© Copyright 1996 John Archer.
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when the body enters a state of REM-sleep a brain signal paralyzes the body to keep it from acting out the dream. any awareness of this bodily immobility constitutes Awareness during Sleep Paralysis during the paralysis. i call this ASP.
have you ever found yourself lying fully conscious or in a dreamlike state, unable to move or cry out, while perhaps experiencing auditory or visual phenomena? if so, you have experienced Awareness during Sleep Paralysis. this experience can be frightening and the question naturally arises: "is this normal or abnormal?".
ASP was first described medically in 1876. in 1928 it was first associated with narcolepsy, a serious illness requiring medical care. eventually it became one of the four defining symptoms of narcolepsy, the others being:
Source: Passouant, Pierre. "The History of Narcolepsy". in _Narcolepsy_. Guilleminault, Dement & Passouant. (Eds). (Advances in Sleep Research, Vol. 3.)
it is important to not that sleep paralysis occurs in narcoleptics only during a Sleep Onset Rapid Eye Movement Period [SOREMP]. since the body is supposed to be paralyzed during REM-sleep, one might wonder whether people who did not suffer from sleep attacks would experience ASP events during SOREMPs if these could be induced.
in one study, Japanese researchers selected 16 college students who were known to have experienced kanashibari, the Japanese folk expression for Sleep Paralysis, but who showed no signs of narcolepsy. the researchers induced sleep onset REM periods by the simple technique of interrupting the subject's sleep. SOREMPs were reported in 71.9% of these attempts and ASP events occurred in 9.4% of those induced REM periods.
this strongly suggests that ASP is a function of REM-sleep, no matter how this state is induced. confirmation of this perspective comes from noting that a variety of physical and psychological stressors have been known to induce ASP events. Source: Takeuchi, T. et.al. (1992). "Isolated Sleep Paralysis Elicited by Sleep Interruption." Sleep. 15(3): 217-225.
When narcolepsy is defined by sudden attacks of REM (or dream) sleep, Sleep Paralysis [SP] is noted in about 14% of narcoleptics.
However, when Dr. Henry Everett surveyed the entire Freshman class at Johns Hopkins Medical School, he found that 15.4% of the students "presented a convincing account" of having experienced Sleep Paralysis ... without other signs of narcolepsy.
[Everett, Henry. C. (1963). Sleep paralysis in medical students. Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease. 136:283-7.]
Note: Sleep paralysis not in conjunction with other symptoms of narcolepsy is generally called Isolated Sleep Paralysis [ISP] by the medical profession.
Other surveys of normal populations have found prevalence figures for ISP as high as 53%.
[26% (medical students in Nigeria) Ohaeri, J. V. et. al. (1989). Journal of the National Medical Association. 81:805-8]
[39% (normal black americans) Bell, C. C., et. al. (1984). Journal of the National Medical Association. 76:501-8.]
[44% (nursing students in Nigeria) Ohaeri, J.V. et. al. (1992). Journal of the National Medical Association. 84(1):67-70]
[53% (class of 300 psychology students) Nightlight, The Lucidity Institure Newsletter for Spring 1990. 2(2):4]
This means that ISP is a natural and fairly widespread phenomenon, not a part of narcolepsy, but that narcolepsy does not confer any immunity to it!
Nevertheless, there is something about Awareness of Sleep Paralysis that makes doctors want to drug it out of existence. They used to use insulin. Prozac (tm) has also been tried.
[Koran, Lorrin M. & Raghaavan, Sharadha. (1993). Fluoxetine for Isolated Sleep Paralysis. Psychosomatics. 34(2):184-7]
"Patients with ISP usually don't seek help and if they do they can be misdiagnosed."
[Schneck, J.M. (1960). "Sleep paralysis without narcolepsy or cataplexy." Journal of the American Medical Association. 173(10):1219-30]
That is the question that defines the Field of PsychoPhiloSophical Inquiry. The most enduring concerns, the most fundamental questions, include: Is a person more than a primate body? Is the human individual a Being that dwells within the primate body for the duration of the body's life? If so, can the Being separate from and return to its still-living body? Does the Being survive the death of its body?
In seeking to answer these questions, many people have accepted Out-of-Body Experiencing as evidence that a Being-within is able to separate from its body, perceive and act while in the 'eksomatic' (out-of-body) state, and then return to its still-living body able to give a report of its experiences.
Certainly, Out-of-Body Experiencers have a tendency to hold this point of view. Some go on to accept that the Being within survives the death of its body. Others deny that the Out-of-Body Experience is what it appears to be and that it affords any evidence about an AfterLife.
But, perhaps, most puzzling of all are the many cases in which an experiencer simply doesn't recognize the experience as an Out-of-Body Experience.
In an Out-of-Body Experience [OBE], the eksomatic experiencer seems to be perceiving from a point other than the experiencer's biochemical body.
An OBE can be a very simple experience: "I partially awoke to the strange sensation of ascending rapidly. My body was rigid. Suddenly I became afraid. Coinciding with this fear, I descended rapidly; a little jerk of the body and I awoke in bed." [Experience of N.D. from Robert Crookall's _The Study and Practice of Astral Projection_ p. 104]
An OBE can be long and involved. Noted skeptic and CSICOP, Susan Blackmore, once published an extract of her own experience which ran on for hours.
Out-of-Body Experience may occur spontaneously, while a person is resting or even walking down the street. It may be stimulated by a fear of imminent death and it is recognized as a component of the Near-Death Experience and the Alien Abduction Experience. It is associated with the use of drugs, legal and illegal. Some see a real Otherworldly journey in the shaman's trip to the land of the dead, while others speculate that pagan Nightflyers may have known something we have forgotten.
Many researchers include in their compilations of experiencer reports clear indications that the so-called Alien Abduction Experience [AAE] is (or includes) an OBE. A few have recognized and commented on this fact, while others may not have understood the significance of their own observations.
Dr. John E. Mack has recently identified Out-of-Body Experiencing (seeming to be conscious and out of, or separated from, one's physical body) as a recurring theme of experiencer reports.
To make our understanding even more difficult, it appears that the penetration of the abduction phenomenon into the physical world is not an all-or-nothing matter. In some cases a person is known to have been missing, can recall, with or without hypnosis, an abduction experience, and has returned with bodily lesions for which there seems to be no other explanation. But in other situations, 'complete' abductions does not appear to occur. The individual may have an out-of-body experience while others see that he or she has not left the house. --- [Mack, John E. Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens. p. 394-5]
Dr Mack does not explain how or why the 'complete' form lacks something present in the 'incomplete' form.
It is common for abductees to refer to out-of-body experiences that they had. ... They sometimes remember that they felt themselves floating out of bed but then 'fought it' and were able to lower themselves back onto the bed and abort the experience. When these memories have been examined, they have turned out to be a combination of the first few seconds and the last few seconds of an abduction. --- [Jacobs, David M. (1992) _Secret Life: Firsthand Documented Accounts of UFO Abductions_ p. 50]
Part of these anomalous memories and dreams might be the unaware abductees' knowledge that they have had Out of Body Experiences. It is common for abductees to feel that they in some way left their body, usually during the night in bed.... A few unaware abductees claim that they have not only had Out of Body Experiences but that they have experienced Astral Travel as well. They know that they have in some mysterious way experienced a strange displacement in location.... The only way that they can reconcile what has happened to them is through the only available explanation ___ astral travel, no matter how ill-defined that might be. --- [Jacobs, David M. (1988). Post-Abduction Syndrome. MUFON 1988 International UFO Symposium Proceedings. p. 91-2]
Dr. Jacobs claims that abductees usually abandon such beliefs when they become aware of what really happened to them. Thus:
Knowledge of the abductions finally gives them the answers they were seeking and the majority of them let go of previously held belief structures that were never fully satisfactory. --- [Jacobs, David M. (1988). Post-Abduction Syndrome. MUFON 1988 International UFO Symposium Proceedings. p. 99]
No doubt some abductees intially accept and later reject the idea that an AAE is a form of an OBE. Others clearly do not. It would be interesting to see the statistics that Dr. Jacobs uses to justify the claim that abductees 'usually' abandon such a belief. My impression is to the contrary. there is a tendency for abductees to change their interpretation over time from a literal one that assumes the event was a physical event occurring as it appeared to occur in real time to an interpretation that considers the event at least partially psychic or spiritual or otherwise subjective.
There seems to be something about the human ego that makes it believe that it only has experience in the physical universe. The issue has been around since at least the 15th century. Then, of course, it came up in connection with the Nightflying of witches, rather than in connection with UFOs. Hans Peter Duerr, describes the case of a Nightflyer 'who said that from time to time she flew away in the retinue of Diana and stayed with Lady Venus. A Dominican friar prevailed on her to let him watch her supposed flight.'
The night came that she wanted to travel, and so she called him. When she wanted to leave, she placed a trough on a bench. ... She sat down in the trough, rubbed herself with oil and said the words she was supposed to say, and while still sitting, she fell asleep. Then she imagined that she was flying, and she had all her pleasurees internally, She fought with her hands and her feet, and did that so violently that the trough fell off the bench and she came to lie under it, gashing her head. --- [Duerr _Dreamtime_ p. 8]
No doubt she awakened with a mark on her body that was difficult to explain.
In another case mentioned by Duerr, the witnesses reported that the Nightflyer had not left her hut. When the witnesses pointed to the numerous bruises on her body and admitted that they had beaten her with switches while she was unconscious, she refused to accept that she hadn't left her hut.
In a more modern setting, Jenny Randles, in her new book _Alien Contacts and Abductions_ reports on a few cases where the supposed abductee was in the presence of witnesses at the time of the event in question. It turns out that the witness did not see the abductee 'leave' the scene. Ms Randles concludes that the abductee was sleepwalking and experienced an internal abduction.
It is curious that there is this inability to recognize that one's body is asleep or that one seems to be separated from it.
Skeptical investigators make much of the possibility that the content of an abduction report seems to follow themes from literature. However, there seems to be little attempt to explain the human's unwillingness to accept that he/she could be Out-of-Body due to literature. In this case it would be religious or scientific literature. Some religions teach that the Soul and the Body are indissoluably joined and there is no separation until death. Scientism (the belief system that limits its view of human being to that which can be inferred from the study of rats) teaches that there is no Being within the Body and, therefore, there is nothing to separate from it.
It would seem that if there is this attempt to related literature to experience, it should be done as a two edged sword.
This brings us to the question of how to proceed with a PsychoPhiloSophical Inquiry in a way that does not prejudice the outcome by predisposing the inquirer to accept a particular result.
Theories about the structure of the human individual can refer to one or more of three realms:
The Upper Realm - The realm from which flows Purposeful Intent or Purposeful Causation.
The Middle Realm - The realm of experience.
The Lower Realm - The realm of mass/energy space/time investigated by materialistic sciences. This is the realm of chance or blind causation.
A Trionic Perspective reflects a committment to reference the data from each of the three realms in constructing a world view, belief system or theoretical description of the structure of the human individual.
After clarifying the experiential reality in phenomenological terms, one must link it with its correlates (if any) in each of the other realms ... in a non-pejorative manner.
Starting within the experiential realm, with the experience of seeming to be abducted by aliens, a Phenomenological Inquiry will attempt to describe the essential features and recurring themes of the experience as accurately and completely as possible. Various researchers have pointed out recurring patterns in the reports of the experiencers, although there is no reason to think that work in this area is finished.
Out of Body Experiencing has been mentioned. Other phenomena include (but are not limited to):
Missing Memories: Budd Hopkins discovered a phenomenon he misleadingly called 'missing time'. When a traveler arrives late (sometimes by as much as a couple hours) with no recollection of what he/she did during the 'extra time' it took to get to the destination, there are, or appear to be, missing *memories* (or, at least, faulty recall), rather than missing time.
Immobility: many experiencers, especially those reporting themes of alien abduction, report feeling unable, despite strenuous effort, to move the BCE body (or what the experiencer takes to be the BCE body).
In this article, i will be concerned mainly with these particular phenomena because they are so often found to occur together and because the phenomenon of immobility has prompted sketics to explain (away) the OBE/AAE as 'nothing more than' Awareness of Sleep Paralysis [ASP].
i will be treating sleep paralysis as a physiological correlate that defines a set of experiences that include Alien Abductions, Lucid Dreams, Out-of-Body Experiences and so on.
The key to understanding that ASP is not, by itself, a disease lies in the discovery that it is a phenomenon of the REM-state.
Probably most people are aware that sleep occurs in stages of varying depth each with its own EEG signature.
Dreaming has been associated with so-called paradoxical sleep, a state of high cortical arousal, only since 1953 when researchers correlated dreaming with the Rapid Eye Movements [REM] that were observed to occur at intervals during sleep. During this state, commonly called REM sleep, the brain is so aroused that it must send out a special signal paralyzing the body to prevent it from acting out dreams.
Despite this bodily paralysis, the experiencer may be alert while the body is asleep. And, it may sense its own paralyzed state. This is Awareness of Sleep Paralysis [ASP]! It is experienced as an inability to move or speak while lying fully alert or in a dreamlike state, with or without visual and/or auditory experience, and may include inability to open one's eyes.
The paralysis is not the problem. The body is supposed to be paralyzed during REM-sleep. The problem is that the experiencer often misinterprets the bodily immobility.
Before moving on it should be noted that we have just isolated three interacting variables:
1. Brain State - Is the Dream Perceiving Mechanism On or Off?
Is the brain Cortically asleep or not?
2. Body State - Is it Paralyzed or Active?
3. State of Being - Is there Awareness of, Response to or
Consciousness of the state or situation the experiencer finds
him- or herself in?
Ordinarily, these variables interact in a state of dynamic balance and we go thru our familiar waking/(sleeping/dreaming) cycle. Unusual relationships among these elements seem to correlate with certain paranormal experiences.
Before returning to this point it may be helpful to consider the medical professional's view of ASP.
END OF DOCUMENT --- Definitions and Notes Follow