Sleeping paralysis This is some fucked up shit by the way... totally freaked me out. I've had this sort of thing before, but not whilst actually being AWAKE and aware of my surroundings. I went to bed pretty late, and had a lot of really paranoid nightmares about being late for work amongst some other disturbing dreams. Although I don't remember the nightmares that well, I knew they were dreams and was trying to wake myself up and trying to move... but couldn't. Then at some point I 'woke up' and could see my room, and I knew I was awake because I could feel my eyes blinking, but worryingly I could also hear foot steps in my room and I just wanted to be able to move so I could see who was there but I just COULDN'T move. When I was finally able to move I literally had to pinch myself just to make sure I wasn't dreaming (there was nobody in the room). I can totally understand where 'legitimate' claims of alien abduction come from now: Sleep paralysis.
Definitely. What alien abductees often claim are experiences mirroring victims of sleep paralysis. Almost all sleep paralysis victims claim seeing something or someone in the room and feeling helpless to do anything and generally scared out of their wits. Combine that with a dream of pop-culture sci-fi grey aliens and bam you have your alien abduction.
Scared out of my wits described the first time extremly anoyed described the second time. Sorry to tell you but if you had it before you probelry going to get it again I have it ones every 5-10 years. It's funny that you gain control over your back muscles yust a bit fasther then the rest so it feels like your head is hanging loose. Ah well one of those things. Don't worry, the chanses that your paralysed and a alien kidnaps you both at the same time are pretty low.
The first time I had it, which was still sort of in a dream (because i was looking at a completely different room to the one I was in), I could see a shadow moving accross the room as if a person... Funny how it is always something in the room when you can't move. There has to always be some paranoid freaky element to the paralysis...
If you're tired enough, natural human hallucinations such as hypnogogia can occur during normal 'waking' hours (no paralysis involved).
You often get a sleep paralysis if you're tired and you're trying to sleep but some sounds keep you awake... your mind then distorts these sounds... Sleep paralysis is when you're not sleeping but not awake either... After having an astral projection you're usually paralysed for a moment... The gray aliens are not real aliens, they're just astral beings which reflect our thoughts... but it's not like in ordinary dreams because other people's thoughts can also affect the astral realm... and we see these... UFO's... those "aliens" are the same "fairies" people used to see before.... but because we're in a technological age today they (the astral beings) reflect those thoughts...
I wonder why that is? While staying at my parents house in the country i had the most unusual experience. I was with an ex gf and we both drifted off to sleep, only my sleep was chaotic. Basically what you describe, the unusual part was the first thing my gf said to me when she awoke was "all night long it felt as though someone (actually more than one was the feeling) was walking past me, heard it felt it" I felt the exact same thing. We woke up covered by a blanket yet neither of us recall ever waking to get a blanket. I allways know when i wake up to do something and neither of us have any history of sleep walking. Ghost's?
Theres plenty man, car journeys in which passengers experience abduction being pretty common. As well as cases of people being abducted while walking about/performing daily tasks etc. Abductions certainly arnt confined to people asleep in bed.
Yes, there are many people who claim to have been abducted. That much is common knowledge. What I was asking is what evidence exists that supports that conclusion? What there is evidence for is Hypnopompic and hypnogogic imagery and paralysis. There's also evidence of people misinterpreting phenomena they don't understand, misunderstanding events that have prosaic explanations, exaggerating anecdotal reports of events, and outright inventing and fabricating (a.k.a. lying) anecdotes for attention, status, etc. There's even evidence of a link between sadomasochistic tendencies and the belief of being abducted by aliens. But no evidence of actual aliens that I'm aware of. Are you aware of some that you're not sharing with us?
Actually what i meant was that there are just 'claims' of abductions which occur while awake. Theyre as valid as non-valid as you want them to be ultimately, but thats a seperate issue as i see it. In my opinion believing absolutely that all abductions are the result of fraud or too many beers is just as much of an article of faith as believing that all abductions are objective experiences. Way too much dogma in both directions, which tends to make it very hard to work out what is actually going on.
This was very well put. Supposed rationalists are way to comfortable saying what 'things really are' without back up. I can understand why people without experiences of their own or without having come in contact with people who have are skeptical, but to make the leap and simply say: you believe in this because of this, does generally have very little scientific basis. Another unproved theory. They think it is alright to be irrational in this way because they are arguing that something IS NOT TRUE. having met a large number of people who have had these experiences, many of whom are professionals, even scientists, I take them very seriously. I do not think any of them are confusing dream imagery and sleep paralysis with their experiences. The most disturbing account I heard was the morning after by 2 members of a family. Their stories were upsetting, not something they felt happy discussing and were not exactly the same, but with a great deal of overlap. None of this is proof to people here of course, but a little humility, please. You simply do not know why these people are having these experiences. To assume that you do is to hallucinate about other people's experiences. That is odder than what you think they are doing. (by 'you, I mean skeptics here in general)
I only take issue with the space-aliens explanation. Such nonsense is the hypothesis of ignorance not of logical and critical thought. That's not to say that space-aliens are impossible, but I will stand by the notion that they are extremely improbable. Having said that, there is a reportedly excellent book by Susan Clancy titled, How People Come to Believe They Were Kidnapped by Aliens (Harvard University Press, 2005). A short review/synopsis can be found at this link. I've not yet had the opportunity to read the book in its entirety, but it sits on a shelf somewhere waiting on me.
Same here, ive seen whole families from grandmother to mother to child relate abduction experiences theyve had together when out on the road. all Breaking down in tears over it, with psychologists diagnosing clear post traumatic stress disorder. I mean what are you going to tell them to make it instantly prosaic 'yeah you were all actually engaged in an inter-related mass hallucination'. It just starts to get silly after a while. Id be very suprised if there wasnt some objective validity/reality to these kinds of claims. But that doesnt make all abduction experiences true by default. I think you just have to be sensible about it and use abit common sense when it comes to these things really. I actually used to think all abduction experience were outright nonsense, but i realised that that explaination really falls short alot of the time - ergo im not really comfortable invoking the subjective experience argument willy nilly when ever i feel like it anymore.
Ok, I don't know if this is what everybody else is talking about...but every now and then, I get totally freaked out by this.....it always happens before I've fallen asleep at night...never after I've slept a while, and woken up. It seems as if it happens when I'm close to falling asleep - though this isn't always the case. It starts with a noise....kind of like a humming or buzzing that begins quietly and gets louder. I am unable to move....blink, twitch, etc. Also, a feeling of terror quite often accompanies these sensations. I feel like if I don't shake myself out of it, I will be sucked out of my body or something like that. When I was little, I thought Satan was trying to kidnap me...of course, that's just plain silly....but, I've never heard anybody else mention anything like this happening to them. When I asked my doctor, he told me (get this!) that I should read up on alien abduction symptoms! Then he laughed....and said it sounded like I was having a bad dream, and not to worry. I don't think he really understood that this happens quite frequently.
buzzing, thumping, pulsing, etc. are common for hypnogogic / pompic hallucinations. I think the sound of blood flow might influence those hallucinations.
