The Entity: Sleep Paralysis
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A
nightmare that has haunted thousands of people all over the world. Sufferers are sure that
when they see it they are awake and it is real. Science,
psychology and religion have all grappled with this phenomenon. Can any
explain the mystery of the entity?
One
woman has been suffering from entity attacks for most of her life. It began when she was just five-years-old –
-The first thing I remember, as a child at night,
I had just gone to bed, my mother just put me to bed and I could see the lights
on in the living room. I'd just laid down for bed, I could hear my
parents, I could hear the television. And I looked up and to my
right I saw a couple, very shadowy, very dark, in my bedroom. A
man and a woman. And they started walking towards me. It was very
frightening, I couldn't speak. I wanted to call out to my mother,
I couldn't call out to her. I was just terrified. And right about
that time my mother walked into the room, it appeared that she walked
directly through the two people that were standing to my right. And
I began asking her, "Who are these people in my room? What's going
on?” She kept telling me that it was just a
dream, to
go back to bed. I said I wasn't asleep. It wasn't a dream.
I could hear the television on in the other room. And that was the end
of that…….
But
as Jamie got older, the entities that stalked her became more
vivid and more violent, making her increasingly terrified to go to bed.
For years, Jamie thought she was alone and feared she was mad or delusional.
Then she discovered there were others who had suffered remarkably
similar experiences.
Surprising
but true that the entity experience are mentioned in ancient text too, dating
back over 2000 years.
“When doomed to death, I will attend you as a
nocturnal fury. I will attack your faces and brooding upon your
restless breasts. I will deprive you of repose by terror.” - It
wasn't just literature. Many artists had also depicted the entity.
In the Middle Ages, it was often represented as a horned beast that
preyed on sleeping women and was sometimes thought to rape them. Later
paintings saw it as a heavy demon-like creature, sitting on the chest of
its paralyzed victim. Why were there so many depictions of the entity
experience, and why were they so similar?
There may be one
explanation. Throughout history, and
across the world, thousands of people have suffered from night-time
visions in which they are attacked by violent and mysterious entities.
Some people have such severe experiences that their lives are left in ruins. For some of these entity
attacks, science may provide one explanation. When we are
dreaming, a mechanism in the brain paralyzes us to prevent us acting out
our dreams. Some people get trapped in a state between
wakefulness and dreaming, called sleep paralysis.
Dr.
Al Cheyne has studied over 9,000 cases and believes that it may have been
experienced in mild form by up to 30% of the world's population.
--“Sleep paralysis, as I view it, is a type of dream,
a waking dream, or perhaps more accurately, a waking nightmare. Imagine
if you will there are two mechanisms deep in the brainstem of the brain.
And one of these mechanisms we'll call the wake-up mechanism. and the
other one we'll call the dream on mechanism. And they're linked to one another.
In particular, the wake-up mechanism inhibits the dream mechanism. So
when this one is turned on, you're awake, alert, conscious of your
surroundings, able to respond to your surroundings. Imagine that
as your wake-up system turns down, if there's a problem with particular
neurotransmitters, it may not be inhibiting the other system. So
this one may turn on before this one turns off. So you have two systems
on now. So you're awake and you're dreaming.”
If
sleep paralysis might help us understand why these visions seem so real,
can it also help explain the shared scenario experienced in the attacks?
Another
victim explained too. And that more terrific and weird.
-I was only about 17 when this
first happened to me. I went to bed as normal, fell asleep,
enjoying a good sleep, when probably in the middle of the night I
was wakened by the feeling that someone was in the room. I couldn't
explain who it was. I didn't know who it was. I then felt being
totally paralyzed, the fact that I could not move at all. It was as if
the power that was there, the energy, was able to control my body.
I was being held down from the back. I could feel his hands on me.
I could feel that it was a man. I could feel the size of him, I
knew the size of the person that was there. It was a fully grown man. What
happened next was a sexual act. It felt as if there was penetration.
As if I could feel him pushing himself on top of me. I thought I was
gonna die. I thought that they were going to kill me. When the
paralysis eventually went away, I felt as if the presence had withdrawn
into a corner in the room. That there was some creaking. Not
literally moving, but it was creaking as if there was something there.
Dr.
Cheyne believes that a scientific knowledge of how sleep works might
explain not only these attacks, but also the myth of demonic assaults on
medieval women.
“- Sexual assaults are not
common, but they certainly occur. During REM they also have erections,
there's also crural tumescence in women, so that our dreams have sexual
content because our sexual organs and sexual areas of the brain are
being activated. So it's not
surprising that the combination of fear and sex leads to a sexual
assault scenario.
For
many who suffer from nocturnal assaults, their testimony is evidence of
an experience that is still not fully understood. Whether or not
science will one day offer a full explanation for these nocturnal
attacks is unclear. What is clear is that those who suffer will
continue to live in fear of what lurks on the other side of sleep.
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