When you sleep you dream. When you dream, your brain sends messages to your body saying “Don’t move.” The phenomenon is known as sleep paralysis. What happens (apparently a lot) is that people will wake from a dream, their body is still paralyzed.  In those waking moments the brain is still in an altered state of awareness – still flooded with the chemicals and functions of the dream state.  Auditory and visual hallucinations are normal experiences for a person in this state.  The person, now aware, tells their body to move. The body is still paralyzed, it doesn’t move.  Neurons in the brain, firing away, tricks itself into thinking it is seeing things that in reality aren’t there.

Researchers and observers often point out that the experiences described by people who believe they have been adbucted by aliens or who see ghosts are consistent with the experience of sleep paralysis.

Because the brain isn’t receiving data normally, perceptions of the world around you are unreliable. You think you see what’s not there, you see incorrectly what is there, your body can’t move – your start to feel a rising panic. Even though the experience might last only for a few moments, you feel it lasts longer. Like a dream that feels as if it lasts for hours but lasts only a few moments, in your waking dream time is telescoped, expanded. You feel as if hours pass but you see the clock and only a moment or two has passed.

Last night I had an experience of sleep paralysis. Unlike most people who suffer it however, as soon as my eyes opened, and I told my body to move and it didn’t, I knew what was happening. My body’s failure to respond to my brain’s commands was odd, but also liberating – I had a sense of lightness as if I could float off the bed. The strange off kilter perceptions around me – the cat was in the room and around the room and on top of me and the walls were glowing.

I thought “I can’t move and the walls are glowing.”  Then I suddenly knew what was happening.  I didn’t feel any panic or weirdness.  I heard the cat purring and for a moment it sounded like an airplane propeller, but in a weird, distorted way.  I closed my eyes and drifted back to sleep.

Having experienced it though I understand why someone might wake up in the morning, remember that experience and deduce something untoward had happened to them – why they might think they’d been visited by aliens or had a vision of ghosts or angels or demons.

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