Sleep Paralysis: Are You Being Attacked By Aliens While You Dream?
In a state of sleep paralysis, you are in a strange kind of hybrid state, some kind of mixture between your regular awake consciousness and your dream consciousness. During sleep paralysis, REMs clear dreams of float over to awake consciousness, as though a dream is coming to life right in front of your eyes - phantom figures and all. The dream phase may be better described as dreaming, or worse, as nightmares coming to life before our eyes.
Sleep paralysis occurs when we wake while we are still in the phase of sleep called rapid-eye-movement (REM) sleep, which is where the most vivid dreams happen. Researchers think that sleep paralysis is caused by disrupted REM cycles, since the majority of cases of sleep paralysis are found as individuals are falling or emerging from REM sleep. During the rapid eye movement (REM) phase of sleep, muscles relax to an extent that makes them stiff, likely in order to prevent us from violently acting out dreams while sleeping.
We begin the night in a slow-wave sleep -- the non-REM -- that gets deeper and deeper. During regular sleep, moving capacity is switched back on before a sleeper awakens. When sleep goes wrong, one may actually wake up in REM, with ones body still paralyzed.
Suppressing the REM means instead of that sleep cycle period occurring early in the evening, it bounces around toward the end, while your brain is trying to compensate for lost time in REM.
In effect, your brain has a switch called the switch (a small number of neurochemicals) that tipped you between slumber and waking. Even when you are completely awake, looking around at your actual room, a portion of your brain is still asleep. You awaken in the middle of your REM dream, you see some kind of shadow, you begin to panic, creating even more body-image illusions that your mind interprets into that cultural narrative, and you then perceive that there is a demon coming toward you.
REM is when we have our more vivid dreams, and in that period your brain puts your body in a complete state of paralysis. Normally, while you are dreaming, your body is paralyzed to prevent you from acting out the dreams. The dread caused by being awake but paralyzed more commonly drives the dreams-like hallucinations to be darker and more unsettling.
Those experiencing sleep paralysis will feel awake, but may have dreams-like hallucinations, and may have difficulty moving. Reports of abductions in which a subject is unable to move may be due to sleep paralysis, whereby one is conscious, aware of what is happening in the dream, but cannot move and may not (sometimes) be able to breathe.
Some individuals who think they experienced an abduction might not even realize that they were having a lucid dream. It is even possible lucid dreams about alien abductions occur because aliens are something that many of us are fascinated by, at a deep level. Lucid dreaming, where people are partly conscious and able to control their dreams while they are asleep, may explain the stories about so-called alien abductions, research suggests. The sense of paralysis, fear, and powerlessness that comes from vivid dreams can be so strong that a sense of lucidity blurs the lines between dreams and reality, so it is not surprising that people who might not have been consciously dreaming instead insist that they were in fact meeting extraterrestrials who stole them and took them into a UFO, says PRC lead investigator and founder Michael Raduga.
Because they are simultaneously awake and still in the Rem Stage of Sleep, some begin hallucinating while keeping their eyes open, projecting vivid, and often menacing, dreams onto their bedroom surroundings. Both sleep paralysis and lucid dreaming are states of consciousness lying in-between a sleep stage and wakefulness; the former is dreaming while awake; the latter, being awake while dreaming. People are asleep when they have entered REM sleep, the quasi-conscious stage of slumber, where the eyes dart freely around, but the rest of the body is still. If the dreaming sounds familiar, then you may have experienced a case of sleep paralysis, which involves being unable to move or talk when falling asleep or awake, and is usually combined with hallucinations.
Ironically, fear activates fear centers of the brain, like the amygdala, making it likely that Egyptians would awaken while in the Rhema and have a bout of sleep paralysis. Increased fear and excitement would make the sleep paralysis worse, prolonging the episode, and lead to stronger bodily illusions, since they were more likely to attempt movement while paralysed, leading to a disturbance of the bodys perception. A more drastic approach to overcome fear of sleep paralysis is by literally turning away from the frightening monster, slipping into a lucid dream--that is, one where you are conscious of being asleep.
Being able to manipulate the contents of ones own dream-paralysis illusions and imagery from the dream may provide an experiencer with a sense of control over the situation, and may thus be therapeutic. Lucid dreaming practices via Elijah Project may help subjects to learn about what is happening and why, and to be able to manipulate dreams to allow them to break out.
The technique is meant to provide a gateway into lucid dreaming, in which the calmer individual falls back asleep, yet maintains the levels of consciousness that are awake. A new interpretation of dream-dreaming suggests that it does something much deeper than reinforcing the training that occurs while we are asleep. If true, a new interpretation of dreaming could explain even part of that weird human fascination with what is not real about our wakeful lives.
Indeed, research by me and colleagues, conducted in about six different countries over the course of a decade, suggests that beliefs in dream paralysis dramatically shape the experience, both physically and psychologically, by uncovering an extraordinary kind of mind-body interplay. Demonic imagery aside, paralysis is in fact a necessary component of sleep.
It may have something to do with our dreaming -- and it is explained, again, in the form of the "exploding head" syndrome, a term that was invented relatively recently by the neurologist JMS Pearce. When we feel the bang of in our sleep, it may occur due to delayed inhibition.
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