Do weird things happen to you early in the morning before you get out of bed?
Symptoms?
The distinct sensation that somebody is in your room or in your house.
Conversations with people that are not there.
Feelings of dread or even imminent danger.
Heavy pressure on the chest as if being suffocated or drowning.
Out-of-body (or similar) feelings or experiences.
Well the list goes on, with reported problems worldwide. Check the article on the Wikipedia for more details.
If you’ve been sleeping in a nice, deep, happy REM sleep – please know that your body does not wake up all at the same time. The brain can wake up from sleep before the rest of the body does. This leaves the door wide open for odd things to happen. These events (hallucinations) may range from dreamlike episodes to something far more demonic-seeming. You may hear noises, sense movement in the room, or nearly anything else. It is just as easy to have ‘visits’ from Aunt Margaret, your guardian angel, Elvis, or a demon.
In this state, the brain is a little bit euphoric. It is high on blood sugar because you’ve been resting and your body is ready for another day. It is awake and alert but disconnected from your body because that deeper part of your brain is still sleeping.
When you stop to think about it, this state is somewhat trance-like. It is in these trance-like states that Edgar Cayce did his famous readings a century ago. Cayce would recline on a sofa and went nearly to sleep. As he drifted off to sleep his assistant would present him with a question, which he would answer. While Cayce did his readings while going TO sleep, and sleep paralysis is more narrowly defined as a problem arousing FROM sleep, I think the state of the brain is at least similar in either case.
It is in a similar trance-like state that many religious groups claim to have divine ecstacy and are able to talk with spirits or their gods. From whirling dervishes to voodoo priests, the names and methods vary but the results are the same – achieving a trance so that the mystical can happen.
It is not too much of a stretch to say that some researchers believe that sleep paralysis explains many of the abduction stories we hear about in the UFO literature for the past 50 years.
The flip side, obviously, is that if your guardian angel were to visit you, it might be most easily done when you are in a state of sleep paralysis. Whether it is a psychological cause or a psychological effect is open for discussion since science has no way to determine if there is anything truly paranormal going on around us anyway. Just realize that your own mind can play tricks on you!
So what can you do if you think this may be the source for your ‘haunting’? See a sleep disorder clinic. They can do some tests and have you over for a fun sleepover. Well, maybe not so fun – I really don’t know. But you won’t know for sure what is going on unless you give it a try.
