As I was recently cited in D.W. Pasulka’s book Encounters: Experiences with nonhuman intelligences for my work with sleep paralysis, it’s time for me to clarify my current position on the overlap between altered states of consciousness and UAP/abduction encounters. Pasulka’s book is brilliant (although best read after her first work on the topic, American Cosmic) and as a religious scholar, she gives a lot of focus to how sleep paralysis, lucid dreaming and visionary experience necessarily needs to be included in these discussions.
First, a caveat: I am not an expert of UAPs (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena). I don’t know and can’t comment on other aspects of the phenomena in an informed way. Nor can I apply my expertise to the question of legitimacy of non-terrestrial artifacts and biotics as is now being discussed in the halls of US Congress.
However, what I can do is show how my embodied research into sleep paralysis and related visionary experiences can provide some practical tools for those who struggle with these experiences and are scared to go to sleep in case it happens again. In this way, my contribution may viewed as being more relevant to the psychosocial and religious aspects of the encounter phenomena.
As such, my contribution is meager but it’s also practical. Bottom line: You can protect yourself from victimhood. And what’s more, you can interact in a meaningful way with the hyperrational and healing sources of information that emanate from these cosmic spaces, as countless saints, visionaries and mystics have done for eons. Much of those practices are esoteric and unknown, but the phenomena emerges spontaneously from the uninitiated nonetheless. That is the thesis of my little book Sleep paralysis: Hypnagogic visions and visitors of the night, which has been in print now for 14 years, and is now in its 2nd edition.
Many alien abduction accounts have the earmarks of SP, with the victims awakening in the bedroom, sensing a presence, noticing they cannot move, and finally, confronting a scary alien being. Sometimes, these accounts go on to describe how the alien takes the victim on a journey to the stars. As UFOlogist Jacques Vallee noted decades ago, the modern abduction narrative has many parallels to historic angel visitations and also of centuries-old fairyland encounters. But far from pleasant, these accounts sometimes end up with the victims being tortured and sexually molested. The abduction account concludes when victims wake up in the bedroom, as if they never had left, but scared out of their wits.
If these victims have never had a lucid dream before or experienced sleep paralysis, they may assume the journey physically occurred in consensual reality. They often say, “This was not a dream,” not realizing that hyper-realistic visionary encounters are commonly experienced. In the west we call this lucid dreaming, but in many indigenous cultures, this way of knowing is much deeper than its signature of “I know I’m dreaming.” We can’t blame naive experiencers here, as our monophasic culture does not value (and sometimes, even acknowledge) the power of altered states of consciousness like lucid dreaming and visionary states for gathering valuable information.
Another caveat: I certainly don’t mean to reduce all uncanny phenomena to physical brain states, such as sleep paralysis and hypnagogia. Medical anthropologist David Hufford has been on this beat for decades, carefully recording anomalous experiences from a holistic perspective that neither strictly psychologizes nor materializes the accounts. In my edited collection Lucid Dreaming, for which Hufford contributed the essay “Lucid dreaming, sleep paralysis and the non-physical,” he writes, “I have been concerned with questioning, evaluating, and eventually challenging those academic “traditions of disbelief,” traditions where “dream” is a convenient means of dismissing extraordinary claims.” 1
So we can say this: encounters are not just a dream, ie a fantasy. We have to do some unlearning to respect the power of dreaming, trance and lucidity with and without the bounds of sleep paralysis. To flip this disrespectful assumption, we could say the dreaming is an altered state of consciousness where mystical experiences, encounters with non-human entities, and uncanny information, occur. Sleep and its altered states are entryways to multidimensional experience.
I don’t have the time or interest to try to explain anymore to thick boundaried people what it’s like to experience an enchanted weird world. Again, my core motivation is helping folks who do have these experience to learn ways to protect themselves as well as work with the cosmic insights, healing encounters, and ancestral downloads that come from these profound experiences.
So here’s some stuff we know: The ties between abduction and other uncanny experiences is well mapped. The literature on the connection between hypnagogic hallucinations and psychic effects is pretty vast and comes from many parallel threads. Telepathy, ESP, and mutual dreams have been cited in religious texts and accounts, 19th century spiritualism and occult texts, and in modern controlled studies. In general, researchers who look at this aspect of dreaming suggest that hypnagogia (and its sister state in sleep awakening, hypnopompia) seem to be “more conducive to telepathy,” as Simon Sherwood reports in his 2002 meta-analysis.2
Neurology, of course, does not really provide much support on this topic, except to say that hypnagogic hallucinations (I prefer the term hypnagogic visions) are more similar in brain activation to trance states than ordinary dreaming.3 Field anthropologists who have lived with (and worked with) indigenous peoples have also reported numerous anomalous psi events, usually saving their declaration for after they secure tenure or retire.4
These events, while hard to replicate in a lab, become an accepted part of life for those who are open to uncanny and bizarre experiences, such as synchronicity and precognitive dreams. Just as telekinesis effects are weaker in the laboratory than reported in their natural setting (such as poltergeist accounts or visitation dreams in old homes and other historic locations), sleep paralysis encounters that occur in the lab also rarely have psychic or uncanny dimensions to them.
Research into terrifying abduction encounters also suggests that there is a connection between sleep paralysis, alien abduction accounts, and a past history of childhood sexual abuse.5 Both those who report being abducted by aliens and those who have memories of abuse also report more SP. And all three groups score more highly in certain psychological traits, such as being creative, fantasy-prone, and open to paranormal experiences.
If you have a history of sexual abuse, these memories and fears may easily surface during a SP encounter. I recommend working on your courage and keeping strong boundaries when you find yourself face to face with the Stranger-as-Alien. I recommend you work on the core principles of psychic self-defense. I also recommend you do some work on your own belief systems and find core protections that authentically provide you with safety and power in times of need. This is the work I do in my Dream Studies community, and what I teach in my classes and publications about lucid nightmares, sleep paralysis and extraordinary dreaming.
Perhaps the most misunderstood aspect of dreams and visions are the co-creative aspects of these phenomena. The encounters are truly interactive, yes, but more than that: our perception and choices during the encounter can shift the trajectory – and outcome – of the experience.
In this way of thinking, the visionary encounter is not a given, written in stone, but created in the moment as a give-and-take response between the visionary and the vision field. The path is not set: we are surrounded by choices and possibilities in every moment.
The practical aspects of the co-creation of dreams, visions and the Imaginal for experiencers are beginning to be more fully understood thanks to lucid dreaming studies. Meta-consciousness — once thought to be the hallmark only of waking awareness — has been shown to be evident throughout the sleep-wake spectrum.6
As G. Scott Sparrow has suggested with his theory of co-creative dreaming, visionary experience is a creative endeavor between dream creation mechanisms and the dreamer’s own attitudes, thoughts and assumptions. Furthermore, dreamer responses are often chronic and adaptive—based on childhood fears and previous exposure to trauma.7 This perspective shows how a dreamer can, and does, shift the direction of a current nightmare by reflecting on previous nightmare experiences, circumventing thought patterns that escalate fear, and re- imagining how future encounters will be different. I have applied Sparrow’s work (as well as the work of other transpersonal psychologists) to sleep paralysis, and have had profound success neutralizing bad encounters and even leading to transformative ones as well as out-of-body experience.
The die is not cast. Our participation matters.
And… our cultural upbringing plays a role too in what manifests in the moment. Culture is not the root of extraordinary experience — but it’s a powerful predictor of how images are seen and interpreted. Our conscious experiences are indeed filtered from the get-go. Some have suggested that alien abduction stories could take the shape of traumatic memories of surgery, with their elements of the modern medical environment, in which we are held down and paralyzed in a well-lit and sterilized room, prodded against our will, and leaned over by goggled and masked entities. Awareness during anesthesia comes to mind as a real-world paralysis nightmare that happens every day. Sleep paralysis expert Jorge Conesa-Sevilla has even suggested that the alien encounter could be a mythologized reliving of medicalized birth trauma.
I also wonder about the shadow side of the Western doctor, who dutifully perpetuated terrible crimes against humanity in the last century, including a key role in the theory of eugenics, which led to the forced sterilization of tens of thousands of American women throughout the 20th century, as well as the medical atrocities of the Holocaust.8
Folklorist and illustrator Brian Froud takes an ecopsychological approach, suggesting in his book Good Fairies, Bad Fairies that the eyes of the prototypical alien figure —large, dark, and fathomless— “reflect our dysfunctional relationship with the earth: our wanton misuse of nature’s gifts, our exploitation of natural resources without regard for consequences, our short- sighted practice of taking from nature and not giving back.”9
In all three of these renderings, of abduction as sexual abuse, as surgical memories, and as a symptom of ecological devastation, the theme is one of something lost, something damaged, and something that was once alive and now destroyed. In other words, perhaps we are the aliens we see in the mirrored view of this sacred and darkly numinous encounter.
I’m certainly not alone (that, friends, is an encounter joke) in this notion that the findings of extraordinary experiences have been overlooked in the popular conception of the encounter phenomena. David Hufford’s works should be read alongside the work of UFOlogists Jacques Vallée and religion scholars such as DW Pasulka. Anthony Peake’s works, especially the Hidden Universe, for example, links in a nuanced way how lucid dreaming and sleep paralysis overlap the UAP phenomena in a way that does not reduce the phenomena to a conventional flatland perspective.
And going way back, Carl Jung’s work on Flying saucers is often misread as a dismissive psychological take on UFOs, but Jung’s psychology is much more radical when it comes to shared perspectives than many know. A symbol, to Jung, is not an idle fantasy but manifests from an unseen network of energetic resonance from the universe itself. There is a distinction between the imaginary and the Imaginal.
Rather than dismiss all these accounts as fanciful, or strictly psychological, it is more reasonable to assume that something more than our western atomistic science is at work here. We need more experienced sleep paralysis visionaries in the field, dreaming at sacred sites and envisioning at locations where these events are prominent.
To do so, we need to radically revision what it means to dream and to envision in the first place.
This original essay is in part drawn from my book Sleep paralysis: Hypnagogic visions and visitors of the night
References
- Hufford, David. (2014). Sleep paralysis, lucid dreams and the non-physical, in Hurd and Bulkeley’s (Eds) Lucid dreaming: New perspectives on consciousness in sleep. Santa Barbara: Praeger, p. 255.
- Sherwood, S. (2002). Relationship between the hypnagogic/ hynogogic states and reports of anomalous experiences. Journal of Parapsychology, 66, pp. 127-150.
- Takeuchi, T., Miyasita, A., Inugami, M., Sasaki, Y., and Fukuda, K. (1992). Isolated sleep paralysis elicited by sleep interruption. Sleep, 15, pp. 217-225.
- Young, D. and Gouley, J.G., Eds. (1994). Being changed: The anthropology of extraordinary experience. Ontario, Canada: Broadview Press.
- McNally, R. and Clancy, S. (2005). Sleep paralysis, sexual abuse, and space alien abduction. Transcultural Psychiatry, 42(1), pp. 113-122.
- Kahan, T. and Laberge, S. (2011). Dreaming and waking: Similarities and differences revisited. Consciousness and Cognition, 20, pp. 494-514.
- Sparrow, G.S. (2014). Analyzing chronic dream ego responses in co-creative dream analysis. International Journal of Dream Research, 7(1), pp.33-37
- Conesa-Sevilla, J. (2004). Wrestling with ghosts: A personal and scientific account of sleep paralysis. Xlibris/Randomhouse.
- Froud, B. (1998). Good fairies, bad fairies. New York: Simon and Schuster.
- Bulkeley, K. (2003). Dreams of healing. New York: Paulist Press.
I wasn’t sure where to put this, esp since this is the only entry in the Blog where the Comments section isn’t disabled, some more Lucid Dreaming info from one of my Favorite Blogs–Reality Sandwich:
https://realitysandwich.com/lucid_dreaming/
Definitely alot of source info, esp for experienced Ludic Dreamers and Practitioners of Oneiromancy such as ourselves, Sifu Ryan Hurd. They even mention Books that you have recommended on here and your e-Newsletters. They mention some Documentaries as well, not sure if you’re familiar with them, along with the 7 Solfeggio Frequencies, to which I had no idea about. I was only informed about the Universal Frequency 432Hz.
Hope you enjoy the Reading!
thank you Dwayne! I also like Reality Sandwich — in fact I have a number of my own articles on their site — this one is my classic manifesto on the shamanic aspects of lucid dreaming : https://realitysandwich.com/lucid_dreaming_shamanic_consciousness/