Dark Intrusions

 Foreword

By Colin Wilson

Still in his twenties, Louis Proud has demonstrated with this book that he is one of the most acute commentators on the paranormal to appear in recent years. His starting point is the condition called sleep paralysis – shortened to SP – when someone wakes in the middle of the night and finds himself unable to move; a state that may last seconds or minutes.

When I mentioned it to my wife this morning, she said: “But surely that’s purely a physical condition?” The answer is that it may be, but often is not.

Many “psychics” experience it as a prelude to an OBE, an out of the body experience. For example, Robert Monroe, founder of the Monroe Institute in Virginia, began to have them it in the late 1960s, when he was conducting personal experiments in “sleep learning.” He began to experience what he called “vibrations” on the point of sleep. One day his hand, which was touching the floor, seemed to go through the carpet so he could feel the floor space below. And soon Monroe was having full-fledged OBEs. Obviously, the “vibrations” were a kind of disconnection from his senses, as if his “spirit” was separating from his physical body. Or – using a more down-to-earth analogy – a car had slipped out of gear and into ‘”neutral.”

Louis Proud began to have similar experiences when he was 17. He says it is as if there is a malevolent presence nearby, sometimes as if something is squatting on the chest to prevent the sleeper from moving. Hallucinations, both visual and auditory, may also be experienced. Like my friend Stan Gooch, author of Total Man, Louis Proud has even had sexual encounters when in the SP state.

That certainly sounds as far from “normal” experience as one can get. Yet it is important to emphasize that many such experiences have a basis in normality. What makes Louis Proud’s book so interesting is that he is obviously the kind of person who often has experiences that are beyond the normal. Yet his book is not a collection of weird oddities, but an exploration of the world that lies behind our eyes, yours as well as mine.

It seems clear to me that Louis Proud has been intrigued by his own paranormal experiences and is therefore more “open” to a remarkable range of them. So what he has done here is to gather together many strange experiences, like the Enfield poltergeist, Whitley Strieber’s “contact” experiences, Stan Gooch’s hypnogogic visions, Trevor Constable’s UFO-related discarnates, Joe Fisher’s mendacious and deceitful ghosts, Van Dusen’s auditory hallucinations, and Dion Fortune’s alarming contacts with an ill-disposed “witch,” to make a book that grips the reader from beginning to end.

It seems to me immensely sad that the world should be polarized into hard-line skeptics – like “The Amazing Randi” – and people like myself who are perfectly willing to consider the paranormal as a reasonable possibility. Which is why, as I read Louis Proud’s book, I began to feel a rising excitement, and the feeling: “This man is so obviously sincere that a reader would need to be pretty prejudiced to dismiss it all as self-delusion.”

It gives me immense pleasure to be allowed to introduce a writer who will, I suspect, become widely admired for his enviable brilliance and clarity.

Introduction

When I was seventeen years old something changed within my mind; a shift of awareness occurred, and I became receptive to the presence of invisible beings – and I still am. Call them spirits if you like. Whenever I hear, feel, see, and sense these beings, I am always in an altered state of consciousness. Never am I fully awake. I do not have, and have never had, any kind of mental illness, nor am I on medication for any reason whatsoever; nor do I take recreational drugs.

The condition I suffer from is called sleep paralysis (SP), and it’s not all that uncommon. About 25-to-40 percent of the population will undergo an SP episode at least once in the course of their life. The experience may be so minor, or may have occurred so many years ago, that it’s now entirely forgotten, or remains but a dim memory. For some of us, however, these experiences occur frequently and cannot be forgotten. They have had, and continue to have, a profound impact on our spirituality.

So what is SP, and how is it associated with things that go bump in the night?

Explained simply, SP is a condition whereby a person experiences temporary paralysis of the body shortly after waking up (known as hypnopompic paralysis), and, less commonly, shortly after falling asleep (known as hypnagogic paralysis). Although their minds are reasonably awake and alert, they find themselves unable to move their bodies – sometimes for as long as a few minutes, though usually just for a few seconds.

The condition is closely related to the normal paralysis that occurs during REM (rapid eye movement) sleep – called muscle atonia – in which the body is paralyzed to inhibit a person from enacting dream activity, such as running while dreaming about running; this prevents us from causing ourselves physical harm. Some scientists and physicians believe it’s a normal part of the sleep cycle. Generally, when SP occurs, the brain has awakened from an REM state, yet bodily paralysis is still taking place. In some instances, the sufferer may experience hypnopompic or hypnagogic hallucinations, which can be auditory, tactile, or visual in nature.

So there you have it – a neat and succinct explanation of SP. If you were to look up the subject in an encyclopedia or textbook, you would probably come across an explanation much like the one above. To this day, the phenomenon, particularly its spiritual side, remains little understood. Any “expert” in these matters will smugly tell you that there is nothing more to SP than some temporary abnormal brain activity; that the hallucinations of SP sufferers are simply a product of the imagination. By holding such a view, however, one is almost denying the very existence of the phenomenon. My use of the term “hallucination” is only for simplicity’s sake. I do not consider these experiences, for the most part, to be hallucinations.

During an SP attack, a person often feels that there is a malevolent presence nearby – sometimes perceived as a demon or evil spirit – and that this being is holding you down by resting on your chest, preventing you from moving or fully waking up. The sensation is very uncomfortable and quite stifling. It is not uncommon, moreover, for a person to feel that you are being violently attacked by this “entity.” Being choked, being bitten, or having your limbs twisted are just a few of the sensations that people report.

The reader may be familiar with a famous painting by the British artist Henry Fuseli (1741-1825), called The Nightmare (1781), which shows a young woman lying on her bed, asleep, with a large hairy demon sitting on her chest. Floating above the foot of her bed is the ghostly head of a rather goofy-looking horse. The painting almost certainly depicts an SP attack. Was Fuseli an SP victim, I wonder? I wouldn’t be surprised if he was, though I guess we’ll never know.

As far as auditory hallucinations are concerned, the types of sounds and voices that SP sufferers hear vary widely. Buzzing, grinding, whirring, whistling, and ringing sounds are commonly reported. These are sometimes accompanied by strange bodily sensations, such as a tingling or numbness. Also reported are sounds of a “technological” nature. Siren noises and telephone noises are two typical examples.

Then there are the voices, some of them indistinct and unintelligible, others clear and comprehensible. For some strange reason, the latter are usually simple commands. Psychologist J. Allan Cheyne of the University of Waterloo (UW) in Canada, who, within the last decade or so, has collected in excess of 28,000 tales of SP, runs a popular SP webpage, from which I have obtained, for this book, numerous quotes by SP sufferers. On this webpage, one woman reported the following experience: “As I listened I could sense this ‘thing’ walk or hover over my head – very close directly over my ear. It said ‘Freya!’…The voice continued: ‘I’ve got work for you to do!’ Then I listened as the presence hovered for a few seconds more and moved across the room to sit on my roommate’s bed.”

It’s interesting to note that the sounds and voices people hear during SP episodes are, for the most part, distinctly experienced as being external to the hearer, rather than thought-like and “in the head.” Generally, they are not taken to be self-generated. In comparison to auditory hallucinations experienced during SP episodes, visual hallucinations are reported far less frequently and are often less vivid. The images people see are predominately indefinite and insubstantial. Often people see “shadowy” beings floating around the room or standing near the bed. Most of the entities I see are dark, shadowy serpentine creatures, with long, thrashing tails. I also see grey orbs of various sizes, which look like balls of liquid smoke. I will explain more about this later.

These days, SP is used to explain – and often unfairly dismiss – a significant number of nocturnal paranormal experiences, from alien abduction episodes to out-of-body experiences (OBEs). The phenomenon has had a profound impact on religion and mythology throughout the ages, not just in the West, but all over the world. Some have speculated that in medieval Europe, the belief in incubi and succubi, as well as other demons, and possibly even witchcraft, may have resulted from the SP phenomenon.

Although these days we refer to a nightmare as a fearful or disturbing dream, the meaning of the word has changed, and since around 1300 the word has been used in connection with the SP phenomenon. In England during the Middle Ages, to have a “nightmare” was to have an SP experience – an experience attributed to the influences of a “mare,” a demonic being thought to attack people in the night, causing a sensation of pressure on the chest.

The mare – or mara – also exists in Scandinavian mythology and is described as a malignant female wraith. This immaterial being is believed to be capable of moving through a keyhole or the crack under a door. Once inside the victim’s bedroom, she seats herself on their chest, then “rides” them. The sleeping victim is said to experience “nightmares” as a result.

Today, defined as having a worn or gaunt appearance through illness, lack of sleep, etc., the term “haggard” also relates to SP, for it was once believed that witches or hags attacked men in the night by riding on their chests as they slept. In Chinese folklore, SP is believed to be a form of minor body possession caused by forces of the dead, though it is said not to harm the victim in any real way. The Chinese name for SP translates as “ghost pressing on body,” or “ghost pressing on bed.”

References to SP-type phenomena can be found all over the world, in Japan, Thailand, Mexico, Greece, Indonesia, the Philippines, Hawaii, Russia, and Hungary. The list goes on. In most of these countries, spirits and other supernatural beings are thought to be behind SP episodes. Having had hundreds of SP experiences over the years, I can easily understand why this is the case. To become a victim of SP is to realize that invisible, non-physical beings do exist.

Apparently, it wasn’t until the publication of David J. Hufford’s groundbreaking 1982 book The Terror That Comes in the Night that researchers began to realize that SP affects the general population and is not exclusively a symptom of narcolepsy. Narcolepsy, as defined by The American Heritage Dictionary, “is a disorder characterized by sudden and uncontrollable, though often brief, attacks of deep sleep, sometimes accompanied by paralysis and hallucinations.” It should be mentioned, too, that SP experiences differ from both night terrors and nocturnal panic attacks.

Some researchers make a distinction between the types of SP episodes experienced by the general population and those experienced by the narcoleptic population. In his book Wrestling with Ghosts, sleep researcher Jorge Conesa Sevilla sometimes uses the term Isolated Sleep Paralysis (ISP) to refer to the SP experiences of people “in otherwise normal populations without other symptoms, even when the SP experience is a once-in-a-life time event.”

To say that SP is a subject about which there is much confusion would be putting it mildly. The fact that it was previously thought to be something that only narcoleptics suffered from is proof of this. And although it’s beginning to gain acceptance as a fairly common condition, it remains little understood. So to help clarify matters, I need to stress the point that there are various forms of SP, such as SP accompanied by hypnagogic/hypnopompic hallucinations (sometimes called hypnagogic SP), and what one might term non-hypnagogic SP, or simply SP. If you were to undergo the latter type of episode, the only thing you would experience is bodily paralysis. There would be no hallucinations, and, most likely, the experience wouldn’t leave much of an impression.

Some people, such as myself, experience episodes on a fairly regular basis and are sometimes referred to as chronic SP suffers. Others have episodes very infrequently – say every five years – and are therefore unlikely to think of themselves as having a disorder. The specific form of SP that I have – and which some alleged victims of alien abduction probably have also – is known as Recurrent Isolated Sleep Paralysis (RISP). RISP, as defined by Jean-Christophe Terrillon and Sirley Marques-Bonham in a paper published in the Journal of Scientific Exploration, “is a rarer variant of sleep paralysis characterized by frequent episodes or a complex of sequential episodes of generally longer duration, and in particular by the range and intensity of the perceptual phenomena occurring during episodes.” Explained simply, RISP sufferers undergo, on a regular basis, generally long SP episodes, frequently accompanied by hypnagogic/hypnopompic hallucinations.

Although people are most likely to develop SP during their adolescent years – around the age of sixteen or seventeen – as happened to me, it is not uncommon to experience such episodes in childhood, nor is it impossible for a person to develop the condition at this age. I myself have vague memories of childhood SP episodes, some of them involving clear auditory hallucinations. I remember telling my brother when I was about six and he was about seven that “God” had spoken to me during the night. I was not asleep at the time, I insisted, but had just woken up. My brother said something to the effect of “Yeah, right!,” and I quickly forgot the incident, only to remember it about ten years later, when I developed RISP in my teens. The incidence of SP tends to decline as people move into their twenties, becoming significantly lower after the age of around thirty.

The condition is thought to be hereditary because it’s often shown to occur in families over many generations. This might explain why one of my uncles is, as far as I can determine, a chronic SP sufferer, as he claims to have had countless nocturnal visits from grey aliens and other entities. An artist of some note, my uncle is obsessed with fairly tale-type themes and frequently paints white rabbits dressed as people, gathered in the forest under the moonlight, surrounding nude, vulnerable girls. Some of these artworks remind one of Alice in Wonderland. Some of his other paintings feature fairies, cherubs, and other supernatural beings, many of them glowing.

Statistics for the prevalence of SP in the general population vary widely from study to study – depending, of course, in which country the study was conducted, how it was designed, what ages the participants were, and various other factors. Differing from the statistics mentioned earlier – that 25-to-40 percent of the population will undergo an SP episode at least once in the course of their life – are those provided by the 1990 International Classification of Sleep Disorders (ICSD), which states that the figure is 40-to-60 percent. On the University of Waterloo’s SP webpage, the figure given is 25-to-30 percent. The ICSD further states that SP experiences are frequent in about 3-to-6 percent of the population. I ask, once again, that the reader bear in mind that not all SP experiences feature hallucinations, and that these statistics apply equally to those who see flying green goblins and have full-blown OBEs, as well as to those who experience nothing but short bouts of uncomfortable paralysis.

In a study carried out in 1999 by the American Academy of Neurology, which surveyed the sleeping habits of 8,100 German and Italian participants, nearly 30 percent of people with severe SP were found to experience hallucinations during their episodes. Taking these figures, as well as those provided by the ICSD, in concert, one can easily calculate the percentage of RISP sufferers (chronic SP sufferers who experience hallucinations) in the general population, which is 0.9-1.8 percent. Not wanting to get bogged down in terminology, I will be using the term SP to refer to a whole range of such experiences, from those that involve hallucinations to some that don’t. This seems to be the norm these days, anyway, with SP being used as a very broad term. Because, as explained in The Abduction Enigma, written by Kevin Randle, Russ Estes, and William Cone, “there is no single, simple definition of what sleep paralysis is,” I feel it necessary to include a precise and comprehensive definition of the phenomenon, as given by R. J. Campbell in his dictionary of psychiatric terms:

“A benign neurological phenomenon, more probably due to some temporary dysfunction of the reticular activating system consisting of brief episodes of inability to move and/or speak when awakening or less commonly, when falling asleep. There is no accompanying disturbance of consciousness, and the subject has complete recall for the episode. The incidence of the phenomenon is highest in younger age groups (children and young adults) and much higher in males (80%) than females. It occurs in narcolepsy… The terms by which the phenomenon has been known are nocturnal hemiplegia, nocturnal paralysis, sleep numbness, delayed psychomotor awakening, cataplexy of awakening and post dormital chalastic fits.”

This book is an attempt to make sense of the SP phenomenon from an alternative, non-mechanistic perspective. Those of a skeptical disposition, who have little or no time for the occult or paranormal, will find nothing of value in this book. Only those who already have an interest in such subjects and are equipped with an open, but discerning, mind, are likely to enjoy this book and gain something from it. My hope is that SP sufferers like myself, who are fed up with the official explanation of SP, will find comfort within these pages and hopefully some answers, too.

Part one of Dark Intrusions deals primarily with the SP phenomenon and is rife with descriptions of my own SP episodes. Putting these experiences into words was by no means easy. When it comes to describing experiences of a paranormal nature – experiences that are of another realm and of another mode of consciousness – one is extremely limited by language. I ask that the reader bear this in mind. Please understand, moreover, that I am not recounting dreams, that what occurs during an SP episode goes far beyond anything that occurs during a dream and is a wholly different experience. If any of my SP experiences read like dreams, it’s because I’ve failed to describe them adequately.

Part two of Dark Intrusions expands on what I deal with in part one, placing the subject of SP in a much broader context. Many of the topics explored in this section – among them, poltergeist disturbances, mediumship, channeling, alien abduction, Spiritism, OBEs, and shamanism – may strike the reader as largely unrelated, and one is likely to wonder what any of them have to do with SP. I can assure the reader, however, that there is a method in my madness. Had I not examined the SP phenomenon from as many different angles as possible, what I now know about the subject would be very limited indeed. Furthermore, it has long been my understanding that there is no subject in the paranormal/occult field that isn’t related to another and which doesn’t supplement another. Having a comprehensive knowledge of such matters allows one to recognize this truth.

I have to admit that much of what I’ve written herein has been colored – though not dogmatically so – by my interest in Spiritism, an offshoot of Spiritualism, which began in France in the mid-1800s. I make frequent references to two Spiritist texts – The Spirits’ Book and The Mediums’ Book – and quote extensively from them. Not until I’d finished writing Dark Intrusions did I realize that it had such a strong Spiritist flavor. I even felt compelled to include a chapter on Chico Xavier, Brazil’s most famous Spiritist medium.

It would be accurate to say that this book, rather than being about SP, is essentially about the nature of incorporeal beings and the interactions that take place between them and us. I regard these matters as a kind of science – by no means a definite science, but a science nonetheless. It is my firm belief that we can bring the occult into the light, that what is classified as paranormal or supernatural need not remain elusive and incomprehensible.

One will notice, throughout the chapters of this book, a great many number of consistencies between the work of one paranormal researcher or shaman/occultist and that of another – consistencies that cannot be attributed to the sharing of information, or, for that matter, coincidence. These consistencies illuminate spiritual facts, and I think it is important that one takes notice of them. Only by piecing these facts together – rather than relying on purely subjective observations – can we begin to make any real progress with our understanding of the “spirit realm” and its inhabitants. It is my hope that this book is a step in the right direction.

DARK INTRUSIONS

An Investigation into the Paranormal Nature of Sleep Paralysis Experiences

By Louis Proud