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A week or and then ago I finished reading Louis Proud's fascinating book Nighttime Intrusions: An Investigation into the Paranormal Nature of Sleep Paralysis Experiences. Published but last year, it argues that sleep paralysis is actually a cousin to spirit mediumship, in that the experience represents an bodily visitation by paranormal entities that live constantly among us. Usually we remain in a status of common ignorance — we don't see these entities, and they don't see us — merely sometimes they become aware of us, and then, if they're the lower and more craven kind, they latch onto the states to feed on our life free energy. Sufferers of sleep paralysis thus serve as conduits to the spiritual or daimonic realm in a manner roughly similar to mediums or, in a slightly different context, the teenager that's typically identified every bit the focal indicate for a poltergeist disturbance. (For a detailed caption of Proud'due south ideas, see the interview he gave to TheoFantastique a couple of months agone.)

You lot'll recall that I myself suffered for years from savage episodes of sleep paralysis. I still have them occasionally, only they're much milder and less dramatic than they used to be. In the commencement they were fully as shattering and spiritually transformational as what Proud — a sleep paralysis sufferer himself — describes in his book. Although I never bought fully into an all-out paranormal explanation of the whole matter, remaining by and large skeptical about such matters, I was unable, as a matter of psychological fact, to escape the awful curtain that the experiences cast over my life for a few years, simply as I was unable to deny the clear impression that the effigy or figures that visited me during those episodes were objectively real, every bit opposed to subjective dream figures generated by my encephalon. Of course, that doesn't hateful they actually were (or are) existent. Only as in all things, it's prudent here to make sure you're informed before you pass judgment, and in this case that might mean reading — for instance — the work of David J. Hufford, the brilliant pioneer of sleep paralysis studies (and a professor of both humanistic medicine and religious studies in the Penn Land and University of Pennsylvania systems). Among the several aspects of his work that are guaranteed to provoke a reaction deeper than a mere shrug are his findings that the phenomenology of the sleep paralysis feel (what it feels like, and what the "entities" encountered during it look like and act like) remains constant across cultures, even amidst those that are fully isolated from each other, thus giving the prevarication to the idea that cultural expectations determine the content of the attendant hypnagogic visions; and that even among educated moderns who have been taught, or who have sometimes eagerly sought out on their own, the voluminous medical literature that explains the neurological aspects of slumber paralysis, information technology's all the same quite common for them absorb this medical-scientific knowledge without changing their opinion that their experiences have a metaphysical or paranormal basis.

Reading Proud'south book has got me to reflecting seriously on everything that happened to me during those years, a task that'south fabricated easier by the fact that I wrote about a lot of it in my periodical at the fourth dimension.

Here are two things nearly my experiences that I've never mentioned to anybody, including family and close friends. I bring them up now because I figure they might prove interesting to those of you who are fans of my horror fiction and want to know more virtually its origins.

Start, I'll highlight two famous images from Hollywood that, although they're very distinct from each other, manage in tandem to illustrate the thing that I encountered during one of my earliest and virtually powerful sleep paralysis experiences (which I described in a kind of glossed-over fashion in "Fun with nocturnal assail"):

If you can imagine these 2 images — which are probably familiar to you — mingled together to the point where they're concomitant, so you'll accept a practiced sense of what I encountered in my bedchamber one night in 1993. On that occasion, I emerged circa 3 a.yard. from a sleep so deep that it was well-nigh a blackout, to find myself paralyzed past a dark figure hovering over me at the foot of the bed. When I say I was paralyzed past the figure, that's precisely accurate: I had the sense that this matter was responsible for the awful country of paralysis that had unaccountably taken hold of me. And yes, I do know, and I recollect I may even have known and then, about the physical paralysis that naturally occurs during REM sleep. In the presence of that dark figure, I was immediately panicked, horrified, positively sickened with terror and dread, in a way and to a degree that I had not but never experienced but had never even conceived. And this horror was a issue not simply of my paralysis, nor of the effigy's presence and frightening appearance, just of the atrocious knowledge of its reason for beingness there, which gripped me suddenly and totally. The thing was a vaguely man-shaped vortex of darkness, and I knew, with a kind of psychological weight that I had never imagined, that it was the anti-me, that information technology was like my ain personal black hole, and that its presence, in fact its very being, meant my utter annihilation. I actually felt information technology sucking my entire beingness into it, like a roaring, devouring hurricane meant for me and me alone.

Yes, cue thoughts of the Jungian shadow, the disjected and repressed aspects of the total cocky, objectified in a moment of involuntary hypnagogia to confront me. Only does such an explanation, even if accepted (and it sounds valid to me), necessarily negate and exclude all others? Can't the "caption" of many things exist multivalent?

And then that's the beginning of the 2 things mentioned in a higher place: In 1993, during my worst-e'er episode of sleep paralysis, I encountered a demonic-seeming figure whose very essence and raison d'etre was my utter negation, and which looked a bit like the cinematic images I've supplied. I didn't recollect of the motion-picture show pictures until quondam later, though, when I was trying to come to grips with the whole affair, and was trying to remember what the entity had looked like, which was singularly difficult because although it definitely had a visual advent, which definitely felt like I was looking at it in only every bit real and wakeful a fashion as I'chiliad at present looking at my laptop screen, its appearance was also, somehow, psychological or spiritual, so that what it looked like to the physical eye was completely intermingled with what it "looked" like to thought, emotion, and the imaginal middle.

The 2nd thing is a little chestnut from my college years that has come back to haunt me from time to time, and that has at present pushed its fashion to the front of my thoughts thank you to Proud's book. As I mentioned in a contempo Demon Muse mail ("Stoking Your Creative Fire: Embrace your Artistic Demon's Rhythm (i)"), when I was an undergraduate at the University of Missouri-Columbia, I took a class titled The Creative Process. It was offered through the honors college, and was created and taught by Dr. Betty Scott, who in addition to being a noted trumpet histrion was and is a long-time adherent of culling spiritualities and wellness modalities. Her Artistic Process class, which I took when it was brand new and had merely been offered in one case or twice before, was ostensibly about the subject named in its title. It was supposedly intended to teach students the psychology of creativity and aid them increase their creative potential. And while it really did cover this territory, it too ended upwardly being and then chock-full of non-mainstream spiritual and psychological stuff that it could validly accept been titled New Age 101. Under Dr. Scott'southward tutelage, I and my fellow students engaged in guided visualizations to find internal creative guides. Nosotros drew and shared personal mandalas. We created and endlessly wrote affirmations. We listened to subliminal learning tapes consisting of New Age electronic music accompanied by subaural messages aimed at increasing our creative focus and energy. We discussed Richard Bach's newest book at the time, One, which continued the writer'southward tale of his transcendent love affair with his "soulmate," Leslie Parrish-Bach, that he had begun in The Bridge Across Forever. (Having been mesmerized start by Bach's Jonathan Livingston Seagull and then his Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah back in high schoolhouse, I was an piece of cake mark for this i. Of course, the whole thing seemed to fall apart retroactively when he and Leslie divorced in the belatedly 1990s.)

At outset I dug the hell of the whole thing, and I started out as 1 of the star pupils in the class. But partway through the semester I dove with gusto into researching a newspaper for some other class about the then-hot New Age movement in America, and by the time I had finished writing that newspaper, which touched on the channeling phenomenon (including J. Z. Knight and her Ramtha swindle), neurolinguistic programming, crystal mania, UFOlogy, and all the rest of that sick-defined, Shirley MacLaine-helmed phenomenon, I had shifted into full-diddled skeptic mode, and for the residuum of my foray through The Creative Process I was barely able to incorporate my contemptuousness for what we were doing. Poor Betty, who really was a nifty lady, couldn't help but detect the change. Of grade she was a lot older and wiser than I was, so I think she only endured my altered demeanor equally she had probably endured the attitudinal volatility and pseudo-schizophrenia of a keen many college students before me.

And so, a year or two after I was out of her class, a mutual friend named Robert who had been in at that place with me, and who had gone on to spend more time with Betty in The Creative Process II (a class that I naturally opted to skip), told me something that came blazing upwards from my memory several years subsequently when I was suffering my near-meltdown from repeated sleep paralysis attacks.

Specifically, Robert told me that when he was talking with Betty i time afterward a class meeting of Creative Process 2, he brought up my proper name for some reason — an understandable occurrence, since the three of u.s.a., he and Betty and I, were all mutual acquaintances. And then for some reason she shared with him that she was concerned that I might take a "dark one" attached to me. I blinked when he told me this, and replied, "Huh?" since this was the showtime I had heard of such an idea. And so he explained that, according to Betty, a dark one is an unincarnate or disincarnate spirit that longs for fleshly being, and that sometimes one of these spirits volition adhere itself to a person and live vicariously through his or her bodily experiences. Only when it does this, it accidentally and involuntarily imparts a kind of dark-sided emotional cast to its host, simply by the fact of its own nature and presence, and then that its host's outlook, mindset, attitude, and overall view and experience of life are tilted in a sure dark-ish, anti-life direction.

And that, my friends, is something that Louis Proud describes very specifically in Dark Intrusions.

As I have explained before — for example, in my Strange Horizons review of Unexplained: An Encylopedia of Curious Phenomena, Strange Superstitions, and Ancient Mysteries, and also in some web log posts hither and at Demon Muse — I've been very interested in the paranormal, in ghosts and UFOs and cryptozoology and all the rest, since I was a kid, when Daniel Cohen's books almost these things were a delight to me. Every bit an adult that interest has connected,. and I've gone on to read books of a much more sophisticated nature, everything from Colin Wilson, John Keel, Patrick Harpur, and Anthony Peake to explicitly skeptical stuff similar Skeptical Inquirer and a couple of the hardcore skeptical titles from Prometheus Books. And I've done all that while earning a graduate caste in religious studies and pursuing a side career equally a supernatural horror writer and contained scholar of such matters. And so it'south not like I haven't idea about such things in awhile. Information technology's not similar I haven't been "upward" on the mediumistic and parapsychological theories of earthbound spirits and all that. But reading Proud's volume, and finding him not only saying things almost "lower order spirits" that recall Betty Scott's odd speculation about me all those years ago, only doing then explicitly in the context of a study of sleep paralysis, which is an experience that helped to define who I am now, has actually knocked the bolts loose on some of my mental doors. Multiple interpretations indeed. I feel similar I'm living out a metaphor.

If y'all've experienced sleep paralysis yourself, and if yous have any thoughts about any of what I'g saying here — or even if you haven't and you don't — I'd love to hear your reactions. The comment threads on my previous posts about slumber paralysis have been most enjoyable to read, and then if yous're so inclined, please speak up.

Oh, and for those who may exist wondering, the respond is yeah, the nocturnal supernatural assail scene near the end of my story "An Abhorrence to All Flesh" in Divinations of the Deep, where a grapheme is horrifically destroyed by a man-shaped hole or vortex that appears at the human foot of his bed, does indeed hail from the experience I've described hither.

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Source: https://www.teemingbrain.com/2010/05/26/shadow-visitors-sleep-paralysis-and-discarnate-dark-ones/

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