I had my first encounter with sleep paralysis at age twenty-two, having fallen asleep on the sofa while watching the movie Clue (which is not intended as a slight against the movie, mind – I was tired and had seen it before anyway). I recall suddenly being aware of the fact that I was apparently awake but unable to move my body – and, since my face was pressed up against a cushion at the time, I immediately became very panic-striken that if I did not move my mouth away and take a deep breath shortly then I was certainly going to suffocate. Somewhere in the background I think I could just about make out the sounds of Tim Curry and co trying to work out who sat where or whatnot, although it came through slightly muffled.
Thankfully, I did already have a limited understanding of what sleep paralysis was at the time, having heard from one or two other people who’d had experiences with it. So, once I'd regained control of my body and had time to recover from my shock, I was able to make some degree of sense of what had happened. Otherwise I’m certain that I would have been a heck of a lot more freaked out.
Since then, I’ve had sleep paralysis on a number of occasions, and the sensation of being suffocated has been a recurring feature. So much so that I now make it a nightly precaution of mine never to sleep on my front, or to lie with my mouth under the covers, as doing so has the potential to accentuate the experience, if not actually cause it. Incidentally, one of my very worst sleep paralysis experiences followed soon after eating a halloumi salad - coincidence, or might there be some truth to that old adage about cheese being a bringer of nightmares? I'll leave that to the neurobiologists to decide.
Technically speaking, sleep paralysis is not, in itself, anything to fear. It's really just a case of our wonderful bodies doing vital things that we tend to take for granted and occasionally getting it wrong. During REM sleep (the stage of sleep in which you have all of your best dreams) the brain induces a state of paralysis in order to prevent you from acting out any of the activities in your dreams (doing so has the potential to be extremely disastrous). Sometimes the various stages of sleep get a little ahead of themselves, and sleep paralysis is the result of entering a state of waking (or semi-waking) consciousness while that bodily paralysis is still active. In the absence of such knowledge, however, I could see how people might be inclined to interpret it as something altogether more sinister - hence, ideas about demonic possession, alien abduction, evil dolphin-men (we'll get to that one shortly).
All things considered, I'll concede that my experiences with sleep paralysis have never been all that terrifying. Oh sure, the sensation of being unable to open one's mouth when one desperately wants to take in a deep breath is an entirely unpleasant one, but that's about as far as the horror ever goes for me. I certainly don't recall ever sensing that there was any kind of unnatural presence in the room with me. Within the past few months, I had a somewhat different sleep paralysis experience that seemed to collide with a dream in which someone was pinning me down (by the mouth, naturally) and I felt a peculiar sensation, as if my body was levitating - but again, the only terror I recall feeling came entirely from the apparent loss of control of my breathing. Not the sensation that there was someone else there doing this to me - I think that I took it for granted all along that that much wasn't real. Nevertheless, the "difficulty breathing" is apparently enough to place me in with the 5% described in Carla MacKinnon's short film Devil In The Room - the ones who get stuck with the "associated symptoms" of sleep paralysis and have a particularly nightmarish time of it.
Devil In The Room is an eight-minute documentary that examines sleep paralysis, juxtaposing the underlying science with the raw experience, and touching upon various legends from different cultures that are thought to have had their origins within the phenomenon – the Amazonian boto and the Zulu tokolosche being two given examples. I caught it at the Leeds International Film Festival in 2013, and it struck an instant chord with me, in part due to my own personal experiences in the subject, but also the film’s quirky aesthetics, which include a blend of live action, projection mapping and Quay brothers-esque stop-motion animation. The intention is to represent the various states of consciousness and the different realities that sleep paralysis can potentially bring together, but it also adds a distinct feeling of playfulness to its depiction of the otherworldliness. The film walks a fine line between hair-raising eeriness and whimsical eccentricity, and the stop-motion boto and tokolosche have a quaint charm in their grotesqueness. In fact, "charming" is a word which I feel oddly compelled to apply in summarising the general tone of MacKinnon's short - it's a strangely disarming piece about a notoriously unpleasant (if otherwise quite harmless) bodily phenomenon, one which mixes elements of camp (the overtly spookhouse tones of its voice-over narration), delectable grotesqueness (the film's aesthetics) and tongue-in-cheek humour (the entire end-credits sequence), and the resulting film plays as a curious kind of love letter (or love/hate letter, at any rate) to the sleep paralysis experience, and to its far-reaching impact across human history and culture.
Having already understood the science behind sleep paralysis, the real fascination for me here was learning about those creatures from different cultures that potentially have some connection to the phenomenon. It’s a testament to the kind of rich and wonderful lore that develops from human efforts to rationalise the inexplicable, and it’s particularly fascinating when it applies to something as universal as sleep paralysis. It's thanks to this film that I learned about the folklore surrounding the Amazon river dolphin, or boto, which has captivated me ever since. It doesn't say so in this film, but apparently he, much like the tokolosche, makes a habit of seducing and impregnating human females. The description of a shape-shifting dolphin that uses a hat to disguise its blowhole actually did sound somewhat familiar to me at the time, and eventually I remembered that The Wild Thornberrys (a Klasky Csupo cartoon about a family of globe-trotting naturalists, for those not in the know) had based an episode upon this very legend, albeit an entirely chaste version that also made no mention of sleep paralysis. (According to The Wild Thornberrys' version of the story, another thing that a boto cannot change along with its appearance is its dietary habits - so if you find yourself dining at the same table as a man who insists upon keeping his hat on and orders from the fish menu, be very wary about looking him in the eyes).
Devil In The Room contains plenty of rational dialogue upon the nature of sleep paralysis, and while the film does not seek to put itself at odds with this approach, it nevertheless concludes on an extremely unsettling (albeit deliberately camp) note, with the assertion that, whenever you find yourself in the midst of such an experience, all of this reasoning will be of little consolation to you. And fair enough. If I wake to find myself unable to move and with the sensation that I’m being suffocated, you can bet that I’ll be going into a panic there and then, no matter how assured I am in general about the benign realities of sleep paralysis. Such is one of the key contradictions of the phenomenon, upon which MacKinnon lavishes so much affection - the nature by which it momentarily tricks us into thinking that something extraordinarily horrific is occurring, out of something so terribly mundane.
Be sure to check out Carla MacKinnon’s website The Sleep Paralysis Project, which contains more detailed information about sleep
paralysis, including why you may experience the kind of associated symptoms
that you do.
Note that you don’t have to be in a state of sleep paralysis
to experience freaky hallucinations as you drift in and out of sleep. Far scarier than any of my sleep paralysis
experiences was the hypnagogic hallucination I once had in which a spider the
size of a springer spaniel suddenly shot across my ceiling as I was drifting
off to sleep. I’m extremely grateful
that, in that instance, I was able to make it a light switch in less than two
seconds flat.
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