Aliens Abducted All My Friends

I love conspiracy theories. I also love ruining them for other people. If there is a rational explanation to put to someone’s harmless mumbo jumbo I’ll be the first to find it and ruin Christmas for everyone. Some may go so far as to call me a “bitch” but whatever, the sick glee I get from raining on someone else's parade is always worth it. So of course when a couple of friends recently got into alien abduction theories I took it upon myself to do everything I could to ruin their fun and promised to dedicate a blog to my endeavour.

Enter: This blog.

I don’t deny that there could be something or someone out there- not in the slightest. I just don’t know if I can go so far as to believe that aliens have been sneaking around making late night cameos all across the world without anyone noticing except for a staggering number of crackpots in Texas. There’s just so much conflicting evidence out there: between Men In Black, Widget and Star Wars, I just don’t know what to think.

My favourite explanation is a sleep phenomenon called Sleep Paralysis. It also explains a whole host of similar run-ins people have with spirits, ghosts, and apparitions- whatever late night visitors you might choose to roll with.

So this is how it works:

To begin with, while we’re asleep, our bodies usually go into a state of paralysis called REM Atonia. It’s important that we’re able to do this as part of a regular night’s sleep, mainly so we can’t act out what we're dreaming. Sleep Paralysis is when someone wakes up from a deep state of sleep, but the brain has kind of missed the memo and keeps going with the whole body paralysis thing, even though you’re now conscious.

There’s more to it though, Sleep Paralysis usually comes with different sensory hallucinations which can range from quite benign to fucking scary. The most basic are usually physical sensations, for example, one may wake up and experience a brief period of paralysis along with a sensation of being suffocated or crushed. This is quite a common occurrence; it does no damage whatsoever and only lasts a minute or two. I get this quite a bit if I nap in the day time (Sleep Paralysis is related to bad or irregular sleep habits). Let me just say, it’s fucking horrendous.

That’s kind of like the low cal version though- it gets better. People who experience hallucinations with their Sleep Paralysis get to endure it for up to 7 or 8 minutes. Along with the joy of being paralysed, many people report an intense feeling of a presence in the room usually coupled with strong feelings of fear or anxiety towards said presence. Comparable to the feeling you get when you walk home alone on a dark street and you are absolutely convinced someone is there. Quite commonly auditory hallucinations are involved as well. Anything from a simple buzzing or tapping, to laughter and screaming, to actual speech. Finally, it’s much rarer, but visual hallucinations can also get involved.

These are often percieved as a manifestation of the “presence” in the room and can take many different, often human like, forms. They usually are only seen in the peripheral vision and aren’t that vivid. Though in cases, they can take on extremely vivid forms and “physical interaction” between the person and the hallucination has even been documented. Most sleep paralysis episodes are akin to nightmares and are almost never enjoyable. Kind of a bummer really, it could be potentially awesome if you think about it.

To explain it in basic terms, it’s kind of like suddenly become conscious whilst dreaming. Of course, we automatically accept things we see to be true when we know we're conscious (seeing is believing and all). When you know for a fact you’re awake, when you know you’re not on drugs and when you can see a stranger standing over your bed in the middle of the night, you’re likely to believe that there is in fact, a stranger standing over your bed in the middle of the night. If the person or thing you’re seeing is totally weird, the brain is likely to rationalise what it sees and come up with an explanation (a ghost, spirit or alien) for something you see in a state of consciousness before its going to resort to all out denial of what you can see with your own eyes.

So, this is a great explanation for SOME alien abduction cases (I can accept that some cases can’t be explained away by crazy sleep disorders). Why is it though, that people all across the world are having the same “dream” about aliens? Surely that throws this theory right out the window, right? I honestly can’t tell you why so many people have such a similar “dream”. Though I can tell you that there are hardly any recorded alien abductions before the late 1940’s, which is also the same time sci-fi started to really make its mark on pop culture. Think about that. Before then? Most episodes of sleep paralysis were the backbone of countless myths and legends about demons, ghosts and monsters.