Image: Le Cauchemar by Johann Heinrich Füssli, 1802
“I was awake and conscious. I felt a heavy weight over my chest, or more like some creature sitting on it, and I couldn’t move. I wanted to get the damned thing away from me, but I had absolutely no control over my body, and the freaking thing was too heavy to move by an inch. I wanted to scream for help, but no voice came out of my mouth. I panicked and cried… Although I remained completely soundless. It was frightening!” This is a testimony I often heard, without realizing how scary this experience actually is, until the “monster” paid me a visit once, the only and unique time in my whole entire life.
We call “him” in
In reality, bôghTTâT is a physiological state called: Sleep Paralysis. In MSA: shalal annawm شلل النوم.
What’s Sleep Paralysis? Or what does bôghTTâT really stand for?
20% of sleep is what’s called REM (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep, which is the portion of sleep during which dreams occur. And when you are dreaming, the brain sends signals to your muscles to completely relax, so that if you dream that you’re crazily running, you don’t produce the same moves in bed and bang the wall. Sleep paralysis occurs when a person goes into or out of a REM sleep. It’s an ill-timed disconnection between the brain and the body. That is when you suddenly wake up before your brain orders your body to get back to its normal state, which makes you fully conscious, yet hallucinating.
Qualifying Sleep Paralysis by a monster does not come out of the blue. In many cultures, nightmares and all kind of nocturnal attacks were always associated with demoniac spirits. Nowadays, some scholars even believe that sleep paralysis is all about abduction by space aliens!
Almost, 50% of people have experienced sleep paralysis at least once in their life. Have you?
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