Meryseshat comments on The Sacred Mundane - Less Wrong

42 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 25 March 2009 09:53AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (103)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: mattnewport 18 December 2009 11:01:29PM 7 points [-]

I'm a little skeptical of this claim. When I've experienced sleep paralysis I've imagined seeing a non-supernatural human intruder but all I actually saw was a vaguely human shaped shadow which for some reason in the confused half-asleep state of sleep paralysis seems highly likely to be an ill-intentioned intruder rather than a shadow. People with a different cultural expectation might claim to have 'seen' a demon but I don't think that should necessarily be interpreted as them having had a detailed hallucination, just that an ambiguous and threatening presence is assumed to be whatever strikes them as the most likely thing to be hanging around threateningly if indistinctly.

Comment author: Meryseshat 01 December 2010 12:22:12AM 3 points [-]

I agree. When I've experienced sleep paralysis, I've rarely seen anything much at all other than distortions of the appearance of the room. What I get instead is a buzzing noise and a sense of vibration through my body, and then my body feels as if it's being tossed around the bed in impossibly rapid circles by some kind of evil force. I've never culturally heard of any experience like it. It certainly has the sense of oppression and evil, but there's nothing about it that sounds like any kind of mythology I've ever heard in my culture or another.

Comment author: mattnewport 01 December 2010 10:49:34PM 1 point [-]

According to this article a sense of vibration and rapid acceleration of the body are fairly commonly reported (I don't recall experiencing these symptoms myself). That article and the Wikipedia entry both mention some of the mythology and folklore surrounding the experience from different cultures.