Wherein My Girlfriend Is Abducted By Aliens

No, really.

Well, at least as much as anyone else can be said to have been abducted by aliens.

Seriously.

She told me about it last night. She awoke around 5AM to find that she couldn't move. She wasn't bound by anything visible, but she was nonetheless unable to move, struggle as she might against her unseen bonds.

She was then surrounded by aliens that all resembled miniature versions of Pyramid Head from Silent Hill 2. They proceeded to do I-don't-know-what to her, because at that point in the story I shouted "We must search you for implants!" and started poking and groping her.

The fact remains, however, that a group of little aliens came into our bedroom while she was asleep, used some sort of super high technology to paralyze her, and then surrounded the bed looking frightening and intimidating. She was, accordingly, frightened and intimidated.

But it's not like she thought they were real.

See, when the skeptical, critical thinking mind has such an experience, it is filed under "delusion." She's experienced sleep paralysis before, though never such a vivid hypnopompic hallucination. It was the paralysis itself that gave her the fright; being unable to move for no apparent reason will do that do you.

Sleep paralysis is a fairly widespread experience that occurs when the brain wakes from REM sleep but the body does not. See, during REM sleep, the body is paralyzed so as to keep the dreamer from moving about as in the dream. This is called "REM atonia." Sometimes this persists into wakefulness, and the person lies in bed, unable to coerce his or her body to move. If you don't know what you're dealing with, this can be quite frightening. Hell, if you do know what you're dealing with, this can be quite frightening.

Hypnopompic hallucinations are hallucinations that occur upon waking from sleep. They happen in a sort of mid-way state between sleep and wakefulness, one that generally doesn't last long enough to notice. These hallucinations often accompany sleep paralysis, however, because sleep paralysis is just that: a midway point between being fully asleep and fully awake.

I have suffered from sleep paralysis and hallucination exactly two times. I'm sure I've mentioned them somewhere before, but I'll officially record them here for posterity.

Time 1, Fall 2005: I was lying in bed when I suddenly realized that I was awake, but completely unable to move. I was staring at my alarm clock, which read "11:01." I tried desperately to sit up but found myself unable to do so. The minutes ticked by. Presently, I became aware of something coming from the bedroom of my erstwhile roommate Magus. His bedroom door was open, and a Beach Boys song was emanating therefrom. I was confused: Magus isn't a Beach Boys fan and has no Beach Boys CDs or MP3s. Moreover, it became readily apparent to me that something was wrong in his room. I could feel and undeniable presence in there. This, however, was strange to me, as I knew he was out of town that night. My mind raced with possibilities. Was he home early? Had a burglar broken in? Or was it something more sinister still? Growing ever more frightened and desperate as the haunting strains of the electro-theremin drifted lazily into my ears, I made a mighty jerk at 11:15 and broke the paralysis. I became immediately aware that there was no Beach Boys song playing in the other room, no "presence," and nothing whatsoever out of the ordinary. I realized exactly what had just happened, sat back, and laughed. I now understood a lot more about some woos than I had a few moments before.

Time 2, Spring 2007: The second time I experienced sleep paralysis and attendant hallucination it was much less dramatic. Compared to the first time, I was much closer to sleep. During time 1 I was almost entirely awake and aware. During time 2 I was drifting between dreaming and wakefulness, moving back and forth from a dream state to wakefulness where I would open my eyes and stare at my bedroom door. Because I was in REM, I was accordingly unable to move. My anxiety built with each movement back toward wakefulness, and it culminated in a rather startling hallucination: after a couple of seconds staring at the door, unable to move, the door burst violently open and in stormed an ex-coworker, an angry, bitter woman whom I hadn't seen in months. She was screaming bloody murder at me for some reason. I was so startled and scared that I came immediately to full wakefulness and once again laughed at the peculiarities of human perception.

Back in the day, when Germanic tribes roamed the forests and moors of Britain, people would report abductions by strange creatures. They'd awake, fully paralyzed, and find themselves surrounded by weird-looking humanoids the likes of which they had never before seen. They had heard of them, though. They had heard of the Fae, those creatures of fell magic who would abduct and torture humans, or replace their babies with malformed Changelings of their own creation.

A few centuries later, the Church held Western Europe in an iron grip of oppression. People would awake paralysed and see strange, inhuman creatures that they had never seen before. They knew what they were, however. Their priests had told them: witches, warlocks, and demons, magical servants of Satan himself, hellbent on torturing and corrupting humanity.

These days, in the post-Enlightenment era of science and technology, people still have the same experiences. They wake up paralyzed and see their strange, inhuman captors surrounding them. They've never seen these creatures before, but they've heard of them: aliens. Extraterrestrials who have traveled light years across the universe to abduct and study humans, who break into homes at night, paralyze people with force fields, and procede to analyze them or even impregnate them.

Humanity has not changed overmuch, physiologically, in the last 1000 years or so, and neither has our hypnogogia. What has changed is the cultural context in which we experience our hypnogogia, and accordingly the interpretations of these phenomena have also changed to suit the times. These are rare occurences, and it is understandable that someone whose mind is just a little bit too open (perhaps there's a little brain dribbling onto the floor), will interpret this new, frightening, and anomalous experience from within his cultural context.

Given that there is no evidence whatsoever of a secret cabal of shape-shifting creatures that invade people's houses at night, tie them down with invisible bindings and then loom menacingly over them, creatures who have been doing so to a minority of the population for hundreds and hundreds of years, a clean slice with Occam's Razor shows us that it is far more likely that these people are experiencing sleep paralysis coupled with hypnopompic hallucination, two known and well-documented phenomena that can be shown to result in exactly the experiences and perceptions that elicit these reports, and interpreting them with what knowledge they possess.

Luckily for both my girlfriend and I, our knowledge surpasses The War of the Worlds, The X-Files, and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. We understand to a better extent than many the abilities, activities, and proclivities of the human brain. Given no external evidence to support our momentary and frightening perceptions, we interpret our experiences in the way that is nearly 100% likely to be the correct one. No matter how vivid, how real, or how frightening, such experiences are the result of momentarily faulty REM and a still-dreaming brain. Like a thousand gods, myths, and legends, the demons that haunt our dreams have, with the aid of good science and sound, rational thinking been exiled to the other realm of the Fae: the place where things go when they've been disproved.

Doesn't make them any less scary, though.