The history of demons looming nearby or on sleepers

[C C]

https://www.discovermagazine.com/mind/wh...your-chest

EXCERPTS: In Italy, it appears as a witch, a ghost or, sometimes, a horrid humanoid cat. [...] In Newfoundland, it’s known as the Old Hag. The Inuit, however, interpret the phenomenon as a shamanistic attack. And in Brazil, the Pisadeira is described as “a crone with long fingernails...” These represent a small sample of the many folkloric interpretations of sleep paralysis ... in which a person is fully awake and aware but cannot move or speak.

[...] Given its ghastly symptoms, it's understandable how our ancestors might attribute sleep paralysis to demonic forces. But sleep scientists have concluded that it’s actually a normal part of the sleep cycle ... Some have referred to it as a mixed state of consciousness. ... The loss of muscle control is called atonia, and it, too, has its rightful place ... Brain signals reduce our muscle tone, inhibiting motion and preventing us from acting out our dreams. Only when atonia lingers into wakefulness do we become aware of the distressing inability to move.

One 2011 study found that about 8 percent of the general population experiences sleep paralysis, though the rates are much higher — around 30 percent — for both students and psychiatric patients. For some, isolated sleep paralysis instances happen rarely. But others suffer from recurrent sleep paralysis

[...] Even the malevolent, phantasmic images that plague these fitful sleepers have an earthly explanation. They’re called hypnagogic hallucinations when they occur just before sleep, and hypnopompic when they happen after waking. They can include not only visual but also auditory hallucinations, as well as bodily sensations, like floating or feeling pressure... (MORE - details)

[Magical Realist]

I've had a few paralysis dreams in my life. It's interesting that I always react to them as a sinister or demonic presence, half perceived and half dreamt. This autonomous reaction to a conscious otherness, an "alien" predatory threat, that hides itself in the darkness, seems wired into my brain, perhaps a vestige of my belief in demons when I was a christian, or else an evolved instinct left over from the days when we'd sleep exposed to the threat of ravenous nocturnal beasts.

[Image: sleepparalysis-web.jpg]