Dr. David Hufford is one of the foremost researchers in the field of sleep paralysis and folklore. Much of my work is based on his research, and I’m particularly impressed by anyone who has direct experience of the phenomenon that they make their life’s work, which he has done. I'm sharing an excerpt from his work with you today, from Sleep Paralysis, Lucid Dreams, and the Non-Physical World (2014). Here he describes his experience with non-physical:
In December 1963, I was a college sophomore. Having just completed the last of my final exams for the term, I was tired. I went to bed in my off-campus room at about 6 o’clock, looking forward to a long and uninterrupted night’s sleep. In that, I was mistaken. About 2 hours later, I was awakened by the sound of my door being opened, and footsteps approached the bed. I was lying on my back and the door was straight ahead of me. But the room was pitch dark, so when I opened my eyes I couldn’t see a thing. I tried to turn on the light beside my bed, but I couldn’t move or speak. I was paralyzed. The footsteps came to the side of my bed, and I felt the mattress go down as someone climbed onto the bed, knelt on my chest, and began to strangle me. I thought that I was dying. But much worse than the feelings of being strangled were the sensations associated with what was on top of me. I had an overwhelming impression of evil, and my reaction was primarily revulsion.
Whatever was on my chest was not only destructive, it was disgusting. I shrank from it. I struggled to move, but it was as though I could not find the “controls.” Somehow I no longer knew how to move. But then I did move, first my hand and then my whole body. I leaped out of bed, heart racing, and turned on the light. The room was empty. I ran downstairs where my landlord sat watching TV. “Did someone go past you just now?” He looked at me like I was crazy and said “no.”
I never forgot that experience, but I told no one about it for the next eight years. I had never heard of an experience anything like this, so I could not expect a lot of sympathetic understanding if I did tell someone. And I was certain that I had been awake during the episode, but I knew that if I said this was anything but a scary dream, I would be judged crazy!
Eight years later, in 1971, I was doing my doctoral dissertation fieldwork in Newfoundland, Canada. There I encountered the Newfoundland tradition called “the Old Hag.” When you “have the Old Hag,” Newfoundlanders said, you awoke to find yourself unable to move. The hag, an evil, terrifying something, could be heard coming, footsteps approaching. The hag would enter your room, come to your bed, and press you, crushing the breath out of you. If the experience is not interrupted, they said, it could end in death. My informants claimed that this happens to many people in Newfoundland.
The conventional explanation of such traditions is that in various ways tradition gives rise to stories that claim experiential evidence. The traditional beliefs and narratives come first, they morph into experiential stories, and they may eventually give rise to supporting experiences as a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. In the scholarly view, the most common way for this to happen would be a dream based on having heard traditional accounts: “You say you believe this because of your experience, but science says that you had that experience because you believed. Seeing is not believing; believing is seeing!” But for me, this made no sense. The intruder in 1963 came into my room from a cultural void.
My 1963 experience, combined with the complex Newfoundland tradition that was practically identical to it, formed the basis for my career as I left Newfoundland to join the Behavioral Science faculty at Penn State’s College of Medicine: the experience-centered study of spirit belief traditions. This pursuit has challenged conventional scholarly wisdom and led to some rather startling discoveries. I found that Newfoundlanders were correct in that the experience is common on the island—almost one in five having had it. Later, I was also able to show that the experience is as common among people who do not have a tradition about it, as it is among those who do—for example, among my medical students. As in my case, the experiences of these students were indistinguishable from those in Newfoundland except for the language used; Newfoundlanders called it the Old Hag, but my medical students and I had no name for it.
Sleep Paralysis (SP) with a presence is rarely included in discussions of “spiritual experience,” but the great majority of subjects do consider their Sleep Paralysis experience spiritual when it includes a presence. The presence is there in approximately 80 percent of SP episodes. SP is a category of extraordinary spiritual experiences (ESEs)—that is, experiences that appear to the subject to be direct perceptions of a non- physical-spiritual reality (i.e., visions, although they can occur in any sensory mode). I also found that SP with a presence is a major part of spiritual traditions of supernatural evil all over the world, such as vampire beliefs and beliefs about witchcraft and sorcery.
SP and lucid dreaming also have complicated relationships with out-of-body experiences (OBEs), dreams of deceased loved ones, and precognitive dreams. Each of these is associated with spiritual beliefs, in both modern and ancient cultures, and in both Western and non-Western societies, making lucid dreaming a powerful influence in the development of spiritual beliefs.
For anyone that would like to know more about David Hufford, his Wikipedia link is: HERE
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