Message #17408

[mccoy]

Now, sleep paralysys, that's a thing I know very well, having experienced it for 40 years and maybe having a little release in the last couple of years. We've been talking at a certain lenght about it in the Yoganandaji.org forum.
The physical, medical explanation: the body has a safety mechanism which prevents us to act out what we dream. When we wake up yet that block has not been removed yet, we experience a dreadful sense of immobilization and helplessness.
The popular explanation which, pls mark me, is common to many different cultures across the world: spirits jumping on your chest and immobilizing you. They have various names, the effect is the same, a sense of suffocation. This was also part of the farmers' common knowledge in my area, a black demon jumping on you by night, with its own name.
Metaphysical explanation, at least what I could come up with putting together my own experiences, medical explanations, Worldwide lore.
Of course the physical block exists. But in those times there is a real feeling of fear, of evil presences. Very often I mentally chanted AUM or concentrated hard on Yogananda to come out of that state. Sometimes I felt myself falling down and then trapped in that state. Very often the agonizing efforts to come out sound like screams outside. A comical aspect is that when I coummuted 2 hours by bus, I was often a prey of those  states and people would tell me I was screaming. Once I screamed so loud the driver stopped. I asked people to shake me to wake me up, it worked if they shaked strong enough. It may be scaring to other people if you don't warn.
Back to teh explanation: evil spirits may be attracted by those episodes of sleep paralysis maybe because they feel like a convenient passage to possession. They mistake it for a fallen barrier. So maybe the spirits are the consequence and not the cause for that. Other times the spirits may be the cause if they are trying to get advantage of sleep to posses you. Yogananda tells about such an episode in the black cat story, also recounted in the other forum. In his words, Satan tried to possess him in the semblance of a black cat. Pls note that these spirits in popular lore are often black-