Astral projection and lucid dreaming are having a moment! Thanks to cult classic films like Inception and Waking Life, and to popular educators such as Jade Shaw (check out her documentary Insight Out if you haven’t yet), we have entered into the Age of Aquarius with our eyes wide open to the multidimensional realms beyond.
Yet there’s a missing piece, a bump on the onramp to bliss and transcendence.
I’m talking about how so many would-be lucid dreamers and out-of-body practitioners get hung up in the threshold of the Real, trapped like flies in the web of sleep paralysis.
This is the initiation we didn’t ask for.
But that doesn’t matter. We must go through.
Isolated sleep paralysis (ISP) is a visionary dream state that remains largely a mystery to Western dreamers. While usually only lasting a handful of seconds, the experience can be terrifying if the dreamer has never been exposed to it before. Usually occurring during sleep onset, the dreamer realizes that she cannot move.
The feeling can be ominous: as if someone—or some thing—is holding her down. Sometimes this uncomfortable sensation is combined with hallucinations that only amplify the fear, including sensing a presence in the room, or seeing a dark and unknown intruder. In its full-blown lucid nightmare form, this hallucination may sit on the dreamer’s chest, taking the form of a monster, demon, or alien entity. And this all happens while the dreamer is awake and aware.
As so many have said, This wasn’t a dream. “It was realer than real.”
Witches, Aliens and the Wyrd
Western history is full of nightmarish stories of demons, mysterious cloaked men (most of them not wearing hats by the way), hairy creatures, and ogres who sit on the dreamer’s chest. In the Middle Ages in Europe, and up until the 17th century in the U.S., witches (mostly women) were put to death for “associating” with these creatures of the night. Other women were put to death because men had erotic sleep paralysis visions featuring them; this is the story of Salem, MA.
Even today, many people who suffer from sleep paralysis night-mares are shamed into silence because being haunted by demons in the 21st century, this Age of Information, is to be cursed twice over.
Ghost hauntings and the sexual demons known as succubi may also have their experiential roots in the iSP encounter. This doesn’t materialize or debunk the paranormal lens in my opinion; it merely situates how visionary awareness can reenchant our world to include the deep weird, as anthropologist Jack Hunter calls the blending of the Fortean with research into extraordinary experience.
The word wyrd is Germanic and Old English, rooted in notions of fate and the ability for folks to eclipse time to forecast the fates.
Psychologist Brian Bates has this to say about the wyrd in general:
“In its archaic original sense [wyrd] meant that aspect of life which was so deep, so all pervasive and so central to our understanding of ourselves and our world that it was inexpressible. Wyrd refers to our personal destiny. It connects us to all things, thoughts, emotions, events in the cosmos as if through the threads of an enormous, invisible but dynamic web” ( as quoted in Hunter 2023).
When I view sleep paralysis visions through this lens of the wyrd, I see more clearly than ever how that momentary paralysis –stuck as we are like flies in web –is actually a chance to focus, ground and project even further into the web, disavowing the signals from the body and allowing us to identify with this other realm.
Further, alien abduction experiences often emerge from this sticky position too, beginning with sleep paralysis and following with fantastic lucid journeys into cosmic landscapes and encounter with non human intelligences. Again, imo this does not debunk those narratives, but contextualizes them within a psychospiritual lens that includes the wyrd, the unsightly, and sometimes, the darker side of awe, what religious scholar Otto termed the mysterium tremendum.
Co-creating our Reality
However, these nightmarish experiences are only one side of the coin.
Expectation brings lucid dreaming outcomes; we can thank OG lucid dream researcher and psychophysiologist Stephen Laberge for this popular concept although it has been more deeply explored in the co-creative dream theory of Scott Sparrow.
Lucid dreamers know from personal experience that a dream is not a “given,” but rather a state that is co-created with the conscious and unconscious mind working in call-and-response. In this sense, lucid dreamers are one step ahead of laboratory science for understanding the full spectrum of possibilities in sleep paralysis hallucinations.
As for the wyrd, medical anthropologist David Hufford has been on this beat for a long time, starting with his 1982 text Terror in the night. Hufford’s analysis was the first to link REM dreaming to Old Hag narratives, but with an emphasis that suggests that our evolving scientific understanding of isolated sleep paralysis hallucinations is not in conflict with the modern belief in spirits, entities, and ghosts (because we experience them a priori, with or without cultural loading from folklore).
In my opinion, as I’ve suggested for 15+ years, sleep paralysis is a true spiritual experience. What we believe about the divine, God (or lack thereof) and the nature of evil is put to the test during these harrowing encounters, regardless of our understanding of the physical mechanisms involved.
Nature shows us the face we turn towards it. With practice, courage, and gratitude, sleep paralysis visions can move away from the typical nightmare scenario of aliens, incubi, and demons, and instead include visitations of benign entities and helpful spirits.
Encounter is still the predominant spiritual theme here, but not one of victimhood.
Instead, revelation and healing.
Thankfully clinical sleep paralysis researchers are beginning to document the full spectrum nature of sleep paralysis visions – at least by saying that “anecdotally” they aren’t all bad, generally linking this other side of the coin to trait openness, the tendency to be more open to experiences that don’t make conventual sense or are ambiguous by nature (dream nerds: see Denis 2018, Kilkova et. al 2020, and Mayer et. al 2022).
We have much to learn about this dynamic visionary experience. But what was once the province of folklore and superstition is showing itself to be grounded in scientifically-verifiable vision states. While neurotheology, the study of the brain’s relationship to the divine, has the potential to educate us about the mechanisms of these fantastic states of consciousness, sharing our private experiences is just as important for moving the culture forward. But science does not win out over shared meaning when it comes to visionary spiritual experience.
As experiencers, we must have the courage to discover for ourselves what is myth and what is consensual dreaming reality.
If you’d like to go deeper on this topics, and develop your own practice for getting unstuck in the cosmic web, come explore the visionary potentials of sleep paralysis with me in my 3 week online course Sleep Paralysis Mastery that starts Thursday March 6th.
Leave a Reply