were on wheels. I was pinned to the mattress and suddenly aware that I could not move. I was so scared! I tried repeatedly to muster my voice, to scream to my mother in the next room, but not a sound came out of my mouth.
Beyond the foot of my bed were the stairs coming up into my room. There was a 3 foot rod-iron gate along the length of floor that overlooked the stairway, and to my horror I saw that SOMETHING was making its way upstairs, into my room! I couldn’t move, I couldn’t scream and I KNEW I wasn’t asleep.
The thing that came into my room looked to me like a full grown person all hunched over with a black plastic drum liner over their head. Seriously, it was a squat, wide shape wearing a shiny trash bag. Oh for FFS, right? I can still see the thing in my mind’s eye, cresting the top step and pausing there as if contemplating me. Finally, as if satisfied that I could not move or make a sound, it began moving to the door way to its right that led into my mother’s room. I did not see any feet or legs or hear the half-expected crinkly sound of a plastic bag. I believe I knew even then that it was no trash bag, that my mind was simply trying to attach some meaning to this bizarre oddity before me, to make somehow common this absolute uncommon thing I was seeing.
As it slipped into my mother’s room, an instinctual, almost guttural fear welled up in me and all at once, my voice broke through the paralysis- I shouted MA! But all that came out was a croak, so I concentrated and screamed again and this time my voice rang through the dark room. Instantly the bed stopped careening back and forth and was still and the curtains fell back to their appropriate station flat against the wall.
I lifted my arm, then my legs, and then scrambled out of bed and into my mother’s room, where I awoke her from a sound sleep. Seeing her bedside clock I was dismayed to realize hours had passed since the time I was conscious of willing some wind through my window. In light of that, I chalked the whole experience up to one hell of a vivid dream and fell easily back to sleep.
But the memory stayed with me, as sharp and poignant as something that happened only yesterday. Some years back I came across Hypnagogia and the “Old Hag” stories while surfing the web and delved with great interest into the whole thing. I dismissed the old hag idea out of hand (although ironically, my younger brother described an episode much like it, right down to the thing sitting directly on his chest, as having happened to him in the same house.)
I remember seeing the movie “Phantasm” as a teenager and those little hooded ghouls in the cemetery were the closest thing to what I’d seen i could put my finger on, until I saw the movie “Communion” in particular, the scene where the short, cloaked beings entered Strieber’s bedroom prior to abducting him. Now, my father has always told me an open mind was great until you finally fell in so with that in mind, while I’ve had several equally strange experiences that run the gamut from the spiritual to precognitive events and the like, I have never said to anyone that I’ve seen an alien or a ghost. This doesn’t mean that I don’t believe such things are, indeed, possible. If they aren’t, then there are a lot of folk sharing the same sorts of hallucinations and frankly, the accounts of such experiences present some staggering evidence that SOMETHING is going on.
I’d love love love to know just exactly what!
To this day I don’t pretend to know, but something in the very core of me is beyond certain that the experience was no dream- the lucidity of it far surpasses even the most vivid gift of REM sleep. If it ever happens again? Instead of focusing my will towards an impossible scream, I intend to try telepathy, because I have questions, damn it! My curiosity for things of paranormal nature is larger than the fear of those long ago years, and I’d rather have answers than all the money in the world.
Meanwhile, in lieu of answers, I wouldn’t turn down cash…
PS: this is the first time I have ever written this story down, although I’ve pondered it a thousand and ten times, turning it over in my mind like a shiny black pearl from a necklace broken a long time ago. I’ve considered hypnotism in order to edify the events of those missing hours, as well as several other equally mystifying events from my youth that have stayed with me, but then, I don’t believe hypnosis actually works.
Imagine?
I have on several occassions experienced sleep paralysis,starting from when i was a teenage to even current days, although inthe beginning,I was not aware of the term or of any other such experiences.
My experiences begin with a frightening dream, always of ghosts, haunted houses and/or possessions. In the dream, I would be experiencing a haunting of some kind, in which whenever the ghost was in my presence i would find it difficult to breathe and i would eventually pass out. ‘Passing out’ in the dream would wake me in real life still with the difficulty of breathing. At this point i would try to move to make breathing easier and would find that i am somehow restricted and that i could not breathe as it felt as though something was lying on top of me as though someone was sitting on my chest and my arms and legs are tied. My immediate reaction is to scream out for help or reach out for my partner lying next to me, but am unable to do so. Eventually through struggling and forcingmy self to scream or move the feeling goes away. I have never ’seen’ anything out of the ordinary during an episode, but am aware that during this time i am completely awake and everything around me seems normal.
However, the first time this ever happened, my sister at the same time heard someone calling my name, and came in not long after to find out who it was that was sneaking into my bed room at night…!
Until i approached someone about my experiences and had sleep paralysis explained to me I truly believed that a ghost or spirit was trying to smother me to death, and hearing stories experienced from others, I am still not truly convinced that something parnormal is happening, especially when so many have the exact same ‘hallucinations’….?
Tee,
First off, thank you for sharing your story with the rest of us.
In my article I did not mean to say that life outside our planet is null. I was talking about the possibility of using Hypnagogia as an explanation for some (or most) abductions.
Your story is down right scary as it is strange. One could chalk this up to a Hypnagogic event, but the fact that your younger brother experience something like what you did can mean other things.
It would be interesting to document a Hypnagogic state like yours, while the subject tries to gain focus and control. If you manage to, let us know.
thanks!
Jojo,
Having the same type of dreams and/or hallucinations can be the byproduct of some psychological effect (good or bad).
If you never experienced anything paranormal in your home before, chances are that what you experience while sleep is not a paranormal event. Most likely the way your body reacts.
Although I am reminded of the “Grave’s End” book. In which the author describes sparse paranormal events in her home, but also suffered from the “Old Hag Syndrome” often. Her home is said to be haunted.
Check out the book here:
http://ghosttheory.com/books/gravesend.html
More importantly though, nobody in science has 100% factual information yet on sleep paralysis. As of today (Dec 29,08), its causes are still not found to be absolute. Many papers have been written, and there are some facts.
science doesn’t deal in absolutes, and there is always room for change or error. that’s what’s so great about science and its research methodology.
that said, there is a LOT of scientific research into sleep disorder and sleep patterns, and there is FAR more conclusive evidence for science-based sleep-related “paranormal” experiences than there are alien or spirit related ones.
in fact, there is ZERO science-based evidence for the alien / spirit night visits.
hey, this “the whole family walked out of the tent and was abducted” anecdote is interesting. i don’t suppose the event was reported to the authorities and physical exams conducted afterward, and the cynic in me just can’t help but wonder if a book is in the works.
I’m so glad to see other groups out there that view things the same way I do.
On many occasions I have experienced sleep paralysis with halucinations. In most cases it has been spiders that I see. The best way to describe it is you are awake and aware but the dream that you are having overlaps on top of things you are actually seeing. It’s very scary. Luckly mine only last for a second or two. They tend to arrive during stressful times in my life. I have never seen shadows, people or aliens. But if I did I can tell you it would be a life changing experience. Luckly the answers I looked for were scientific and not paranormal.
Things like this are the same ideas we apply to paranormal cases. There are almost always normal explainations for things that go bump in the night. Giving people the information they need to cope with and understand what they are experiencing is the responsible thing to do!
I had a few hypnagogic experiences in my childhood and I am ready to believe that hypnagogia accounts for a lot of ghost stories. I believe that we human beings will lie as easily as we breathe, and for any flimsy excuse, so I doubt there are many sightings by “awake, coherent and sober individuals”
funny, lately I’ve been researching hypnagogia in hopes to explain what others have called a “good candidate for clairaudience” not sleep paralysis and to my surprise am left almost right back where i started. Ive experienced sleep paralysis since about 19 yrs of age(im 25) in which i have experienced none other then being able to open my eyes, and watch everything around me but feel completely paralyzed. I cant talk, scream or move other then extremely heavy breathing or slightly moving my fingertips, although i did have one successful attempt at actually screaming myself out of the state. this can last from anywhere from seconds to going on and off for about an hour. Im almost certain its due to complete exhaustion to where my mind is “awake” but my body is still sleeping, or at least something isn’t exactly transmitting the correct neuro-responce.
Although hypnagogia explains my condition to an extent, none of the occurrences i have had my the alleged “clairaudient” match up to any explanations or theories.
Its always happening when i am at low energy, usually when i am starting to dose off but am completely awake. a state of twilight or complete relaxation, and haven’t begun the phase of unawareness of outside stimuli. Everything i hear is clear as day and makes since to an extent, almost as if you were fumbling through an old radio searching for stations and only heard sentence after sentence of different voices, that are right next to you, speaking into your ear if you will.
these are not the same as the rapid transmitted scattered thoughts that occur right at the beginning of REM, that make no since whatsoever, and can sound like a humming crowd of thoughts mostly muttering random words like “butterflies and peanut butter” (do a little mental recall and you’ll know exactly what I am talking about). on the contrary, these are LOUD and it can and has sounded as if someone was literally screaming into my ear. it always awakes me from my state of relaxation almost as if i was in a deep state of meditation. Hypnagogia just really doesn’t do it for me. there are far too many open questions and its almost as if this theory was conjured to create a folder in the world of sleep research for those instances that no one can explain.
im a student of psychiatry so naturally being skeptic is predominant, until my extensive research. I have always been a so called “sensitive” to paranormal activity. in fact most times i am even the least bit convinced is when someone else who knows NOTHING of what’s been occurring suddenly has the exact thing happen to them or my pets start reacting to unknown stimuli. its always an escalade, classic.
only lately after my meditation state is interrupted abruptly by a loud and sometimes negative voice do i then experience activity in, if i didn’t know better, would say direct response.
the brain is an extraordinary part of the human body and we don’t have a clue as far as I’m concerned. We’ve only just begun. I try to always remain as skeptic as possible,even when its near impossible for others around me. guess you can never really know, and for now ill continue searching, and maintaining research ..and pass by those who continue to tell me to awaken a so called “gift”.
and for what its worth, i dont drink, and and this is the only phenomena among countless that has occurred in a meditation like state. most are during the day, and with others (also skeptical)around me. in fact, it doesnt have to be any particular location, i have literally watched objects move “by themselves”. but thats for another topic.
thanks for reading.