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Sleep Paralysis or Old Hag?
Science News Online has a decent article about what scientists call sleep paralysis and what folklore calls Old Hag Syndrome. The article and subject matter is interesting in itself, but I think the dichotomy between scientific and non-scientific understanding of phenomena is particularly striking here.
First they give the accounts of ordinary people, showing how they describe what happened to them. It’s full of scary mythological-type imagery:
According to one of the chroniclers, “The first time I experienced this, I saw a shadow of a moving figure, arms outstretched, and I was absolutely sure it was supernatural and evil.” Another person recalled awakening “to find a half-snake/half-human thing shouting gibberish in my ear.” Yet another person reported periodically waking with a start just after falling asleep, sensing an ominous presence nearby. The tale continues: “Then, something comes over me and smothers me, as if with a pillow. I fight but I can’t move. I try to scream. I wake up gasping for air.”
Then they launch into the scientific basis for these events.
The researchers found that during sleep paralysis, the brain, suddenly awake, nonetheless displays electrical responses typical of sleep characterized by rapid eye movement (REM).
Two brain systems contribute to sleep paralysis, Cheyne proposes. The most prominent one consists of inner-brain structures that monitor one’s surroundings for threats and launches responses to perceived dangers. As Cheyne sees it, REM-based activation of this system, in the absence of any real threat, triggers a sense of an ominous entity lurking nearby. Other neural areas that contribute to REM-dream imagery could draw on personal and cultural knowledge to flesh out the evil presence.
A second brain system, which includes sensory and motor parts of the brain’s outer layer, distinguishes one’s own body and self from those of other creatures. When REM activity prods this system, a person experiences sensations of floating, flying, falling, leaving one’s body, and other types of movement, Cheyne says.
Before I launch into my own interpretation, this is what I think is the real crux of the issue:
Traumatic encounters that a person seems to experience during sleep paralysis feel as vividly real as anything that happens during the day does, he notes.
I guess my main question is: if they feel real, then why can’t we simply accept them as real? Why do we need scientific studies to either explain or discredit phenomena like this? It seems like the underlying bias of a study like this is that you can’t accept the testimony of your senses. Or, more succinctly, you can’t trust yourself. And the reason you can’t trust yourself, is because we can’t see what you can see. We can’t experience it ourselves and therefore we can’t trust you. But we can trust machines and we can trust measurements, and that’s it.
What I’m saying is: maybe the brain triggers the sense of an “ominous entity” nearby because one actually is! If we’re looking for the simplest possible explanation, then that to me seems like it’s it.
This is really similar to the point I was trying to make in my article on representation & reality. Individually, “reality” is anything we personally experience - even if it’s supposedly impossible. But consensus reality is built out of the experiences of many people. The second our experiences don’t match up, we run into trouble. We start thinking that people who’ve experienced differently from us must either be lying or hallucinating or on drugs or stupid or that there must be some kind of brain-pattern that we could analyze. And so we move farther and farther away from actual experience, building layers of interpretation and language to iron out the differences between out. And where do we end up? We end up with a bunch of machines in a lab telling us what we’re allowed to believe and what’s not real - even though our senses tell us something totally different. No wonder everything’s so fucking whacked out.
[Article found via Jennifer]
July 14th, 2005 at 12:09 am
Nothing to add, just wanted to say: that last paragraph kicks ass.
July 14th, 2005 at 12:20 am
Wow, agreed! I had two recurring experiences of this, both completely different. You’re going to have to bear with me here, because I’m either going to become the zealous, histrionic schizotypal guy in comment-world; or the “ooh, new topic to bring up– this guy is a freak magnet.”
I’ll paraphrase…
In one instance I ’saw’ an invisible figure (think the old Predator movies when he’s cloaking) and then it leapt on top of me. This, being right after a nap in the middle of the day in my dorm room, was pretty startling. I was already awake though, which is the part that confuses me. But it was humanly heavy, extremely muscular, and I could feel its leathery skin and “claws.” I fought it off and it shreiked as it “fell” into some sort of… well, somewhere, I don’t know how to explain it. I actually wish my roommate would’ve been there at the time so he could verify that he didn’t see anything and that I was just flailing around. Because, who wants the whole “there’s a creepy thing that likes to attack me” concept hanging over them? I’d rather be reassured it was all in my head, really.
Was I scared at the time? Hell yeah. But did it phase or scar me? Nope. The scariest part that sticks with me was its scream, really. Like I said in my last comment, I have plenty of weird stories in my history, so I figured it would just make another fun story to tell. Plus, I figured I kicked its ass, and maybe, just maybe, I got some God-points for that. Promoted to demon-slayer, perhaps.
But a lot of my story feels inconsistent with most incubus stories. In particular, when I moved to Phoenix a year later, it came back and lay down next to me while I was taking a nap in the middle of the day on the floor. I had just woken up to let in the maintenance man, I stood around for awhile as he fixed my bathtub, and then after he left, I went back in and lay down and suddenly I saw/felt it lay down next to me. I guess I could say that it was a different one, but I don’t really know. It definitely felt identical. It didn’t attack me, it just came and lay there. I turned around, stood up, turned on some lights and went in the other room hoping it would just disappear.
And then less than a year after, I was reading Castaneda’s book “The Art of Dreaming” and found out that he supposedly “brought out” dream entities (inorganic beings, perhaps?) during a few lucid dreaming experiments/meditations. It was always something I had wanted to do in the past, but… not THAT thing.
July 14th, 2005 at 12:34 am
Are you proposing that people should believe that a physical being was present, even if conscious witnesses in the room saw nothing? Or that the person is translating some nonphysical phenomenon into a subjective physical experience?
Stage magicians can produce very convincing illusions. People taking ketamine have had out of body experiences that provided inaccurate information about what was going on in other rooms in the house. Our senses can be fooled by causes external and internal; application of Occam’s Razor, which may or may not be appropriate in this case, would suggest sleep paralysis is another such instance. If we could figure out how to put people in this state at will, we could see if multiple people in that state in the same place at the same time perceived the same thing, which would be really interesting…
July 14th, 2005 at 12:44 am
I never said it had to be physical
Again, you’re saying the same thing that I’m trying to state above - that experience is only “valid” if it’s (1) repeatable and (2) can be experienced by many people in a predictable way.
Let me ask you a personal/rhetorical question: have you ever been in love? Could you ever take that one relationship and repeat it exactly? Could you ever make anybody else experience it exactly as you did? Of course not. And if you could, then what would be special about your experience once it was no longer private to you?
What’s wrong with private non-repeatable experience? You can’t sit here and say somebody else definitively didn’t experience something. After a while, it starts to just seem like jealousy that one person has had an experience and another has not, and thus discounts it.
July 14th, 2005 at 1:36 am
Who’s proclaiming subjective experience to be wrong or invalid? It’s simply of much greater interest when it repeats with some commonality: we can learn from those commonalities. Poetry and music celebrating love would be nowhere near as popular if it the experience it discussed had so little commonality that very few people in the audience felt any sympathy for the composer.
What would you expect from a study of sleep paralysis? Anyone running experiments to objectively detect the presence of ominous entities would have trouble getting funding or being published.
July 14th, 2005 at 2:43 am
One explanation I read of sleep paralysis is that your brain shuts down large-scale muscle movement while you sleep, so that when you’re in REM phase dreaming of walking or running (or flying), you don’t actually walk or run, thus avoiding injury. In sleep paralysis, your body is still shut down, but you’re conscious instead of dreaming.
I’ve experienced sleep paralysis and it is the most terrifying thing I’ve been through. It’s like being surrounded by total malevolence, time stretches to infinity, and you can’t move.
Practical advice to get out of it: move the muscles in your face - your eyes and mouth - as they are less affected by the body shutdown.
I have a tendency to experience sleep paralysis as abstract, bottomless terror, not as a visit from an entity. Fortunately, it doesn’t happen to me often, maybe once every couple of years.
July 14th, 2005 at 7:14 am
i think most of our lives are private, non-repeatable experiences. it drives some artists mad. it certainly confuses most. leads to religion?
July 14th, 2005 at 11:28 am
I’ve had these experiences on and off for years, they disappeared at the advent of OBE, interestingly enough. In every case I heard voices/noises and felt a presence in the room, once, I saw a woman in a nightgown (!?!) sit on the bed next to me. Another time something grabbed me by the throat. I do think thse are some sort of lower astral entities/experiences. Makes you wonder about Tom and his body thetans, tho.
July 14th, 2005 at 12:05 pm
the thing that bugs me about this line of reasoning is when they use it to ‘explain away’ all similar experiences. it’s like the ufo visitation angle; they seem to say that since some of these experiences stem from sleep paralysis, *all* of them must be attributable to sleep paralyisis. what they fail to address, however, are the mulltitudinous accounts of similar encounters that occur in the middle of the day, the experiencer completely awake! in fact, a cursory glance at the literature illustrates that there is no set time (day or nite) when this stuff occurs, and can happen just as readily to someone who is wide awake.
July 14th, 2005 at 2:49 pm
it is a natural tendency for people to want to have things tidied up but when the tidying up becomes a rush to judgement or, in the case of criminal investigations, sentencing the wrong person, then the tidying has become compulsive and destructive. the experiences we have at the fringe of our consciousness are valid to us in that we have real feelings as a rusult, therefore these experiences effect our lives. to discount the experience as a trick of the mind or a trick of the light invalidates the experience and moves us away from finding out more about what`s going on. it also marginalises the people who report these experiences and makes it less likely that others will report events.
July 16th, 2005 at 9:16 pm
[…] se of hearing works, you use your sense of hearing and other senses. This feeds into some earlier discussions on the nature of reality as perceived by us, as comp […]