Hi Reader,

I just published a new article: Sleep Paralysis and the Weird side of Spiritual Experience.

While I'm delighted by the mainstreaming of lucid dreaming and astral projection, there’s a missing piece, a bump on the onramp to bliss and transcendence.

I’m talking about how so many would-be lucid dreamers and out-of-body practitioners get trapped like flies in the web of sleep paralysis.

This is the initiation we didn’t ask for.

But that doesn’t matter. We must go through.

Isolated sleep paralysis (iSP) is a visionary dream state that remains largely a mystery to Western dreamers. While usually only lasting a handful of seconds, the experience can be terrifying if the dreamer has never been exposed to it before. Usually occurring during sleep onset, the dreamer realizes that she cannot move.

The feeling can be ominous: as if someone—or some thing—is holding her down. Sometimes this uncomfortable sensation is combined with hallucinations that only amplify the fear, including sensing a presence in the room, or seeing a dark and unknown intruder. In its full-blown lucid nightmare form, this hallucination may sit on the dreamer’s chest, taking the form of a monster, demon, or alien entity. And this all happens while the dreamer is awake and aware.

Many people who suffer from sleep paralysis night-mares are shamed into silence because being haunted by demons in the 21st century, this Age of Information, is to be cursed twice over.

Ghost hauntings and the sexual demons known as succubi may also have their experiential roots in the iSP encounter. This doesn’t materialize or debunk the paranormal lens in my opinion; it merely situates how visionary awareness can reenchant our world to include the deep weird, as anthropologist Jack Hunter calls the blending of the Fortean with research into extraordinary experience.

The word wyrd is Germanic and Old English, rooted in notions of fate and the ability for folks to eclipse time to forecast the fates.

Psychologist Brian Bates has this to say about the wyrd in general:

When I view sleep paralysis visions through this lens of the wyrd, I see more clearly than ever how that momentary paralysis –stuck as we are like flies in web –is actually a chance to focus, ground and project even further into the web, disavowing the signals from the body and allowing us to identify with this other realm.

​Read the entire piece on the Dream Studies blog.

Yours,

Ryan Hurd

PS Yep I'm gearing up for my class on sleep paralysis mastery! If you want to enroll, there's still 3 days before we meet for the first time. New students also get a copy of my book Sleep Paralysis and a dream amulet mailed to your door.

And not to confuse things, but Inner Sanctum members of the Dream Portal get access to this training as part of membership. So if you've been on the fence, if you apply now, you'll access to the live course as well as all my dream course, plus small group coaching, live dreamwork, expert guests, and more. Learn more about membership here.