Us humans can be extremely silly at times since we seem to have an afinity for the irational. Take the condition of sleep paralysis for that matter. The brain, of the person experiencing sleep paralysis, during waking up from sleep is locked between REM and reality and the body persists into remaining in a paralysis state, so the person is partially awake and unable to move. Occasionally, the ones experiencing it can feel the weight of muscles on their chest or on their back and find it hard to breathe. During this state, the patient occasionally hallucinates, at times for a few seconds and other times for many minutes. It is more like dreaming while awake, and conscious of the surroundings but unable to move. In some accounts, the patients report a figure sitting on them and every so often it is attacking them. In some places in Africa they call it the Witch Riding Your Back, the Greeks call it Mora (from the Slavic ‘moth’ or ‘nightmare’ in Croatian), in some places in southern US they call it the Hag, the Turks call it Karabasan the dark assailer, the Maltese Haddiela the wife of Hares, the Japanese Kanashibari, meaning bound in the steel, and the Chinese simply body pressing ghost or Gui Ya Chuang. Every culture calls it something. The older some cultures are, the more their folklore is connected to pagan beliefs dating before the discovery of the electricity and the electric bulbs. An invention that, when first lighted the streets at night, helped to disperse most of the ghosts and demons away from the towns and cities, clearing a number of places from their haunts.
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| The Nightmare, by Henry Fuseli (1781) is thought to be one of the classic depictions of sleep paralysis perceived as a demonic visitation. |
Times, however, change. The United States, with the help of Von Braun’s vision, gloriously won the space race. Humans began to talk about life on other planets. Hollywood and television helped to spread the image of man in space and the human mind begun to imagine extraterrestrials visiting our planet with their highly advanced space vessels. Of course sleep paralysis did not remain unaffected by all these. The new hallucinations illuminated the church’s medieval Europe look. People could no longer find relief in prayer. The church for years used and abused the Hag, Mora, Mara, Karabasan, Lidércnyomás, Suk Ninmyo, and, instead of helping humans to understand, they helped them to ‘deal’ with it. The clergy played them and the patients felt guilty for allowing their evil thoughts to manifest and open the doors to demons and devils into their house.
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| The Fourth Kind. Photograph: Universal Pictures/PR |
But ‘thank god’ for people like Von Braun, who through his work made possible space travel to another space object, and people dreamt of civilisations being able to travel from one planet to another even from those in a far away star to earth. Because of it, sleep paralysis patients in the 'new world' have a different kind of hallucinations. They dream of aliens abducting and performing tests on them. In their nightmares, Alien scientists are probing them and even have sex with them. Some are convinced that their bared alien children got removed at birth for more cruel experiments. Europeans never had an active space program, and Europe, being nothing more than a few medieval villages that grew into cities with people stuck in medieval religious times, maintained their nightmares of dark and evil figures. The American nightmares, because of the space program and the technology brought in our homes, are more futuristic. However, organised religion is a virus that spreads and mutates like the flu. New church-like institutions were created for abductees to find relief by being relieved of their hard earned coinage. Following on the steps of others, they make no attempt whatsoever to use any proper scientific method to rationalise. They accept without doubt. Now that may be a new religion in embryonic stage, born through and growing with technology. Though, somehow, it fails to fully catch up. Maybe we should give it a couple of thousand years to mature, or a new marketing strategy.
(Christos Tsotsos author of The secret of the elemenets)
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