Notes on Sleep Paralysis

The Nightmare (1781) by John Henry Fuseli

I don't know if people who believe in supernatural phenomena are more likely to suffer from sleep paralysis - or if, in fact, it's the other way round and those prone to the latter condition are more likely to see spooks, spirits, and succubi - but there's evidence to suggest a connection between what is a fairly common disorder and the conviction amongst some that there are occult forces at work in the world.      

For those who are unfamiliar with the term, sleep paralysis refers to those times either just after waking or just prior to falling asleep, when a person is semi-conscious but unable to move or speak. During these episodes, which usually last no more than a couple of minutes at most, people often report hearing strange noises or feeling an unusual presence in the room. Some also report out-of-body experiences, or breathing difficulties due to a tightness of chest.

Obviously, this can be frightening and the fear is very real even if the ghost or demon that is thought to have triggered it is not an actual entity, but is, rather, a hypnagogic hallucination, something which can be far more vivid than a regular dream. 

The condition can occur in those who are otherwise perfectly healthy (and perfectly rational). Often, it's triggered by sleep deprivation or psychological stress, such as the grief caused by the death of a loved one. Cases of recently bereaved widows hearing the familiar sound of their dead husbands' footsteps on the stairs at night are not uncommon, for example.  

Interestingly, it's believed that sleep paralysis plays a significant role in generating fantasies of alien abduction, as well as paranormal activity. Ultimately, the content (and interpretation) of a sleeping subject's dreams, nightmares, and hallucinations tends to be determined by their cultural background. Thus, whilst Americans mostly worry about extraterrestrials and Egyptians are troubled by jinn, only a melancholic Scotsman is haunted by the sound of a ghostly piper patrolling the ramparts.

Anyway, I hope this reassures those who fear things that go bump in the night: just relax, roll over, and go back to sleep in the knowledge that - more often than not - there is nothing to fear but fear itself. Or, as my MR therapist says, allow cognitive reappraisal to bring emotional regulation.

Oh, and one more thing - don't eat cheese before bedtime!*

Notes

For the latest scientific research on this question see: Dan Denis, Christopher C. French, and Alice M. Gregory, 'A systematic review of variables associated with sleep paralysis', in Sleep Medicine Reviews, (April 2018), Vol. 38, pp. 141-57. Click here to read online.

See also the 2015 documentary dir. Rodney Ascher, The Nightmare, which examines the issue of sleep paralysis via an extensive series of interviews with sufferers, dramatically re-enacting their experiences. The film seeks to demonstrate how a wide range of spooky phenomena can often be attributed to this recognised - but little studied - medical condition. The official trailer can be watched on YouTube by clicking here. 

* This sounds like a joke or a reference to an old wive's tale, but Dickens, like many great 19th century thinkers - including Nietzsche - took diet seriously and knew that eating the wrong foods at bedtime could have undesirable side-effects. In A Christmas Carol (1843), Ebenezer Scrooge attributes the ghost he sees to "an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, and a fragment of an underdone potato". 
 

Loving the Alien (Notes on Exophilia)

Dream-sketch by Zena
(untitled, undated)

As Roland Barthes once pointed out, the art of love has no history. And so there's no progress in pleasures - nothing but mutations and perverse deviations. So it can't be said that exophilia is simply an unearthly development of xenophilia; loving the alien is not merely a substitute for loving foreigners.

Rather, it's a unique form of desire that deserves to be considered in its own right, even if its devotees share traits with other paraphiles who have a penchant for inhuman and non-human lovers and long for a sexual experience that is truly out of this world (what the journalist Annalee Newitz charmingly describes as an alien fuckfest).   

What, then, is exophilia, in essence, if you will ...?

Obviously, such a question is difficult - perhaps impossible - to answer; who can truly say what love is (particularly forms of love that are by their very nature queer and which often involve extreme as well as abnormal activities)? 

However, for those who imagine the phenomenon of alien abduction to involve human test subjects being taken secretly and against their will by extraterrestrial biological entities in order to be experimented upon in ways that include a non-consensual sexual component, I suppose exophilia might be said to be primarily a sci-fi rape fantasy or close encounter of the kinky kind. 

Procedures such as vaginal and anal probing, the collection of semen and harvesting of ova, etc. all speak of medical fetish transplanted out of the lab or hospital and projected into the still more sterile and even more hi-tech environment of a spacecraft. It's intergalactic masochism in which submission is made to an alien overlord rather than a woman in furs.            

Of course, not all exophiles are so passive in their pleasures; some dream of violently penetrating alien bodies and inflicting a maximum amount of pain and suffering upon creatures from outer-space ...

Supervert, for example, is the author of a philosophically-informed, pornographic work entitled Extraterrestrial Sex Fetish, in which the protagonist, Mercury de Sade, is a serial-killer looking to make contact with EBEs - not to befriend them, learn from them, or submit to them; but so that he might rape, torture and murder them. 

It's a deeply unpleasant read. But it's also a necessary counternarrative to the moral idealism of Star Trek in which humans and non-humans all rub along together in a kind of rainbow alliance; or, again to paraphrase Annalee Newitz, the playful cosmic permissiveness of Barbarella in which everyone fucks, but no one is ever fucked-up or fucked-over.                    


Notes

Those interested in knowing more about Supervert's Extraterrestrial Sex Fetish (2001) can click here. Or, to read a sample chapter, here. 

Those interested in reading Annalee Newitz's review of the above as it appears on AlterNet (18 Aug 2002), can click here. 

This post was inspired by (and is dedicated to) Zena, who provided the lovely illustration above.  

What Big Extraterrestrial Eyes You Have

Matilda the Cat is something of an internet sensation, with thousands of followers on social media. But, despite her appearance, she's actually a perfectly normal moggie. The poor thing does suffer, however, from a rare condition in which the lenses of her eyes have spontaneously detached, causing blindness, and giving her the look of an alien being. 

Those who are interested in reading more about her case should visit: aliencatmatilda.com - her official website. Because, fascinating as her story is, what I really wish to discuss here is the origin of the idea that aliens - particularly those known as Greys - have large, black, glassy-looking eyes. 

Obviously it doesn't come from the actual world, because there are no entities from out of space visiting planet Earth on a regular basis and abducting large numbers of human beings in order to probe them and fuck with their minds. Many people - mostly Americans - might believe contrary to this and insist that there's a global conspiracy covering up the facts, but, alas, it is of course complete nonsense; a mad fantasy on behalf of the needy, the lonely, and the fearful. A bit like the belief in a loving - but vengeful - God. 

For God, like ET, is a convenient fiction. Not surprisingly therefore, we find that our idea of what an alien looks like first comes from literature: H. G. Wells to be precise, who, as long ago as 1893 was already imagining futuristic grey-skinned beings with big heads and large eyes. Then, in 1901, he depicted the natives of the moon (Selenites) in very similar terms. 

He was followed in this belief that alien races would conform closely to a certain body type, by the Swedish writer Gustav Sandgren who, in 1933, under the pen name of Gabriel Linde, published a sci-fi novel translated into English as The Unknown Danger. Here, once again, a race of aliens were described as chinless wonders possessing big bald heads, large gleaming eyes, and small mouths. 

Thirty years later and press reports of the Betty and Barney Hill alien abduction case described those doing the abducting in this identikit manner. All stereotypes are grey; but by now all Greys were stereotypical.

Spielberg unimaginatively gave us more of the same in Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). And then, in the 1990s, Mulder and Scully chased very familiar looking aliens for nine seasons, The X-Files firmly establishing the link in the paranoid imagination between Greys and the military-industrial complex of the New World Order.

As Oscar Wilde once said, Life imitates art far more than art imitates life. The disappointing thing is how few people realise this (and how tragic the consequences can be).