Why the paralyzing ‘sleep demonʼ

still haunts humans in the age of

science
Josh K. Elliott

WATCH: Here's what your nightmares say about you.

You wake in the middle of the night and you feel it: an evil, menacing
presence is in the bedroom with you. You open your eyes and your
worst nightmare is standing at the foot of your bed. Itʼs real, and you
canʼt move a muscle.

It might look like an old hag, an alien, a deceased relative, a shadowy

figure or a demon sitting on your chest. No matter what it looks like,
this creature leaves you terrified and seemingly trapped in your body,
unable to move as it weighs down on you.

READ MORE: Can night owls force themselves to become early

birds? Yes, hereʼs how

“I thought I had a black blanket on top of me,” said Tamara Jones, a

25-year-old college student in Toronto who has experienced the
“creature” firsthand. “And then it slid down … and it looked like it flew
under the bed. It was a big lump.”

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 This so-called “sleep demon” has terrorized humans for thousands
of years, although science has only managed to explain it within the
last century.

The sleep demon is actually a hallucination linked to sleep paralysis,

which occurs when a person is jolted awake in the middle of the
rapid eye movement (REM) phase of sleep associated with dreaming.
You wake up but your brain is still dreaming — and itʼs projecting
your nightmares into the real world.

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Approximately 6-8 per cent of people will experience sleep paralysis

during their lives, according to Brian Sharpless, a clinical
psychologist and research fellow at Goldsmiths, University of
London. Sharpless has worked with hundreds of people suffering
from sleep paralysis and has written several books on the subject.

“Youʼre paralyzed while youʼre awake and youʼre having

hallucinations,” Sharpless told Global News.

“The experiences are so vivid that it makes sense some people

might perceive it as real,” Sharpless said.

“Itʼs like if you start a dream and you wake up in the middle of it,”
said Maurice Ohayon, a professor of psychiatry and behavioural

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 sciences at Stanford University. Ohayon has studied sleep paralysis
and hallucination for over 20 years, both in Europe and in North
America.

READ MORE: How to wake up early without hating your alarm

clock

There are countless old folktales about spirits and demons that
accost sleepers in the middle of the night, often to prey upon or
punish the helpless victim. But scientists say this phenomenon is
actually a psychological event linked to stress and poor sleep habits
— not some paranormal force.

Hereʼs what you need to know about the “witch” in your bedroom,
the “monster” in your doorway and the “demon” on your chest.

What is sleep paralysis?

The brain typically shuts off signals to the rest of the body during the
dream phase, Sharpless says.

“Itʼs probably so we donʼt act out our dreams, which could be

dangerous,” he said.

However, stress can disrupt the sleep cycle and jerk a sleeper out of
his or her dream early, while the body is still in this “lockdown”
mode.

This leaves the person fully conscious but unable to move after
waking from a dream state, according to the U.S. National Institute of
Neurological Disorders and Stroke. Sleep paralysis can have a wide
range of additional symptoms, including a heavy feeling on the chest
and hypnagogic hallucinations, in which the individual is still
dreaming while looking at the real world.

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 Ohayon says a hypnagogic hallucination is a “distortion of what you
see,” not an outright fabrication. In other words, your hallucinations
might turn a clothing rack into a towering monster, or a blinking
internet modem into a glowing-eyed visitor from another dimension.

WATCH BELOW: Five ways to create the perfect sleep

environment

Ohayon says sleep paralysis usually affects people during periods of

stress, especially among people in their 20s. It might afflict a person
only once in their entire life. However, some people can struggle with
it for years.

Jones says she had her first sleep paralysis episode at age six, and
sheʼs had a few episodes every year since. She remembers being
terrified by the paralysis during her first episode.

“I tried to scream for my mom and I remember just not being able
to,” she said. “After a while as I got older and it just kept happening,
it stopped being scary.”

Jones says her frightening “black blanket” dream was a one-off, and
her hallucinations are usually more mundane because she knows
whatʼs happening.

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 “If Iʼm going through a more stressful time or thereʼs been a big
change in my life … it can happen every single day for weeks on
end,” she said.

Andrew Munday, 36, says he started experiencing sleep paralysis

during stressful moments in high school. However, he didnʼt start
hallucinating until his mid-20s, when he was going through an
unstable period at his job.

“There were two weeks in a row when I had one each week, and
those ones were much more vivid,” he said. “I sort of woke up — ‘ishʼ
— from the nightmare and there was still the lingering image from
the nightmare floating in front of my face.”

READ MORE: Why you keep having the same nightmares over
and over again

Munday thought he saw a man trying to strangle him in his first

hallucination. On the second occasion, he hallucinated a doctor
made of burned, sewn-together corpses.

He says the hallucinations faded away after a few seconds, and he

hasnʼt seen them since.

“I was really concerned about where my life was going, and whether I
was going to be able to survive in my job,” he said.

Munday says he ultimately decided to go back to school so he could

change careers.

“Once I figured out the way out … thatʼs when the panic and the
paralysis went away.”

Sharpless says sleep paralysis has become more well-known to

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 mainstream audiences thanks to Kendall Jenner, who discussed her
own struggles with it in an episode of Keeping Up with the
Kardashians a few years ago.

Mastering your nightmares

Ohayon says some people manage to control their sleep paralysis by

having lucid dreams in which they can influence the narrative.

“They manage to master their own hypnagogic hallucination,” he

said.

Jones says she learned about lucid dreaming from Reddit, and she
now uses it to cope with her sleep paralysis.

“I can use lucid dreaming to kind of situate myself,” she said.

“If youʼre able to have that awareness and relax your muscles
(during sleep paralysis), youʼre more likely to just fall back asleep
instead of jolting out of it.”

Sharpless says the best way to get through sleep paralysis is to

simply wait it out and remind yourself that what youʼre seeing isnʼt
real. Most cases donʼt last longer than a minute.

“As soon as movement returns, the hallucinations dissipate

immediately,” he said.

The haunted history of sleep paralysis

The sleep demon is perhaps most famously depicted in The

Nightmare, a 1781 painting by the artist Henry Fuseli.

The image shows a woman draped across her bed in a restless

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 sleep. A demon known as an incubus crouches on her chest and a
horse peeks at her from behind a nearby curtain.

The so-called “sleep demon” has taken many forms over the
millennia. Sharpless says these nightmarish visions are usually
influenced by the sleeperʼs culture, so they will look very different
from one era or country to another.

East Asian sleepers often “see” a ghost, he said. Christians in the

Middle Ages would see a demon or succubus. Dreamers in Zanzibar
claim to have been attacked by a giant black bat called a popobowa.

Many of these demons apply some sort of pressure to the personʼs

chest — a phenomenon that Ohayon says is linked to the paralysis.

The creature has also seeped into modern pop culture. The titular
character in Netflixʼs Chilling Adventures of Sabrina faces a witch-
like sleep demon in the first season of the show. The 2018 horror
film Mara also brings the nightmare of the sleep demon to life.

WATCH BELOW: The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina

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 A few myths around the sleep demon offer some sort of incentive for
the sleeper to move. In some Middle Eastern cultures, for instance,
the creature is a jinn wearing a hat. If the sleeper can wake up and
snatch the hat, he or she will earn a reward.

“If youʼre in France in the 13th century you might see demons or
witches, whereas now youʼre seeing technologically advanced
shadow people,” Sharpless said.

“Every culture puts their own little spin on it, but the core features
of sleep paralysis itself — the paralyzing fear, the sense of weight
on the chest — these things seem to be invariant.”

He adds that sleep paralysis could explain a spike in reported alien

abductions in the 1980s and ‘90s, when paranoia around the
phenomenon was at its peak.

Sharpless says itʼs also common for people to hallucinate about a

recently deceased relative.

“When weʼre grieving that often interrupts our sleep, which would
make sleep paralysis more likely,” he said.

READ MORE: Building up resilience to grief helps prepare for

lifeʼs losses, says author

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 Ohayon adds that hallucinations are often informed by a personʼs
own beliefs, and they can sometimes reinforce that personʼs belief in
the paranormal.

“If the background of the sleeper is very mystical, the content will
probably take a more mystical colouration,” he said.

“Itʼs possible that this is there,” Ohayon said. “But I donʼt believe it,
personally.”

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