Hi Reader,

How's your dreamlife?

I was a guest on Coast to Coast radio last week, talking about sleep paralysis night-mares and visionary hypnagogia. The phones really lit up. Even after an hour of taking callers, we barely dented the requests and George Noory had to apologize to listeners that we were out of time. I heard some incredible first-hand accounts. I was blown away with how many people have had this experience -- and how many are just at a complete loss of how to interpret what happened to them.

Most are terrified, and some folks even think they are cursed.

The sad part for me is that the folks who have these experiences are actually visionaries. If western culture provided us the basic principles of altered states, many of these folks would-be expert lucid dreamers, mystics, and out-of-body practitioners. But instead they get hung up in the threshold of the Real, trapped like flies in the web of sleep paralysis.

Let me define my terms if you're new to this topic.

Isolated sleep paralysis (ISP) is a visionary dream state that remains largely taboo 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 them down.

Sometimes this uncomfortable sensation is combined with REM dream-based visions 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 feels awake and aware.

As so many have said, This wasn’t a dream. “It was realer than real.”

Witches, Incubi and the Deep Weird

The real dark side to this altered state is how we have treated people who report it. Western history is full of nightmarish stories of demons, mysterious cloaked men, hairy creatures, and ogres who sit on the dreamer’s chest. In the Middle Ages in Europe, and up until the 17th century in the U.S., witches (mostly women) were put to death for “associating” with these creatures of the night.

Other women were put to death because men had erotic sleep paralysis visions featuring them; this is the story of Salem Witch Trials too.

Ghost hauntings and the sexual demons known as incubi and succubi may also have their experiential roots in the iSP encounter. This doesn’t debunk the paranormal lens in my opinion; it merely situates how visionary awareness can re-enchant 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 deep weird, 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.

This imaginal realm, that is neither imaginary or real, but occupying a shared space in between.

Free Sleep Paralysis Resources

I haven't ever charged for access to my sleep paralysis 101 material. My sleep paralysis report remains free after 15 years, and so does this workshop which I've given dozens of times. You can get access to both on the free tier of the Dream Portal. If you suffer with sleep paralysis -- or just want to be more prepared the next time it happens during a lucid dreaming session -- I encourage you to check this material out.

Going Further

And if you are interested in going further with your own sleep paralysis encounters, or learning how to help your own clients who suffer with these experiences, I will be leading my yearly training soon - starting March 3rd. This year I'm calling it: Visionary Hypnagogia: from Sleep Paralysis to Sacred Encounter.

I am going to open the cart for this new course next week, so keep an eye out. This year I am limited the number of students so we have an extra secure container, with plenty of time to discuss and workshop the most important issues that come up.

That's all for now. I just ordered a pizza and a four foot tall creature is asking me to watch him play legend of Zelda

Sleep well and dream strong!