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 experience (what it feels like, and what the “entities” encountered during it look like and act like) remains constant across cultures, even among those that are fully isolated from each other, thus giving the lie 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 sleep paralysis, it’s still quite common for them absorb this medical-scientific knowledge without changing their opinion that their experiences have a metaphysical or paranormal basis. Hufford, the brilliant pioneer of sleep paralysis studies (and a professor of both humanistic medicine and religious studies in the Penn State and University of Pennsylvania systems). But 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. Of course, that doesn’t mean they actually were (or are) real. Although I never bought fully into an all-out paranormal explanation of the whole thing, remaining mostly skeptical about such matters, I was unable, as a matter of psychological fact, to escape the awful pall that the experiences cast over my life for a few years, just as I was unable to deny the clear impression that the figure or figures that visited me during those episodes were objectively real, as opposed to subjective dream figures generated by my brain. In the beginning they were fully as shattering and spiritually transformational as what Proud - a sleep paralysis sufferer himself - describes in his book. I still have them occasionally, only they’re much milder and less dramatic than they used to be. You’ll recall that I myself suffered for years from savage episodes of sleep paralysis. (For a detailed explanation of Proud’s ideas, see the interview he gave to TheoFantastique a couple of months ago.) 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 as the focal point for a poltergeist disturbance. Usually we remain in a condition of mutual ignorance - we don’t see these entities, and they don’t see us - but sometimes they become aware of us, and then, if they’re the lower and more craven kind, they latch onto us to feed on our life energy. Published just last year, it argues that sleep paralysis is actually a cousin to spirit mediumship, in that the experience represents an actual visitation by paranormal entities that live constantly among us. A week or so ago I finished reading Louis Proud’s fascinating book Dark Intrusions: An Investigation into the Paranormal Nature of Sleep Paralysis Experiences.
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