So ive been watching a lot of the channel GREEN and they have a lot of ghost shows and one of them always bothers me…Celebrity Ghost storys. The worst part about this show is 90% of the paranormal activity is EXTREMELY close to sleep paralysis induced hallucinations… They all start off with the celebrity laying in bed not being able to move because of the “ghost” which is always an unseen presence or a heavyness on the chest. They also say they cant move and see ghostly figures staring at them when they wake up in the middle of the night probably during REM sleep. Im not downing ghosts or the paranormal because I do believe in it and I have experienced it plenty of times but theres a lot of people that have no clue what sleep paralysis is. My aunt claims a demon wakes her up at night and makes it hard for her to breathe and she cant move, i quickly told her about SP and how to combat it and since then she has now realized that it was all in her head and now no longer believes her house is haunted…this is just my opinion but it seems like a lot of these people in ghost shows are experiencing the completely natural and non paranormal activity also known as SP induced Hallucinations XD what do you think?
Sleep Paralysis and ghosts >.>
I’ve never experienced anything scary while in SP or doing WILD. That thing about demons or ghosts etc is called “Old Hag” if I remember correctly…Problem is that a lot of people seem to hear about scary stuff happening during SP even before they really know what LDing is about and that scares them a lot. They forget that SP is natural, it can’t harm you, it doesn’t need to be scary at all and there are multiple easy ways to snap out of it. 
Sleep paralysis hallucinations explains some, but not all, paranormal experiences. I do think it’s clumsy of a paranormal TV show to feature a person who had their “ghost” experience while close to sleep and not to address the possibility that the experience was SP, or a dream.
I have had several SP nightmares. I’ve seen dead bodies floating over my bed. I’ve had a decapitated head screaming at me. I’ve had a serpent breathe fire on me and singe my flesh (I actually felt pain). I’ve had a melted floating demon head follow me around through a FA after an SP episode. I’ve had ghosts in period clothes trying to claw their way into my body (also painful). As I child, I had an SP episode in which snakes crept over my whole bedroom.
My experiences have scared the crap out of me.
I’ve had a couple of experiences where the “hallucination” didn’t stop after I woke up. After one nightmarish LD, I woke up and could feel something hitting me. I was completely awake, eyes open, sitting up. The strikes weren’t painful, really; it was like puffs of compressed air hitting me in the chest for about a minute or so after I sat up.
It’s difficult to effectively assess what’s happening in you and around you after a terrifying SP episode. Usually my heart is speeding and I have adrenaline in every cell. Yes, when I’ve woken up, I’ve felt like “something is in the room,” but maybe it’s only my fear compounded by the fact that, before my body woke up, I was lucid and aware. Regardless of whether my tormentors are objectively real or not, I saw and heard and felt them.
I’ve learned to take these experiences in stride, for the most part. About a month ago I had a lucid nightmare where I was flying away from my house, so happy to explore, when I suddenly found myself in a hallway with a copy of myself who was holding me down and stabbing me with a screwdriver. Instead of freaking out, or fighting back, I mentally calmed myself and tried to be open to what was happening–to learn from the experience. I apologized to this aspect of myself. Well, it was painful. He didn’t accept my apology. It went on for about thirty seconds. I tried to hang in with it, but it was all too real and uncomfortable (I was pinned down) and I had to wake myself up.
I know I’m not alone. A lot of people have had many lucid nightmares and bad SP experiences. It’s not a failure, I think. In my case, I’m rather sure that a few aspects of my subconscious hate me. This last experience was specifically telling because, usually when I accept an experience or apologize, the tense situation resolves. But not so that time.
Anyway, in closing, yes, I think a lot of “paranormal” phenonema is self-generated. But even when it’s self-generated, and you know it is, you can’t always control the situation. The mind is vast and complex.
God dammit, dreamosis WHY do you open your eyes when you have an sp?!
I often open my eyes in SP. Many times, it just happens without me noticing. Sometimes Um just curious.
Not all of my SP experiences have been negative. I’ve had many open-eyed SP experiences where I simply saw my bedroom or the edge of the bed.
I once became lucid during an SP experience in which it felt like invisible beings were standing all around me and channeling positive energy into me. I wasn’t scared at all, but at peace. Another time I became aware and felt an influx of pleasurable energy into the top of my head and suddenly found myself flying over a river. Last, there was once where I went lucid during SP when shadows were thrashing at my body. I became lucid as I mentally cried out for a guide, or someone, to help me. I heard a voice say, “You’re your own guide,” and as the voice said I felt so empowered. The shadows evaporated and woke up from SP feeling quite encouraged.
So I’ve had positive experiences mixed with the bad.
Well this isnt about just experiences with sleep paralysis i want to hear peoples opinion on the fact that all those people say its ghosts but its more then often probably HP
You want those who agree with you to post that they agree with you?
When a person is actually in the SP state (body paralyzed with the mind awake), they can hallucinate or dream–or they can simply lie there, experiencing nothing but a paralyzed body.
If the person panics, and they’re dreaming, probably he will have a bad dream. Again, though, the person might not panic at all, and have some positive experience.
The trouble is, if ghosts exist, and it’s possible for us to communicate with them in a relaxed state like SP, how do we distinguish between hallucinations/dreams and a real experience?
If you already believe that ghosts don’t exist, then of course it’s only an extension of your belief system to say that SP experiences of ghosts are illusory.
The only way to know for sure, perhaps, is to experiment–to purposefully induce SP, talk to a being (or hallucination), and try to extract information that you can confirm while fully awake. If you’re unable to confirm anything, all you’ve lost is a little time to relaxing and lucid dreaming.
I’m not totally convinced that SP hallucinations and/or ghosts are ALL due to one’s imagination. I think when in between sleep and waking, the usual barrier that keeps most people from consciously being aware of spirits and the like is lowered so one may be more likely to see real ghosties when trying to sleep (or being awakened during sleep).
Maybe some of these hauntings could be attributed to HH , but I don’t know if anyone can really determine the percentage.
It’s funny, lots of people are scared of the “Old Hag” or, the incubus or succubus and they wake up in the middle of the night when the incubus/succubus are on them. It’s pretty much a myth, and it’s just SP or even just a FA.
I think it’s just utterly crazy they believe in ghosts.
It’s not logical.
Chaotic, I must agree with you that it is illogical, but then again, don’t you think that something illogical is just another aspect of Science that we don’t understand ?
That’s very gullible of them, it must be because the celebrities, right? Thinking, “We’ll make more money than usual, why not?”
I’ve only had a good experience with SP so far, hope to keep it that way.
im not saying ghosts don’t exist because there is a lot of evidence of really unexplained activity, But I can say that ive heard stories from countless family relatives that theyve had encounters with ghosts but everytime they did have a freak experience it would be as they were waking up or they would just be sitting there in the bed and all of a sudden a ghost or a demon and even for me the lady from the grudge! Actually a few times ive been trying the WILD method and experienced extremely frightening HH that seemed like they were ghosts or shadow figures and things from horror films. But I knew I was doing a WILD and this was just the exciting part of it ^.^ and successfully LD’d but they show just makes me laugh.
To be fair its not ‘logical’ to say anything other than I’ve not seen valid evidence within the scientific sphere, therefore with the absence of evidence I choose not to believe there are ghosts, They aren’t real to me. Saying you think it’s utterly crazy to believe in them, makes you come across as bigoted.
I do have to say that I’m not sure I agree about being close to sleep causing the barrier between worlds to become weakened. It’s been too well demonstrated that in such a state we are highly suggestible and ungrounded to reality. The visions also seem to be strongly manipulated by expectation, bad and good. I don’t reject the prospect of spirits, but I simply find it hard to accept that what we see on the border of wake and sleep is anything other than our mind wandering and drifting. I don’t see any reason to believe that state of mind is innately more ‘spiritually connected’ etc than at any other time.
Well, to me it seems the real question is: if ghosts are in fact real, can we have experiences with them while we’re in SP? If they’re real, I don’t see why not.
Obviously, since we also hallucinate during SP, any experience we have is suspect. But, even while we’re hallucinating, we can perceive real events. We can hallucinate and perceive something real at the same time. Can we hallucinate and perceive physical reality and perceive another reality at the same time? Maybe.
The issue is, we can maybe perceive anything. Maybe you’ll hear messages from another reality in this state, but it would be suspect if you had such things happen from a normal active state of mind. Throw in suggestibility, hallucinations and confusion from semi-loss of conciousness and it’s stretching a point to say maybe something happens. The reason I assert that is that some will panic and become afraid with such concepts and I feel it’s scaring them a bit needlessly. Of course it’s ‘possible’ but there’s the kind of possible like, “Maybe it will rain” and the kind of possible that “Maybe a pig will be born with wings due to genetic mutations and take over the world.”
We can’t presently test such things scientifically so we’re in the realms of guessing and conjecture, but I think given we know we are in a state prone to hallucinations that responds strongly to our expectations, it’s a fair default assumption that it’s a hallucination. So those of a nervous disposition can breath a sigh of relief.
Yes, I can see how it’s frightening to think that there are bodiless beings around us who might interact with us when we practice WILDing or OBEs, etc. I agree that it’s stupid to fret over it.
The only snag, though, with a default assumption that everything you see is a hallucination (“unreal”) is that, even if you aren’t interacting with an independent being, you may still be interacting with a real psychological aspect of yourself.
DCs aren’t unreal. They’re real psychological projections of your mind, if nothing else. Some of the projections may have little meaning and some of them may have great meaning, even if it’s occluded from the ego.
So, what I’m saying is, the best default assumption is that what you’re interacting with psychologically real, if nothing else. That what you’re seeing/hearing/feeling/interacting with is a manifestation of your mind.
That’s what most people mean, I guess, by “hallucination” but oftentimes you hear people saying that hallucinations aren’t “real.” They are real–they’re thoughts from your body and mind. What is truer is to say that hallucinations are illusory–they aren’t what they seem to be, which is, usually, a part of physical reality. They aren’t a part of physical reality; but they are part of mental reality.
I’m certainly not dismissing all dream experiences as being unreal hallucinations. To do that would be ignoring a great deal of personal evidence, which I expect others can repeat/see. It’s a bit odd how if you observe your dreams on a regular basis you can actually start to see themes emerging aside from random static noise from the activities you did throughout the day. There is a definite process running during sleep that translates to a sort of thinking. Almost like you are trying to figure things out. I’m not really into dream interpretation dictionaries, but that doesn’t mean I see dream interpretation as useless. The symbols of dreams are very personal and no generic dictionary can really tell you what they mean accurately.
I’d actually go further than saying DCs potentially embody a part of yourself. I’d go so far as to say the entire dream scenario is a reflection of your current state of mind. What bothers you, what you think about the world, etc. Parts might just be from what you saw or thought when awake, but often it’s reason for appearing runs deeper. It doesn’t have to be spiritual at all, it can be accepted into a scientific model as well. If you are stressed, chances are good your dreams will become darker, more nightmarish. You might feel trapped psychologically in a situation, your dreams might be of being physically restrained or trapped, chased by monsters. Etc etc.
In actuality what I describe above was a reason I was reluctant to start posting my dreams online. They are deeply personal and reveal a great deal more about what is going on inside your mind: more than I think many people realise.
With DCs being real, I’m not going to discuss on this point to be honest. ‘Real’ is one of those words which sounds like it means a lot, but in reality means nothing. We could discuss what it meant for hours and afterwards be none the wiser.
All of what I said ignores the possible spiritual interactions that might happen by / through sleep. I think your apparent assessment of me as somebody advocating the default assumption that empirical reality is all there is, or that dreams are not real and don’t impact on reality, is incorrect. I just think believing what we see during SP as something more than hallucination, without testing it (if that’s even possible) is a bit of a leap best not made.
I agree the entire dream scenario is a reflection of your current state of mind. I also think any state of consciousness is (at least partially) a reflection of your current mental ecology. Thus:
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the SP scenario is a reflection of your current state of mind;
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the daydreaming scenario is a reflection of your current state of mind; and so forth.
Yes, defining “real” is opening a can of worms. I feel it’s vitally important, though, in respect to our dream experiences–especially our LD and related experiences–because in these experiences we (the ego) are engaging a living system (the rest of the mind).
We can do damage to our own minds (and consequently bodies) while awake (by indulging in negative thoughtloops, doublethink, suppressing our emotions, etc.), and we can damage our minds while asleep and lucid dreaming too. I don’t bring this up to be a fearmongerer, or a contrarian, I’m simply trying to provide a counterposition to the It’s-All-In-Your-Head/It’s-“Just”-A-Hallucination position. What’s in our heads has consequences.
We can treat our dream, or altered state experiences, as “virtual reality,” but the reality is only “virtual” in comparison to physical space and its rules–otherwise it’s a realm of consequences. Dream emotions can carry over into waking life and can affect the bodymind negatively–or positively.
It’s crucial to distinguish between “unreal” and “illusion.” What you sense during a true hallucination is illusion, yet it represents something real–some physiological or psychological signal. The signal may be meaningful on the greater stage of your life, or it may not. Certainly, some of what we experience in dream states is just “noise”–random expressions of sense data or the like. But most empirically-driven psychologists now agree that dreams are carriers of meaning; the theories of random neural firing have mostly been dropped. I would think that dream theory extends to hallucinations in this regard. I doubt a psychologist would listen to a person’s report of a hallucination and then say, “Well, it was just a hallucination. Don’t worry, it wasn’t real.” They would likely take the content seriously. Whether you’re psychotic and hallucinating, or perfectly mentally sane and hallucinating, is immaterial–in both cases the hallucinations have (at least some) meaning.
Thanks for your input, GreenDragon. I didn’t take you for someone who claims empiricial reality is all there is–I saw that you were simply trying to inject some appreciated mental conservatism into the debate.