..A. Barnes: Sleep Paralysis has many technical names and descriptors and can be confused with several unrelated phenomenon. For the purpose of this interview the following terms or phrases can be used interchangeably in accordance with the readers’ preferences: sleep paralysis with a menacing presence, with a sense of intruder, with a demonic presence, with a spiritual presence, with a non-material presence, or, as in the title of the documentary film Your Worst Nightmare: (Supernatural Assault). It appears to be a real attack by nearly one hundred percent of those who experience sleep paralysis by those who experience it.

..People around the world feel they are attacked. Some terms that should not be confused with sleep paralysis, as born out by the science, are nightmares, night terrors, dreaming, lucid dreaming, hallucinations, REM rebound, REM Sleep, and others. Sleep paralysis with a sense of intruder is a complex series of experiences that has many cultural interpretations around the world, based on theology, philosophy, legend, myth, medical assumptions.

..There more than thirty individual and consistent aspects of sleep paralysis with a sense of intruder. Rarely to never does one victim describe experiencing all the possible components, but the complexity of the phenomenon and its widespread occurrence in the world, which has an estimated 1.5 billion living human beings who have had the experience and who describe it in the same way.

..There has been suggestion by prominent individuals that the “pathoplastic” nature of sleep paralysis—its ability to be interpreted in many different ways culturally in the world — makes sleep paralysis a difficult “beast” to nail down and define. It is, however, the persistence of consistent experience behind the cultural interpretations that makes sleep paralysis such a perplexing phenomenon for science.

..Indeed, when millions of people say that something attacked them in the night, something with the same footprints, something scary that climbed onto the bed and choked them while they were wide awake and paralyzed, the complexity of the experience poses as yet unsolvable problems with logic and the scientific process for anyone trying to explain the experience through dreams, hallucinations, or psycho-pathologies. Perhaps there is a solution or full explanation to be discovered, but as of yet there is no explanation that does not either ignore important pieces of the data or that is not based on unscientific assumptions . . . except the spiritual explanation.

..Soul Smack encourages further research on the topic, but is not willing to discount compelling evidence of a possible non-material reality out of hand without actual proof, and currently there is none.

..P. Taitt: The way we found the people who were included in our documentary YOUR WORST NIGHTMARE (Supernatural Assault) was quiet amazing, initially we put out an advert in one of our local online classifieds web sites and also a more well known national classifieds web site, we were also talking to many different people we knew and telling them about our planned documentary. The response was unbelievable, first a few came forward and then the flood gates opened up one after another they came, it was amazing to see that this many people were not only coming forward but willing to discuss openly on camera for the first time their experiences that were so personal and so disturbing. We then contacted David Hufford a researcher on this subject who led us to more researchers and sufferers, the whole thing unfolded seamlessly and was so successful in the discovery of the subjects in our film.

..A. Barnes: For the creation of the documentary film Your Worst Nightmare: Supernatural Assault Soul Smack primarily performed in depth interviews with victims of sleep paralysis, with various experts on sleep paralysis, and a series of on-the-street interviews for the purpose of discovering if indeed sleep paralysis does indeed happen to as many as one out of every five people. The victims of sleep paralysis that we approached spoke willingly on this very personal topic. The approach was the same, which is to say that we approached individuals, let them know we were creating a documentary film and would like their participation.

..Heidi Taitt lined up most of the longer interviews through her contacts. On the street it appeared that we would have been able to conduct longer interviews as well had there been the time. In essence, given a little respect, most people who have experienced sleep paralysis are glad for the chance to speak out. Where does the “supernatural” come into play with what has been discovered to be a physiological short circuiting of the brain during REM sleep? It would perhaps be appropriate to loosely describe sleep paralysis as a “short circuit” occurs electrically

..A. Barnes: Your question mixes several issues together. Although it does not hold up as an explanation for sleep paralysis, I like the “short circuit” idea, as though the entire consistent and complex experience of sleep paralysis including the convincingly real experience of a menacing or spiritual presence would result from a temporary wiring problem in the brain. In this analogy, two crossed brain “wires” would touch and then paralyze a person, and then cause during this paralysis a convincingly real vision of an old women or demon-looking thing that can often be heard sliding its feet on the floor and felt crawling up onto the bed, and that this same “short-circuit” would repeat itself thousands of times in all cultures in the same way and causing the same vision to appear to be real and equally frightening to the individual who experiences it.

..And that wire would only short-circuit itself at the very cross-over point between sleep and wakefulness and never at any other time, and that it would cause no other problems in a person and be undetectable on a CAT scan, and would generally never re-occur or get worse after the age of twenty five years old. Based on the complexity of the sleep paralysis experience the “short-circuit” theory of sleep paralysis falls sadly short of a working model for explaining it.

..It is common for individuals hearing accounts of sleep paralysis with a menacing, spiritual, or supernatural presence to discount them as hallucinatory. There are a number of reasons for this. The foremost reason may well be that accounts from members of different cultures appear on the surface to have nothing in common — culturally there is just nothing in a SP story from one culture that appears to be similar to a SP story from another culture. For example, in the Cambodian culture that appears in film Your Worst Nightmare the story might be that the spiritual attacker was a ghostly haunting head with entrails attached or that during their period of paralysis they were attacked by the ghost of a relative whose death they had witnessed.

..In their culture the relationship with the spiritual presence is due to trauma that happened in their waking experience. In addition, in their beliefs, fear makes a person vulnerable energetically to a ghostly haunting by decreasing the body’s energy and vitality. For the Cambodian afflicted by this ghastly creature it is important to do the Buddhist temple for a cleansing and re-energizing ceremony by the monk. Though neither “religious” nor “paranormal,” the Cambodian explanation is definitely a cultural explanation.

..Contrasting with the Cambodians, Christian cultures commonly interpret sleep paralysis theologically and traditionally through an understanding that the perceived intruder is the devil or a fallen angel or demon haunting a person when they wake in the night. Definitely a religious interpretation, a strong sense of evil is pervasive in the experience, and the cause of the devil’s presence is an individual’s shortcomings or vulnerability to evil which can be solved by making a more pure and loving relationship with Jesus or through better practice in leading a pure life. Prayer and soul-searching is the perceived solution to what could be called a demonic experience. By and large, most Christians seem to have absolutely no doubts about the cause of the experience, and their religion-minded interpretation stands in stark contrast to the traumas that cause the flesh-eating apparition of the Cambodians.

..Study of yet other cultures reveals similar experience but entirely different interpretations of sleep paralysis. In South American of Latino cultures, sleep paralysis with a sense of intruder is often described as “se me subio el muerto,” “or the dead thing crawled up on me.” In Japan one has a story of being locked in a vice. All of these accounts have been dismissed by “modern” society as myths, legends, and superstitions. A person who believes that alien abduction might say that they had an alien abduction. They are so different that there is no impetus to compare them other than to say that all cultures have their members who still believe in the irrational beliefs of their superstitions, which are considered to be primitive and unsophisticated, based on the assumption that “it is not true because . . . such things don’t exist.”

..This kind of assumption is commonly held by members of the scientific or medical community, but it has no basis in fact, science, logic, or rational thought. This is because one of the central tenets of science is supposed to be that one will only believe the truth of a statement if the evidence provided shows it to be true or likely to be true. No explanation that includes as part of its reasoning the any version of the statement “ . . . because such things don’t exist” is in any way scientifically valid and is, by definition, a hollow assumption with no basis in fact.

..If one does shine the methodical light of scientific method and rationality onto many of these seemingly different and un related cultural ghost stories, myths, and legends, such as occurs in The Terror that Comes in the Night, a work by Dr. David Hufford detailing numerous experiences of sleep paralysis across many different cultures, Commonalities do exist between the two stories.

..There are two sides to this phenomena, yes there is a physiological explanation that science has understood for a long time now, you go to sleep and during the various stages of sleep your body releases an array of chemicals and hormones into the bloodstream such as Serotonin, Nor-epinephrine and Dimethyltryptamine (DMT), each play their own role during the sleep process and some of these will disable your motor abilities, this prevents you being able to act out your dreams and thrash around, run or in some cases act out violent physical reactions to what you are seeing during this altered state of consciousness.

..What is not understood is why people across all cultures, races and belief systems report strange supernatural experiences such as hearing their bedroom door open, hearing shuffling footsteps, feeling their bed sink down as if someone or something just climbed up onto it and then feeling a tremendous pressure bearing down on their chest pressing them into the bed.

..The encounters with the supernatural beings are also consistent across the world; they report an old hag or a shadow being either in humanoid form or a black cloud like mass that envelopes them. These consistent accounts can not be ignored and science can not explain them, the only explanation they have is they can’t be real because there is no non material, spiritual existence.

.. Also, the interpretation an individual may experience can be based on their own particular belief system, if you are into Sci-Fi and UFO’s and experienced a classic sleep paralysis episode then you would probably be convinced that what has just happened to you was an Alien encounter or abduction, if you are a religious person you may attribute your experience to a demon or if you were from the Cambodian culture, you may believe it to be the spirit of a dead person, if they had witnessed that particular death as many of them did during the Pol Pott genocide that took place between 1975 and 1979.

..Often during the sleep paralysis the sufferer will experience so much fear and terror it has been reported they often experience an out of body episode, this usually happens if sleep paralysis goes on for more than 15 minutes and many Shamans around the world cultivate sleep paralysis and use it as a jumping point to an OBE, this could also be an escape mechanism linked to the “FIGHT OR FLIGHT ” response, the experience is so unbearable that for safety we leave our physical body.

..A. Barnes: For a medical professional who still believed that sleep paralysis is purely a physiological experience with accompanying hallucinations — in essence that the person who has the experience is either having trouble with sleep and needs some help getting a full night’s sleep or is psychotic or schizophrenic for insisting that their apparent real experience really happened and that they were awake — the solution is to medicate in any number of ways with sleep medications or psychotropic drugs based on the doctor’s preference and the on the diagnosis made. Many of these drugs work on the brain and the nerves and are used among other uses to prevent  One professional uses {Paxil} with success in conjunction with therapy and with help from spiritual advisors and practitioners to lower the incidence of sleep paralysis and sense of menacing presence. Various versions of the psychotropic or psychoactive drugs known today could perhaps help to calm a person and deal with sleep difficulty resulting in sleep deprivation.

..P. Taitt: There are a few medications that may be prescribed to treat SP such as anti depressants, anti anxiety, even various sleep aid medications to ensure the person has as much regular sleep as possible.

M E D I C A L   A L E R T

EDITOR’S NOTE:I {do not} endorse Paxil. Please refer to the article I wrote: Visionsmagazineonline.com/65htp/index.html Here is an excerpt from the article: ..Enter the drug Paxil. I'm sure you have seen the advertisements. Rob Robinson (a rock climber once featured on the cover of Climbing Magazine) says his experience with SSRIs started in 1998. He struggled with withdrawal symptoms including muscle spasms, extreme sensitivity to sound and horrible electric shock sensations in his head. He went back on Paxil to alleviate these symptoms. He concluded he had a drug dependency and found a specialist who took him off the drug in 18 days. ..Robinson states: "Paxil withdrawal symptoms can be so severe and protracted it requires an almost superhuman strength to endure them, not surprisingly, some people can not, and as a consequence commit suicide." Robinson continues: "Others victims have resumed use of Paxil to escape withdrawal symptoms, but will have to take the drug for the rest of their lives whether they want to or not. In other words, they've become lifetime Paxil addicts." .."Approximately 5,000 U.S. citizens have filed suit against GlaxoSmithKline asserting they became addicted to Paxil and then suffered withdrawals when quitting the drug as a consequence of the company failing to warn them of the drug's dangers. Several thousand more persons have sued GlaxoSmithKline in the UK on the same basis. Paxil's reach extends into medicine cabinets the world over, and cuts across all social classes." ..Robinson said: "Paxil is an equal opportunity destroyer."

..A. Barnes: The concept of “reducing” or “containing” sleep paralysis is interesting and perhaps misleading. Psychotropic drugs have an effect on the brain and nervous system. There is no scientific explanation of the sense of menacing presence, or spiritual or supernatural assault in today’s medical world. Drugs can make someone sleep, make someone relax, etc. In the absence of a medical explanation it is questionable to suggest that anyone who suffers less often from these traumatizing experiences has been cured. That would be the same argument as giving me a pain reliever for a sports injury and then saying when I feel less pain that the aspirin healed my injury. The aspirin relieves swelling, which allows me to heal more quickly, and it takes away the pain even though the injury is still there and the pain comes back when the aspirin wears off.

..If someone is constantly disturbed in their sleep for any number of reasons a drug can help sleep. Sleeping better doesn't mean that a person has been healed: it just means that a person has been calmed enough or sedated enough for sleep to occur. Imagine if the menacing presence that one is convinced that they encounter during sleep paralysis actually were supernatural, or a non-material reality: it would mean that the drugs might just not let me wake up or otherwise react and resist the attack.

..This argument demonstrates that drug use for an unexplained issue is not entirely without problems and could actually cause harm. Indeed, sleep specialists, who read EEG’s and EKG’s, etc. while patients sleep see only the intensity of brain waves in their patients. By their own admission, they only know if a patient is having a traumatizing sleep paralysis experience afterwards when they ask what the patient was experiencing. The eyes may be open, but since the experience is paralyzing there is no way to know visually if the patient is dreaming, having a nightmare, or awake and in sleep paralysis. One of the technicians interviewed as part of the documentary is convinced that forcing a patient to sleep through a nightmare or other trauma through the application of sleep medicine is unethical in a very big way because it is disempowering to the patient.

..A. Barnes: Medication is sometimes recommended by professionals that have experience with and knowledge of sleep paralysis. Some of the uses for medicine are as a means of relaxing a person or reducing stress so that the frequency or intensity might be reduced. Some tend not to recommend medicine or drugs at all and prefer counseling.

..P. Taitt: Medication has it’s pro’s and con’s, if a person was suffering from SP to the point where their everyday life was being affected and they could not function normally during the day, then maybe medication may be a good temporary solution. There are alternative treatments such as counseling and using certain techniques to ease the mind before sleep that can be very effective and beneficial for the sufferer, they can slowly be weaned off the medication and use the more natural methods that have proven themselves in many case. The down side to medication is you will loose all control during an SP episode and who knows how damaging that can be if you were suddenly in this situation and so medicated you could do nothing to help yourself, there are ways to break the onset of SP if you wake suddenly and loosing that ability would not be beneficial.

..A. Barnes: In the making of -Your Worst Nightmare: Supernatural Assault- all of the people who were experiencing traumatizing events of sleep paralysis with presence improved because of the interview process, and those who were suffering the trauma of past events experienced tremendous relief to find out that they were not alone and that they were not crazy for thinking they were attacked in their sleep. For all people who participated in speaking about their experience there was simply a huge weight on their shoulders as a result of being unable to speak about their experiences for fear of rejection.

..This point may well be much more significant than any medicine-related approach. Simply talking about the fear and learning that there are millions of people in the world that have the same experience and believe that they were truly attacked is a huge relief. This relief is something that drugs cannot do. Drugs numb the senses or otherwise change one’s perceptions. Talking breaks through the stigma caused by western culture, and this step forward is permanent and always positive for the victim in our experience.

..If you are a doctor who assumes that a person is psychotic for saying that they were awake and that they were really attacked by something in their room that was not human, and there are many doctors and psychiatrists who are still uninformed to this extent—though the word is getting out there!—then use of medicine to heal a psychotic event is unfounded and uninformed. One in five people of more on the planet have SP with a menacing or spiritual presence: one point five billion people can’t be wrong!

..A. Barnes: We don’t know what happens to dreams for drugged people and we will not know until we get a camera into a person’s head so that the things that the sleeper sees can be filmed. All the sleep expert can do is speculate what state of sleep the patient is in from the wave patterns on the screen. People do not remember nightmares or dream sequences usually unless they wake up during or immediately afterwards — an obvious impossibility for a person who has been drugged to sleep.  In the worst case scenario this is truly proof of a non-material reality and when the person is drugged to sleep they are prevented from jumping out of the experience when it gets too powerful. If a person moves even one part of the body, such as one finger, the SP experience is over. Drugged people have no more choice in the matter.

..P. Taitt: I guess they can probably do all three, who knows what they really do to the mind, do you actually forget the experience or is it just suppressed, locked away some place in your mind waiting to surprise you one day. When we sleep we are in an altered state of consciousness, the mind is never completely switched off, we know this because we can most times remember our dreams and therefore must have some level of consciousness actively working during this time.

..A. Barnes: Soul Smack does its best to make sincere relationships with people. We were greatly appreciative that Dr. Hufford participated in the making of this great film, and we are equally appreciative of Dr. Hinton’s participation. Both of these professionals are experts and are at the top of their field in the area of sleep paralysis, and we had a great time making the film with them. As with the victims who interviewed, they were very to see a film made on this topic and are still very involved with the progress of the film as it gets out in the world. We will be doing follow-up projects in film and on the web, and Dr. Hufford is currently a presence on the soulsmack.com web site and has given invaluable advice.  Textbook material is in the works for helping students of psychology to learn about the phenomenon of SP, and both experts and others are actively involved in helping make quality materials.

..P. Taitt: During the making of the documentary we contacted David Hufford who had done extensive research on the subject of SP, Andrew Barnes had met David Hufford in 1984 during a seminar at the Lawrenceville School NJ which was on the subject of sleep paralysis, when Hufford was showcasing his research and book “THE TERROR THAT COMES IN THE NIGHT” Hufford then kindly put us in touch with Dr Devon Hinton from Harvard and the rest is history.  It would be interesting to know how you found the people who have had these “SLEEP PARALYSIS” episodes to create this documentary about a subject that is kept so secret, and is such a personal experience.

..A. Barnes: Aside from the trend to decrease in frequency in certain individuals beyond the age of twenty five, there are currently no known, or at least no published reports of consistent factors known to cause the physiological experience of sleep paralysis beyond any and all factors that increase stress and / or disrupt sleep patterns enough to blur the distinction between wakefulness and sleep.

..The research performed by Soul Smack does, however, point to some surprising issues that are ripe area for new research. One of these areas is on the question of what happens in our sleep when we are in our normal paralyzed state: do we have the same or similar experience in the normally paralyzed sleep state? Do we only remember these experiences if we are awake and experiencing sleep paralysis? Is there a way to help people remember more from their dream state with today’s technologies? And... in a purely spiritual point of view, if these experiences are also happening in normal sleep and are spiritual rather than dreams, then what is our dream state like and is there a connection in sleep to spirituality and spiritual experience that is integral to being human? Or, in other words, are we in daily contact with the spirit world when we sleep? Is sleep paralysis our only way to get a window onto this world?

..P. Taitt: Absolutely not... sleep paralysis affects 1 in 5 people worldwide and is not connect to diet, gender, culture etc. It normally will stop by the age of 25 but can continue to happen way beyond that for some people...

..A. Barnes: Given the preponderance of the data, of the thousands of interviews relating similar experiences all over the world, it is reasonable and rational to ask these questions and to employ scientific and systematic approaches to finding answers. Anecdotal evidence is interesting and makes for good stories that have real value, but the more science and scientific processes free from prejudice and gross assumption are applied for the purpose of answering these questions it becomes more and more likely to find trends that will either prove or disprove the spiritual theories. Other questions will be revealed and ultimately more fruitful and responsible research will be created.

..On a further note on the topic of spirituality, it was disappointing to see some of the Christian points of view first because they seemed to blame the victim. Sleep Paralysis can be scary, and when it is accompanied by a menacing apparently supernatural presence it is often unbearable. This remembered trauma is why victims of intense experiences feel fear when they go to sleep for the rest of their lives. I would not recommend sleep paralysis on anyone based on the stories that I have heard — it is something to avoid. The Christian view, as I have said, is often that one’s relation to Jesus is lacking in purity and that this deficiency lets demonic forces act on our lives in a negative way. This seems to blame the victim, which is not considered the best practice in general.

..Therapy tends to decrease fear of reoccurrence, and this tends to greatly decrease the occurrence of sleep paralysis. If one would replace the more religion-based word of “purity” and talk in terms of emotions such as love, confidence, and fear, then the medical therapeutic process has the same goal as the Christian religious approach, and again we see that there is wisdom in the spiritual and emotional side of sleep paralysis. Therefore, again, it may be wise to meld the science with the spiritual in designing research.

..A large scale project with many participants could be designed today with validity that deals with, for example, that it is amazing that not only does the experience stop when one prays but decreasing your fear before bedtime appears to diminish the number of and the “badness” of the experiences. It seems that replacing fear with love and faith and removing the “bad” energy has real results: it makes this menacing presence go away, come less often, and be less strong and less negative. With more than a billion people in the world who have had this experience, such research is an untapped market from a business perspective and could improve the lives of untold numbers of people. Applied on a large scale it would represent a practical application of spiritual medicine, if you will. I am very excited what your readers’ response will be to this concept. People have to change their minds to think in this way.

..P. Taitt: Sleep paralysis is not more prevalent in third world countries it is just reported more, often due to the fact there is more belief in this type of phenomena, we in the West tend not to speak about this or report it for fear of social stigma and in some cases the fear of being labeled psychotic.

..A. Barnes: We have studied the effects and occurrence of sleep paralysis in Cambodian culture and have put members of this population in our film. The Cambodians have the highest reported incidence of sleep paralysis—over 90 percent of the population experience SP. We know when sleep paralysis began happening in their lives and what drastic event occurred in their lives just before: the entire population went under the control of the violent Pol Pot Regime just before sleep paralysis began to be common. As a society, the country was put on a deficient diet to save money and motivate people to work for the regime: if you did not work you did not eat, including if you were sick. Millions of people died and those who witnessed these deaths commonly began to have sleep paralysis and to develop PTSD symptoms.

..Cambodian victims of sleep paralysis, consistent with all populations, believe the beings that come to them during paralysis are real and wish to do them harm. They interpret the beings consistent with their culture, but true to form, a dark presence comes into the room and chokes them.

..A. Barnes: EEG is a tool for measuring brain activity in terms of quantity. An EEG is very active during sleep paralysis. There is little to no difference between an EEG during REM and when awake.  Although rare, incidents of sleep paralysis have been recorded during sleep studies and preserved for viewing. EEG, EOG, EKG, and electronic connections to muscles or EMG all show characteristic patterns of muscle relaxation and brain activity similar to REM sleep. Eyes are usually open during this period of activity and are open at various times for certain people during periods of sleep. According to sleep specialist it is only known if the person was in REM sleep or in awake sleep paralysis if the patient comes out of the episode to speak about the experience.

..Noteworthy is that there is no way to know from the machinery whether REM is occurring or wakefulness. In sleep paralysis it appears that when it stops the victim jumps up or sits up and is ready to speak about the experience and usually to be comforted and reassured that the creature they were seeing is gone. Most often the victim has a whole bevy of critical words for the person supervising because they want an explanation for why nothing was done to help them! At times the paralysis has continued for many minutes, and the victim wants to know if the specialist saw anything or got anything on camera, since they were sure they were in the company of something horrible and menacing, or “demonic.”

..At this point, the medical experts feel comfortable saying that since they didn’t see anything, then nothing was there! Easy to see why it is so easy to say that the person was hallucinating! Put the specialist into the bed with the leads and the cameras and he or she will also ask what was caught on tape and why no one came to help.

..A. Barnes: Medical professionals who learn about sleep paralysis and about how common it is are fascinated, grateful for being informed, and stop diagnosing SP as a psychotic event unless there are other symptoms of psychosis. It is important for people to be able to talk about this without feeling like they are going to be labeled as mentally ill.

..Sleep Paralysis with a sense of intruder happens to nearly one in five people, as clearly documented. This is undisputed and is the same thing that Soul Smack found when randomly interviewing on the streets of Portland, Maine. When asked, people are glad to talk and are fascinated to find that they are not alone. Ask your friends and you will find normal, non-schizophrenic people having sleep paralysis and belie4ving that something was in the room with them, something generally perceived as mean or dangerous.

..So many experiences of sleep paralysis live otherwise normal lives that it is irrational to suggest that sleep paralysis leads to schizophrenia as a rule or at all. Has anyone ever had this and then become schizophrenic, as your question suggests? Probably: one and a half billion people living today are calculated to have had sleep paralysis with a menacing presence in their lives—probably schizophrenia has come to some of these people. Also some have probably become psychotic and had any number of problems. Was the schizophrenia caused by the sleep paralysis? Probably not.

..A. Barnes: It is definitely an altered state of consciousness, and there is good scientific reason to study dimethyltriptamene, serotonin, norepinephrine, and the other substances that participate in inducing spiritual or mystical experience in conjunction with sleep paralysis, near death experience, bereavement encounters with deceased relatives, alien abduction, and other spiritual or supernatural experiences. Modern science is beginning to take these anecdotes and turn them into serious studies in a similar vein to work that has been done on sleep paralysis. And they are learning a lot (see Barbara Bradley Haggerty recently on NPR).

..Hallucination would be a convenient explanation because it would enable skeptics to explain away the entire experience of SP. But, it is not possible to apply this label and be rational. Too many people who are otherwise healthy have been convinced that they are wide awake and saw what was visiting them. Too many descriptions of rooms and hallways that were observed accurately have been noted to discount that they were awake. And, too many people have had the exact same complex experience for the descriptions to be discounted by a rational mind as hallucination.

..P. Taitt: An altered state of consciousness could be a good reason people are having these strange experiences, when we sleep we naturally enter an altered state of consciousness, our brain vibrates at an alternative frequency more like a meditative state, to add to this, our pineal gland secretes small doses of Dimethyltryptamine (DMT) which was also called the spirit molecule in a recent book by Dr. Rick Strassman MD.

..DMT has been used in ceremonies for thousands of years in Shamanism and is found naturally in certain plants throughout the world, when the brew (Ayahuasca) is ingested the DMT is absorbed and supposed to allow you to access the spirit world in an altered state of consciousness, in this out of body state you can visit other dimensions and experience alternative realities, so if this naturally occurring substance is released into our bodies when we sleep we should certainly consider the possibility that a spiritual experience could be taking place for many of us each night without realizing it.

..If you look at the correlated reports of people that claim to astral project you will be surprised to find all the symptoms and side effects they report when they experience OBE are astonishingly similar to those reported during sleep paralysis, also upon death a huge overdose of DMT is released into our blood stream, could this explain the reports from the thousands of near death experiences that are gathered each year, could this pineal gland and the DMT be the gateway? It’s worth considering.

..A. Barnes: It has not been proven that this is a problem with the brain. Show me your references..

..P. Taitt: Sleep Paralysis is not a problem, it is a normal human experience, as soon as soon as Western society will accept this we can move forward and people will not only be able to openly discuss their experiences but they will also have the vocabulary to do so. The only thing science has proven is why paralysis occurs during our sleep state, you can not simply ignore or discount millions of stories of the exact same experience from every corner of the globe, the words may differ but technically the stories are all the same, this can not and should not be called superstition, these are peoples real experiences and should be respected as such. When people are able to understand this is something they should not fear and are able to openly discuss what they have seen, heard or felt, it usually helps to reduce the episodes of SP and often stops them all together.

..A. Barnes: People who experience SP and tell about it are awake, not hypnotized. DMT appears to be in effect during SP, and that has all kinds of effects on the body and on the vibrational frequencies of the mind. This and other substances are often called spirit molecules. If we want to consider Hypnosis as perhaps a possible explanation for SP, then we would have to create in our minds a source of suggestion, or a "suggested", who would suggest to the mind what the mind would experience or see and remember after the hypnosis. The existence of this “suggested,” a non-material reality that would appear to all people experiencing SP, would explain why people have the same complex vision, ie. “I wake, I hear something in the hallway with sliding footsteps, my door opens, something threatening comes into my room, crawls up onto my bed and suffocates me.”

..A. Barnes: No. We should listen to what people say happened to them and then design and fund experiments that would lead to a real answer that would not disregard or brush-off established scientifically valid research. It is best to let the data speak for itself and not to interpret for any reason than to help establish a base-line hypothesis around which to do further experiments. There is so much that we do not know, and now, with the knowledge of DMT and other substances in addition to the body of evidence it is time to make better and more research.

..Please note that all attempts to explain SP and its accompanying phenomenon truly have failed to hold water other than the supernatural or non-material reality explanation. Similar problems in explaining (away) near death experiences have arisen. I would like to suggest—for the purpose of inspiring research and allocation of resources—that there are consistencies between SP accounts, near death accounts, and bereavement accounts. Imagine for a moment that the SP experiences in our documentary film Your Worst Nightmare: Supernatural Assault are proof of a non-material reality, just for the purpose of imagining in that way that appears uniquely human.

..Imagine that near death stories are also real. Just for fun, just for investigative purposes. At that point, in comparing all the data and in gathering more data, what is the scientific community going to do when they discover that the different accounts appear to actually map the same unknown, as if each experience were looking out of a small porthole from a different vantage point at the same place? Now that would be something worthwhile.

..P. Taitt: Some cases could certainly be Lucid Dreams where the clarity and realism of the situation is indistinguishable to the sufferer. Lucid Dreams are very interesting and we can not rule out the fact that this may be what some people are experiencing.

..A. Barnes: In the meantime, we have made a movie available to the public that tells a bunch of scary stories about something that the scientific world has brought to light but as yet cannot explain without destroying or ignoring the data. That is compelling; that is something worth considering. If physics continues to fail to describe it, then people will continue to look scientifically at a non-physics world for an explanation, at a non-material explanation. That would be like the 90% of the universe’s energy—the dark matter—that science has never seen but that was theorized and then proven to have to exist by its effect. What has to exist when millions of people have the same experience in their room at night? That is more compelling even than a million people having the same dream, which would be startling to say the least. The great universities of the world are coming together and beginning to pay attention.

..P. Taitt: Prayer in most cases will stop any SP episode, it could help because prayer offers a sense of security and therefore reduces the fear factor of the sufferer, this could in turn reduce the FIGHT OR FLIGHT response and the rush of even more hormones, allowing us to move, once you move you break the hold SP has over you.

..A. Barnes: Most every one who has a knowledge of God, or of a god, eventually prays during sleep paralysis and the paralysis experience stops either immediately or very shortly thereafter. Prayer stops it. Prayer puts one in a state of mind and mental focus that makes one less vulnerable or susceptible to SP, etc. This is the spiritual realm or state of mind and being. It may connect us to the more positive universal energies that affect us and which we use the power of the mind to take advantage of, such as whether we choose to respond to the positive energy of someone smiling at us or whether we choose to remain grumpy and closed. Once the SP victim opens him or herself up to higher vibrational positive energies the SP cannot continue.

..A. Barnes: The vast majority of those who have experienced SP and a “supernatural attack” have become either convinced that there is a spiritual reality that we know very little about or have become vastly more spiritual in their lives. Near 100% or experiences believe it is real. There is no argument discounting the spiritual and/or supernatural that holds water. That does not keep people, even scientists, from arguing that SP is purely physiological. This is the whole problem: people who do not believe that it is real must ignore the data in order to persist in this belief.

..We are back to “it can’t be real because things like that don’t exist,” or “all people who have this are delusional because it couldn’t be true.” You might as well say that all the interviews were falsified, including the ones that you do yourself. To think that sleep paralysis is hallucinatory in spite of all the consistent, complex and cross-cultural data might be delusional or hallucinatory in itself, but we will call it superficial and un researched to be polite.

..To call the beliefs of experiences“superstitions” and therefore to belittle to them is silly. To paraphrase Dr. Hufford: why not just say, “my scientist can beat up your scientist, therefore I am right and your ideas are crap.”

..A. Barnes: When SP stops everything that was happening is over. All that is left is the panic heartbeat, the sweat, the fear, the disorientation, and the adrenaline. There are no known cases of abrasions or other injury. There are, however, many accounts of roommates or housemates aware of and wondering what was going on in the experiencer’s room.

..P. Taitt: No markings or physical evidence has been reported to my knowledge, although there is a case in David Huffords book “THE TERROR THAT COMES IN THE NIGHT” where a young man was thrown around his room by a shadow being and during the making of our documentary we interview a lady who claims she was raped on a number of occasions by a non material entity during a state of SP, she could feel it see it but not physical markings were left. If these experiences are happening in the spiritual reality and not the physical this could explain why we see no apparent marks.

..A. Barnes: Yes, there have been cases where people have been scared to death. We have not been able to get that interview to verify whether the cause was SP. Important to note, however, that healthy people are not going to be killed by SP. Great point: if you had a heart condition and were not recommended to watch the Super bowl of it tended to get you riled up, then maybe SP could kill you. It really gets your heart going and makes you want to escape at all costs.

..P. Taitt: I do not think SP kills, but if you were in a poor state of health i.e. a weak heart who’s to say the fear would not kill you. The Hmong people of SE Asia were convinced during the 1970’s that SP was the cause of deaths amongst young perfectly healthy men who had just recently immigrated to the United States. Upon further investigation this was not the case, they died in their sleep of heart arrhythmia which is very hard to detect during autopsy. But the bottom line is SP will not kill a normal healthy person.

CONTACT:
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andrewbarnes@soulsmack.com
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