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Sleep Paralysis
Ever find yourself briefly paralyzed as you’re falling asleep or just waking up? It’s a phenomenon is called sleep paralysis, and it’s often accompanied by vivid sensory or perceptual experiences, which can include complex and disturbing hallucinations and intense fear.
For some people, sleep paralysis is a once-in-a-lifetime experience; for others, it can be a frequent, even nightly, phenomenon.
Hypnagogic and hypnopompic hallucinations are symptoms commonly experienced during episodes of sleep paralysis. Some scientists have proposed this condition as an explanation for reports of alien abductions and ghostly encounters. A study by Susan Blackmore and Marcus Cox (the Blackmore-Cox study) of the University of the West of England supports the suggestion that reports of alien abductions are related to sleep paralysis rather than to temporal lobe lability. There are three main types of these hallucinations that can be linked to pathologic neurophysiology. These include the belief that there is an intruder in the room, the incubus, and vestibular motor sensations
Researchers James Allan Cheyne and Gordon Pennycook of the University of Waterloo in Canada explore the factors associated with distress after sleep paralysis episodes in a new article published in Clinical Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
The researchers used an online survey and follow-up emails to survey 293 people. They measured post-episode distress using a range of items, from post-episode rumination to interference with next-day functioning.
The level of distress following sleep paralysis episodes was associated with features of the sleep paralysis episode itself. For example, the results showed that the more fear people felt during sleep paralysis episodes, the more distress they felt afterward.
The researchers also found that sensory experiences during episodes of sleep paralysis predicted later distress. Feelings of threat and assault — such as sensing a presence in the room, feeling pressure on the chest, having difficulty breathing, or having a feeling of imminent death — were all associated with distress following sleep paralysis episodes. So, too, were vestibular-motor experiences, including feelings of floating or falling and out-of-body experiences.
Cheyne and Pennycook speculate that the sensory experiences that come with episodes of sleep paralysis could exacerbate people’s fear, creating a feedback loop that enhances memories of experiences later on.
Post-episode distress was also associated with a number of individual-level factors, including cognitive style, distress sensitivity, and supernatural beliefs about sleep paralysis.
People who held supernatural beliefs about sleep paralysis experiences also experienced greater post-episode distress. Those who had more analytic cognitive styles, on the other hand, experienced comparatively less distress after sleep paralysis episodes.
Taken together, these findings show that both situational factors and individual factors contribute to these common, and often stressful, personal experiences.
These findings are important, the researchers say, because they provide insight into a common experience of distress that is not well understood. Some participants lamented that their experiences of terror following episodes of sleep paralysis were often dismissed by clinicians.
Given that a large percentage of people report some carryover effects on their functioning the next day, sleep paralysis could “make a significant contribution to the billions of dollars, worldwide, in costs associated with accidents, illnesses, and lost productivity associated with sleep disturbances,” the researchers note.
Sleep paralysis has a long and varied history in folklore.
In Finnish and Swedish folklore, sleep paralysis is caused by a mare, a supernatural creature related to incubi and succubi. The mare is a damned woman, who is cursed and her body is carried mysteriously during sleep and without her noticing. In this state, she visits villagers to sit on their rib cages while they are asleep, causing them to experience nightmares. The Swedish film Marianne examines the folklore surrounding sleep paralysis.
Folk belief in Newfoundland, South Carolina and Georgia describe the negative figure of the hag who leaves her physical body at night, and sits on the chest of her victim. The victim usually wakes with a feeling of terror, has difficulty breathing because of a perceived heavy invisible weight on his or her chest, and is unable to move i.e., experiences sleep paralysis. This nightmare experience is described as being “hag-ridden” in the Gullah lore. The “Old Hag” was a nightmare spirit in British and also Anglophone North American folklore.
In Fiji, the experience is interpreted as kana tevoro, being “eaten” by a demon. In many cases the demon can be the spirit of a recently dead relative who has come back for some unfinished business, or has come to communicate some important news to the living. Often persons sleeping near the afflicted person say kania, kania, “eat! eat!” in an attempt to prolong the possession for a chance to converse with the dead relative or spirit and seek answers as to why he or she has come back. The person waking up from the experience is often asked to immediately curse or chase the spirit of the dead relative, which sometimes involves literally speaking to the spirit and telling him or her to go away or using expletives.[citation needed]
In Nigeria, “ISP appears to be far more common and recurrent among people of African descent than among whites or Nigerian Africans,” and is often referred to within African communities as “the Devil on your back.”
In Turkey sleep paralysis is called karabasan, and is similar to other stories of demonic visitation during sleep. A demon, commonly known as a djinn (cin in Turkish), comes to the victim’s room, holds him or her down hard enough not to allow any kind of movement, and starts to strangle the person. To get rid of the demonic creature, one needs to pray to Allah with certain lines from the Qur’an.
In Thailand it is believed that sleep paralysis and discomfort is caused by a ghost of the Thai folklore known as Phi Am . Some people claim that this spirit may even cause bruises. Stories about this spirit are common in Thai comics.
In the Southern states of the United States, elders refer to it as the “witch riding your back.”
2013-03-04 13:15:36
Source: http://nanopatentsandinnovations.blogspot.com/2013/03/sleep-paralysis.html
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