Sleep Paralysis

[thesummerqueen]

I'm really glad we have this forum now. I don't know about the rest of you, but part of my "exploration" when I was a young teen who was bored with Judaism included a deep interest in the paranormal (I hear this is a common theme among skeptics and atheists). An interest in some sort of folklore inevitably leads to other sorts.

I don't know what it is about the idea of ghosts that scares the ever-living crap out of me. You'd think we'd like to know that our consciousness survives after death, yeah? Except for as long as I can remember I have avoided ghost horror movies - and even a few non-horror ones (and aliens - much as I drool over Mulder, some X-files episodes left my heart pounding). That scene in "The Ring" where she crawls out of the TV? Screaming nightmares for a week - no lie. Forget seeing anything like "The Grudge" and I turned "Darkness Falls" off after the first 20 min.

But I do have to wonder why they bother me, so I watch the goofy shit that comes on TV regarding ghosts - things like "MonsterQuest" or Nat Geo's "Hauntings". Lately, just to have something on in the background, I've been watching Discovery Channel's reruns of "A Haunting."

Something about that show bothers me - inevitably it ends up being that the real cause of the problem is a demonic force. I thought that a demonic force was different from a ghost? Either way, also inevitably, a Catholic priest is called in, whether the family is visibly Catholic or not...usually after the wife/mother has spent time "cleansing" the place with a smudge stick (made of sage - a usual New Age remedy for just about anything except ridding the place of the annoying-smudge-stick-holding-hippie).

I have a tab on my igoogle homepage called "what the wackos are doing" and have links to paranormal and cryptozoological blogs, various religious news-sites, conservative editorials, etc. and ran across this one: http://www.trueghosttales.com/paranormal...llowed-me/

Now I can understand the terror from ghosts, as I described above, but what gets me is that she's describing a classic case of sleep paralysis. Being a person who has nasty, vivid, wake-up-ready-to-punch-my-bed-partner nightmares, I'm pretty interested in dreams. I used to get sleep paralysis regularly as a kid. Most commonly, I dreamed that I was frozen to my unicorn-covered sheets while a very tall man dressed all in black stood in my doorway, blocking the hall-light and watched me. I couldn't scream. I couldn't move. You can look up this condition on the internet and it's very well documented. This is where the concept of the incubus and the night-hag came from. The form it takes changes with society - it used to describe elves...demons...aliens...whatever you were predisposed to.

Then there are the responses to how she should deal with this: holy water. Exorcism.

I am constantly amazed at the plethora of information that exists at our fingertips, but a good many people still choose to believe in this crap and hold themselves hostage to their own fears because of it. There's even a tag called "Sleep Paralysis" underneath her description, meaning SOMEONE has identified the phenomena and given it the correct name.

I can hear Min now - "Some Jesus freaks don't want to let go of their nonsense."

(Coincidentally, I just got a notification of Shell posting an article about the "Most Haunted Houses in Massachusetts" )

Anytime they don't understand what's going on..."a ghost must be behind it". And just like sleep paralysis episodes, the criteria and manifestations change with the era.

For instance: in drafty homes of the Victorian era where people were used to dust and photography was just getting started and therefore had craptastic resolution, here is one idea of a ghost photo:


Now, in a time where we seem to be less used to dust and dirt and have spectacular cameras that correct for EVERYTHING, we seem to be fascinated by...dust balls. (AKA, GHOST ORBS!1!!)



I shit you not. You can check the URL for that one - it's on a ghost site.

Some recent Christian stone-cold-fuck-nut visitor here asked "why does this site exist if you don't care about religion?" I told him "sanctuary". But not just from being preached at - I needed somewhere to go where I could reach out to other people who were grounded in reality. Dust motes are dust motes. Sleep paralysis is your body not completely waking up. I needed to be in contact with other people who didn't let fear rule their lives to the point that they had to make up a scary explanation even for the most mundane things that go on in their lives - like fucking up a picture they took OUTSIDE.