I'd never heard of the condition before. Sleep Paralysis. There was a significant portion of time dedicated to the phenomenon broadcast this morning on the CBC, and I more or less listened to it, while doing a number of other things.

Some people were interviewed; those who described their experience with it personally, an intimate and extremely frightening, actually horrific event while purportedly asleep, causing them to fear for their lives. Some morbidly threatening, utterly malevolent thing had taken them prisoner, as it were.



My husband's reaction, hearing their testimony and the explanations proffered by a number of academics who were engaged in its study, was one of contempt. That anyone would actually believe in this aspect of the frightening paranormal. Nightmares elevated to the acknowledgement of the existence of malign, otherworldly forces threatening vulnerable human beings by visiting them at night and psychologically molesting them with their sinister presence.

He mentioned the Swiss artist, Henry Fuselli, whom he characterized as a sensationalist, a pornographer of the 18th Century, someone who revelled in the celebrity he attained as a believer in paranormal phenomena. Mentioning also his notoriously-famous 1781 painting said to exemplify artistically the existence of these night-time horrors that visit those who live in dread of them.

One expert interviewed explained that the phenomena knows no geographic borders, it is well known and variously-named in a manner to describe its gruesome appearance and effect to those haunted by it in all countries of the world, however remote, however civilized or primitive as societies.

Perhaps telling us more about human beings' fears of the night existing deep within their collective inherited psyches, than the actual existence of creatures from Hell and beyond.