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If these topics aren't things you want to hear about, this may be a good episode to skip. Humans are fascinated by gore and violence, but even more so, the mysterious and unsolved. Interest in these disturbing and unpleasant subjects is called morbid curiosity, and it has gripped hundreds of people throughout the ages. I am one of those people.
My name is Halle, and this is the Morbid Curiosity Podcast. Have you ever had the experience just as you fall asleep or wake up of being unable to move? Your eyes dart around the room, but your body is paralyzed. You may have sensed something, a presence that sparks fear in your heart.
You might even see the being out of the corner of your eye or directly on top of you, pressing down on your chest. It might look like a human, an animal or some type of creature, but no matter what, it's terrifying and it's crushing the breath out of you. This moment seems to go on forever, and then suddenly, it's over. You're alone in your sleeping area.
The creature is gone and you're left wondering if the whole experience was real or dreamed. This type of experience has been recorded throughout history and has been known by many names, but today it's referred to as sleep paralysis. According to modern clinical definitions, sleep paralysis is a conscious awareness accompanied by temporary muscle paralysis that occurs during the beginning of sleep, also known as hypnogogic sleep paralysis, or at the end of sleep, hypnopompic sleep paralysis. This paralysis can also be accompanied by feelings of suffocation, dread and hallucinations that involve multiple senses.
I'll get deeper into the biology of what is thought to cause sleep paralysis and possible treatments after the outbreak. The hallucinations experienced during sleep paralysis are incredibly vivid. A common hallucination is a malicious person or entity pressing down on the chest of the sleeper. Some people experience clawing, tearing at clothing, or unwanted sexual acts.
As you can imagine, this experience is far from pleasant and can be quite frightening, especially for those who don't know the existence of the condition or who cannot differentiate the hallucination from reality. Therefore, those who experienced this phenomenon in the past, before a medical explanation was available, often believed they had been attacked by something or someone supernatural. Such an experience would cause great alarm and fear, and may even spark retaliation or another type of fearful reaction against the perceived entity. It's very likely this experience influenced or at least played some part in many of the myths and folklore of multiple cultures throughout the world and history.
Sleep and dreaming have been mysterious since the beginnings of humanity. Dreaming is an experience that isn't real but often feels real. Dreams are delightful, confusing, and sometimes terrifying. In the past, why we dream seemed unexplainable is easy to see how a vivid dream or experiencing a sleep paralysis episode without a modern scientific explanation could have impacted people as well as religious and supernatural beliefs.
Most dreamers, however, are aware that what they have experienced is a dream. This is not the case for people who suffer from sleep paralysis. During sleep paralysis, the person is often undergoing a waking process and is conscious of their surroundings, but at the same time, they are paralyzed and suffering from a fearful hallucination. This combination of being awake but also dreaming is very disorienting.
There are three subtypes of sleep paralysis, the intruder, the incubus, and unusual bodily experiences. The intruder subtype features paralysis, a sensed presence that incites fear and auditory and visual hallucinations. The incubus subtype, named after a specific type of demon, which I'll talk about in a moment, includes paralysis, a sensed presence that incites fear, auditory and visual hallucinations, pressure on the chest, breathing difficulty, and pain or cold sensations. The unusual bodily experience subtype is less straightforward.
It includes sensations of floating or flying, out-of-body experiences, and sometimes feelings of bliss, but other times fear. The pressure on the chest and hallucinations of a terrifying entity sometimes occur in combination with this subtype. As we'll talk about later, sleep paralysis is an REM sleep-based biological phenomenon, and therefore it's not bound to any particular culture, meaning it has likely had some impact on the myth and folklore of many cultures. Culture does seem to affect the way the experiences are described and interpreted, however.
Many supernatural beliefs could stem from or be inspired by sleep paralysis experiences, incubus, demons, vampires, ghosts, witches, and more recently, aliens. During the Middle Ages in Europe, records of nocturnal encounters with the devil seem to line up with sleep paralysis. These records speak of the devil coming at night and causing feelings of dread, paralysis, and the inability to speak or act. This type of attack on the body was known as obsession, while an attack of the mind, or from within the victim, was known as possession.
Early Christian theologians also referred to a type of lesser demon that attacked at night. The incubus and the female version succubus were believed to be nocturnal assaulting demons that tormented people, but also sexually attacked them. These assaults were thought to lead to pregnancy in female victims and exhaustion or death in males. Succubai were thought to be responsible for male nocturnal emissions as well.
It's possible these demons were created to excuse or disguise evidence of masturbation, illicit affairs, and incest, all of which were heavily punishable sins. These experiences were also used against women who were suspected of witchcraft. I'll get into that in a moment. These demons were so heavily believed in and feared so much that many books written in the 15th century took them for granted.
Non-belief in demons is actually a fairly recent development in human history. Demonic attacks were thought to drain the victims of energy, as one of the main causes of sleep paralysis is disrupted sleep. A lack of energy adds to the evidence that these experiences, at least some of them, were likely sleep paralysis. One demon in particular was thought to be responsible for male nocturnal emissions and sexual attacks.
The female demon Lilith, who was an important mythological figure in Jewish, Babylonian, and Sumerian mythology, long before she appeared in Christian theology, was said to be the queen of the Succubai. She was said to appear at night, lie on top of her victims and strangle them, while also performing unwanted sexual acts or violence. She's also sometimes thought of as the first vampire, which leads to the second supernatural creature thought to be inspired in part by sleep paralysis. Vampire myths can be found in the ancient world in Assyria, China, Mexico, Greece, and many other locations.
These nocturnal undead creatures were said to leave their graves at night and feed on the living while they slept, those who were fed upon, often felt weakened and exhausted. From the MCP's vampire burials episode, we know that many things, including wasting diseases and a misunderstanding of decay after death, are thought to have inspired the vampire myth, but sleep paralysis may also have played a small part, specifically in human encounters with vampires. In some sleep paralysis experiences, the hallucinated attacker takes the form of a person known to the victim. If that person had died recently, this could prove to the victim that the dead had risen from the grave.
The combination of a disease like tuberculosis and sleep paralysis might lead a person to wake up from a perceived attack and find their sheets bloody, which would appear to confirm the attack was real. Also, the pressure felt during the hallucination of sleep paralysis would appear to support the lore that vampires are able to paralyze their victims with their special charm or glamour, and then not only feed on them, but sexually assault their victims as well. Some ghost experiences too have similarities with sleep paralysis. Ghosts are often viewed at night, their shape sometimes clear, but also sometimes hazy or indistinct.
Those that see them are often paralyzed with fear and feel a coldness emanating from the spirit. Ghosts and spirits are the more common interpretation of sleep paralysis hallucinations in Asian populations. The reason for this is unknown, but is likely based in the accepted cultural belief of a spirit world among many Asian populations. That said, when I had my own sleep paralysis experience, the hallucinatory entity I perceived was definitely a ghost, so there's also variation at the individual level of a victim.
I'll talk more about my own experience and cultural variation of sleep paralysis hallucinations a little more in a moment. When the hallucination involved a living human in place of an entity, accusations of witchcraft were often associated with what seemed to be sleep paralysis experiences. There is a very high association between sleep paralysis and witchcraft in Europe. In Germany, the hallucinated entities were called hexedrukin, in Scandinavia, the mayor, or mara, or in other places, the old hag.
During the Renaissance, witches were the most common explanation for sleep paralysis experiences, records from witchcraft trials, including those at Salem in 1692, revealed that people complained of being physically oppressed by witches or their familiars at night. Like the previous folkloric explanations, people sought to interpret these terrifying events, and witches were the cause that made the most sense to them. Fear of witches was prevalent at this time, and witch hunts and executions were also quite common. Accused witches were often women, and their craft was often perceived to have some sexual connotations.
Religious fear and discomfort with sex, especially women's sexuality, likely also played a part in the interpretation of sleep paralysis hallucinations as witch attacks. Witches were also thought to have the ability to travel great distances at night through flying, so the perceived presence of a woman in the bedroom of a victim, despite her being seen at home that night, seemed to support the idea that she was a witch. The similarities between described witch attacks and sleep paralysis are startling. The entity or woman was sensed or perceived.
The victim felt intense dread and sometimes coldness, pressure on their chest, breathlessness, and paralysis as the witch laid on top of them, either strangling them or performing unwanted sexual acts. In Newfoundland, Canada, this experience was called being hagged or hag ridden, and the witch was an old hag that was either set on the victim by another human, or came upon them on her own. In Brazil, the Pizad D'Ira, a witch-like figure, is said to step on the chest of those who sleep on their backs with a full stomach. In more recent history, English authors referred to the sleep paralysis experience as the nightmare.
Today, a nightmare means a scary dream, but the nightmare specifically referred to those sleep paralysis experiences of the incubus subtype. The mare part of nightmare comes from the same root as the German word mar, and the old Norse word mara, meaning a supernatural being, usually female, that laid on the chests of sleepers and suffocated them. This broad description encompasses witches, succubai, vampires, and ghosts. As for the other entities that have been associated with sleep paralysis-like experiences, they are many and varied.
In St. Lucia in the Caribbean, a Kokma, the spirit of a dead baby who chokes a sleeper, is the most common hallucinated entity. This is similar to the Finnish belief that the spirit of a dead child chokes a sleeper. In Zanzibar, an island just off the coast of Tanzania, the Popobawa, a nocturnal humanoid demon with bat wings, are thought to cause sleep paralysis.
Other non-human entities include the Hela of Cornwall, a huge hairy beast, the tromolee of Irish folklore, which is a large bird with many wings and huge talons. Cats are also quite common hallucinations in European records of sleep paralysis experiences. In Egypt and other parts of the Middle East, Jinn are believed to be the attackers. The same is believed by several Swahili-speaking peoples of Southeast Africa, where the sleep paralysis experience is known as jinamese, meaning strangled by a jin.
In several Arabic cultures, sleep paralysis is often referred to as jatthum, and a creature known as any freak sits on top of the person choking them. In recent times, mostly in the United States, reports of alien abductions are strikingly similar to the experience of sleep paralysis. The entity, an alien being, paralyzes the victim and makes unintelligible noises as it pokes and prods them. The feeling of dread and coldness are often also present.
Shadow people, or more recent folklore creature that appears as a living shadow in the vague shape of a human, have also been blamed. My own personal sleep paralysis experiences have always involved ghosts. The first one I can remember occurred during my undergraduate years in college. I had just gone to bed, and while I could see my room around me, I also saw a terrifying figure in a black cloak coming towards me.
The entity looked very much like a dementor from Harry Potter, but it wore a strange black mask as well, similar to the dragon priests from Skyrim. The entity drifted toward me until its face was inches from my own. I couldn't move or look away, and when I tried to scream, nothing came out, but shallow squeaks. Moments later, I was wide awake, and the entity was gone.
Thankfully, I had already heard of sleep paralysis, and knew that that's what I had experienced. If I hadn't known about it, I would have been far more terrified. As you can see, the types of media I consume, my nerd culture, severely influenced my sleep paralysis experience. When it comes to the relationship between sleep paralysis and ancient folklore, the situation is a little more complex.
Did sleep paralysis experiences create cultural narratives, or did the already present cultural narratives influence sleep paralysis experience? This is a question modern sleep paralysis experts and folklorists are still asking today. As for what actually causes sleep paralysis and how to treat it, modern science has only just begun taking apart years of folklore to reveal the biological mechanisms behind this terrifying experience. But before we get to that, let's pause for a word from our sponsor.
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Sleep paralysis has only been categorized as a biological condition in the past 70 years or so, but it's been part of medical discussions for centuries. While many cultures treated sleep paralysis as a supernatural experience, there were some that believed it was within the realm of medicine to treat. The second century CE Greek physician Galen was one of the first to describe sleep paralysis, and stated that the experience was due to gastric disturbances. He believed noxious vapors from undigested food rose to the head and irritated the nervous system, or that they distended the stomach, which then impeded circulation and led to stagnation of the blood.
In the seventh century, Paulus E. Geneta, a Greek medical encyclopedist, wrote that those who suffer sleep paralysis, which was then called FELTs, could often hear the entities speaking and were often threatened with lustful violence. He agreed with Galen that indigestion was the cause. Descriptions of the nightmare don't appear in English until the later medieval period, and even then, most times, they used the ancient Greek word FELTs up into the 14th century.
In 1753, John Bond wrote the first English medical study of the nightmare, entitled An Essay on the Incubus or Nightmare. He was a frequent sufferer of sleep paralysis, and wrote that as soon as the sleep awakes, they are unsettled, but also relieved that they have escaped such a terrifying experience. This acknowledged that sleep paralysis had something to do with dreaming. However, the medical views on the cause of sleep paralysis continued to follow Galen up until the 20th century.
In the early 20th century, psychologist Sigmund Freud sought a new explanation in mental conflict. His pupil Ernest Jones wrote that the nightmare was symptomatic of pathological angst, resulting from repressed sexuality. His research broadened our understanding of sleep paralysis, but his interpretation was virtually baseless. In the 1950s, thanks to electroencephalography, a way to measure electrical activity in different parts of the brain, medical science began to unravel the phases of sleep, and the nature of many types of sleep disturbance.
During the 1970s, sleep paralysis was labeled a parasomnia, or abnormal sleep disorder, and it began to draw serious academic attention as folklorists began to make connections between certain legends and the symptoms of sleep paralysis. The more recent rise in academic attention has been spurred by horror films like The Nightmare and Mara, TV shows such as The Haunting of Hill House and The X-Files and other media. The clinical effects of sleep paralysis are still relatively unknown, and the condition is not routinely assessed or treated in clinical practice. However, what causes sleep paralysis is slowly becoming more clear.
Sleep states make up two out of three states that the mammalian brain cycles through each day. Non-rapid eye movement, or NREM sleep, is dreamless sleep. During NREM, breathing and heart rate slow and regulate, blood pressure drops, and the sleeper is relatively still. About 80% of sleep is NREM sleep.
Rapid eye movement, or REM sleep, is a lighter form of sleep that is strongly associated with dreams. Humans experience three to five REM sleep periods per night. These occur one to two hours apart, and vary in length from around five minutes to over an hour. During REM sleep, the body is paralyzed except for the vital organs and genitals.
This is called muscle atonia, and prevents the sleeper from performing the movements of their dreams in reality. It's been hypothesized that during sleep paralysis, the brain somehow jumps back to an activity pattern similar to when individuals are awake, but their muscles remain in atonia. In this way, the victim feels as if they have awakened, yet are unable to move. This condition is thought to be caused by disturbances in REM sleep.
Episodes usually occur just before sleep onset, or upon waking. Most episodes only last around 10 minutes, but some have been recorded to take around 30 minutes. The paralysis isn't always accompanied by hallucinations either. Only around 5-20% of the population experiences the hallucinations.
Sleep paralysis is often experienced in tandem with other sleep and mental disorders, as well as certain medical conditions. People with narcolepsy and obstructive sleep apnea are far more likely to experience sleep paralysis. Around 60% of narcoleptics report having sleep paralysis almost daily, but most do not suffer the hallucinations often associated with it. People who suffer other parasomias, such as exploding head syndrome, are also prone to sleep paralysis.
Exploding head syndrome is when a person hallucinates loud bangs, explosions, and flashing lights as they fall asleep, or wake. These episodes last less than a second and often result in the person waking up. I've also experienced this parasomnia and found it far more terrifying than sleep paralysis, as I had no idea what it was. People with a history of trauma, PTSD, anxiety, and panic disorders also experience sleep paralysis at a higher rate.
The relationship between sleep paralysis and these mental illnesses is not known, but it's likely that sleep paralysis becomes more common due to the fact that these illnesses result in disrupted sleep. People with hypertension or high blood pressure, as well as Wilson's disease, a genetic disorder in which excess copper builds up in the body, also seem to suffer from sleep paralysis more often than most people. Again, the reason for this is unknown. Healthy people can also be affected by sleep paralysis.
Those who suffer from poor sleep or constant sleep disruption are more prone to experience it, and when it's experienced by someone without other sleep disorders, it's called isolated sleep paralysis. Recurrent isolated sleep paralysis, or RSP, is when a person with no sleep disorders experiences sleep paralysis more than twice a month. It's a recognized sleep disorder, but it's not well-known among non-sleep specialists. As I said earlier, sleep paralysis isn't often assessed for by doctors and psychologists, as it's not as well-known as other sleep disorders, such as narcolepsy.
It's often not considered unless the person already suffers from some other parasomnia. Due to the vivid hallucinations, it can be mistaken for other psychopathologies, such as schizophrenia, in otherwise healthy individuals. Therefore, according to sleep paralysis experts, doctors Brian A. Sharpless and Carl Dogranji eat, sleep paralysis should really be part of normal clinical and psychological assessments.
Dr. Sharpless recommends a three-part procedure to diagnose recurrent isolated sleep paralysis. The first part involves talking to the patient, describing sleep paralysis, and determining whether they have had an experience similar. As the patient isn't always aware the condition exists, much relief, both mental and physical, can be gained by simply acknowledging that this experience is biological and not uncommon.
Part 2 and 3 involve learning if the episodes are linked to any other disorders and screening for other forms of distress to determine if the patient has an undiagnosed disorder, or if the sleep paralysis episodes are indeed isolated and recurring. This screening process would aid in diagnosis, and also add to the growing data about how common or uncommon sleep paralysis is today. Recent surveys around the world indicate that between 20 and 45% of people experience at least one episode of sleep paralysis during their lifetime. These experiences are far more prevalent among shift workers and nurses due to the physical and mental stress of their jobs on top of the irregular sleep patterns that come with those jobs.
It's also more often reported among students and psychiatric patients. The incidents of sleep paralysis may have been greater in the past, considering the irregular work hours and hard labor that most people did in order to survive. Fear of witchcraft and a lack of understanding about sleep and medicine would also add to the stress. Also, modern sleep paralysis seems to have far less sexual connotations than the reported experiences of the past.
As I mentioned, this could be because sleep paralysis experiences may have been a convenient cover-up for illicit affairs and masturbation, but it could also be due to the fact that many confessions of sleep paralysis episodes in the past were extracted under torture, especially in the case of witch trials and supposed demonic nocturnal attacks. Most of the reports that include sexual attack often lack the paralysis and fear aspect. These aspects may have been left out in order to prove the victim was a witch, consorting with demons. If it's so common, why isn't sleep paralysis more well-known, and why don't most doctors screen for it?
It's thought that this is partly due to the patient's reluctance to disclose that they've had such an experience. The patient might feel like they are quote, going crazy, unquote, or that no one will believe what they have experienced. Many patients are relieved to discover that they are not alone and definitely not going crazy. Treatments for sleep paralysis are in the process of being tested for, pharmacological as well as psychotherapeutic forms of intervention so far show promise, but more study is needed to fully treat those who suffer from R.I.S.P.
As for medication, tricyclic antidepressants, and serotonin reuptake inhibitors which are thought to suppress REM sleep seem to reduce the number of R.I.S.P. episodes in some patients. As for psychotherapeutic treatments, education and reassurance of the patient is quite effective in removing shame, embarrassment, and fear that the patient is losing their mind. After this, sleep hygiene and insomnia treatments seem to aid in getting better sleep, reducing the episodes of sleep paralysis.
Another treatment that seems to help is cognitive behavior therapy, combined with relaxation techniques, which help disrupt the episodes as they begin and help the victim cope with the frightening hallucinations they experience. These treatments aren't foolproof and more clinical testing and awareness of sleep paralysis is needed to understand it better and find more effective treatments. Even though sleep paralysis is better understood today than it was in the past, it's still an unsettling experience to go through. It's terrifying that a small miscommunication in our brains can produce hallucinations so vivid that they seem real at first.
It makes us realize how far we've come interpreting these experiences and how far we still have to go in understanding the human brain. That's why sleep paralysis sparks our curiosity. The morbid curiosity podcast was produced by H. Lloyd.
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