When Science Meets the Supernatural

Brains, dreams, and the boundaries of reality

Dear Living Dark reader,

Having suffered from traumatizing visionary sleep paralysis attacks for years in my twenties, and having delved deeply into the literature about this phenomenon, I’m nonplussed whenever I read things like the following, which comes from a recent article in The Wall Street Journal titled “If Not Demons, What Causes Sleep Paralysis?” (Note: It’s behind a paywall.)

We know the temporoparietal junction uses touch and feedback so that your brain can figure out where your body is, where it ends and where another's body begins. It's likely that the shadow figure that is a central aspect of sleep paralysis is the result of some sort of electrical disturbance in this part of the brain, creating a creepy or malevolent “other” at the blurry edge of our imagined body.

Hallucinations are the last part of sleep paralysis and the hardest to explain—the goblins or devils or aliens we see when we are trapped in this space between sleep and waking. Unsurprisingly, the scientific basis of these visions remains elusive and challenging to investigate. If I had to venture a hypothesis, it would include some sort of mismatch between the neurotransmitter serotonin and other arousal neurotransmitters that come online as we wake up. These hallucinations are similar to intense psychedelic experiences, which rely on serotonin modulation.

Note the implied/overt materialist-reductionist attitude, the assumption that the shadow figure often encountered in sleep paralysis, and all the other perceptions, represent nothing but brain states. What, pray tell, is the warrant for this? The very act of recognizing it as an assumption is the first step toward recognizing the philosophical hatchet job that is being carried out in such reasoning.

Then there’s this:

Of course, sleep paralysis is not purely a physical phenomenon. Just as the dreaming brain often stitches together a story in search of cohesion, our waking brains seek to give meaning to the strange and terrible sensations experienced during sleep paralysis. Culture and beliefs play a role. If you grow up in a society where folklore blames evil witches, demons or other malevolent forces for sleep paralysis, your experience of it will be different, and perhaps worse, than someone who grows up in a place without these myths.

The idea that sleep paralysis, both the experience itself and its basic characteristics, is generated by cultural beliefs—what has elsewhere been called the cultural source hypothesis—was roundly disproved as a catch-all, comprehensive explanation right from the start of modern SP studies, when folklorist David Hufford, as recounted in his groundbreaking 1982 book The Terror That Comes in the Night: An Experience-Centered Study of Supernatural Assault Traditions, found that people in Newfoundland who hadn’t even heard of that country’s traditional lore about the “Old Hag” who shows up and paralyzes you in your sleep still had the same experience. Additional research has confirmed this multiple times over the years. Among people who, on the one hand, are immersed in varying cultural traditions of nocturnal supernatural assault that specify the types of supposed spirit entities that cause it, and among people who on the other hand have little or no notion of such things, the same experience occurs with pretty much the same frequency and—most striking of all—pretty much the same structural characteristics, including waking up or coming to partial consciousness in a state of general physical paralysis, feeling an oppressive weight on the chest or body, being gripped by extreme terror, seeing a monstrous entity or entities nearby that seem to be the source of the paralysis, sometimes hearing strange sounds like hissing or voices, and a few other items.

So, in light of this, why the ongoing recourse by various people to the rhetoric of the cultural source hypothesis, even in its somewhat soft form like the line from the WSJ article? Part of me wants to speculate that this tendency represents an attempt to write out of reality an experience that otherwise blows open the conceptual—and more than that, the experiential—door to “more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” As readers of my work over the years are well aware, I have thought about these matters in relation to the general subject of sleep paralysis, and to my own experiences of it, at length and in depth. SP is—let’s face it—one of the most intimate experiences you can have, since it blurs the boundary between the sleeping and waking minds and thus floods us with an overwhelming experience within the theater of our subjectivity.

It may also destabilize our former sense of and/or notions about reality.

The Nightmare (c. 1781), by Henry Fuseli

The WSJ piece is adapted from the new book This Is Why You Dream: What Your Sleeping Brain Reveals about Your Waking Life by neuroscientist Rahul Jandial. At one point in the book, Jandial, after delving quite ably into various speculations about the nature of dreams and nightmares—as in his observation that “some cultures don’t even have a term for nightmares and instead consider them windows to the edges of consciousness”—flatly asserts, “The truth is that nightmares, like dreaming, are the product of neurobiology.”¹

It’s one thing to note the self-evident and not unimportant fact that all experiences and states of consciousness have neurological correlates. It’s another to make the blithe leap to asserting that a given experience, especially something as rich and subjectively central as dreaming, is the product of neurobiology. Such a claim is not a scientific assertion but a philosophical one. And yet this clear instantiation of neuromania, as the philosopher and neuroscientist Raymond Tallis, among others, astutely started calling the drive toward all-pervasive brain-oriented explanations over a decade ago, is still widely proffered and broadly accepted.

I, for one, don’t accept it, on the simple grounds that it doesn’t answer questions but instead gives the appearance of answering them while really begging them. It writes them, and the larger possibilities to which they refer, clean out of its map of reality, and then it assumes that only what it can see from within the boundaries of such an abridged and truncated representation of a world—I’m half tempted to say a philosophically or ontologically sanitized world—is real.

Scientistic reductionism writes entire questions, and the larger possibilities to which they refer, clean out of its map of reality, and then it assumes that only what it can see from within the boundaries of such an abridged and truncated representation of a world is real.

How much more broad-minded and compelling is a position like that of the medical anthropologist and integrative health professor Shelley Adler, author of the 2011 book Sleep Paralysis: Night-Mares, Nocebos, and the Mind-Body Connection. She considers the subject of sleep paralysis both broadly, as a trans-historical and trans-cultural phenomenon, and specifically, by detailing the field research that she personally carried out in the 1970s among the geographically distributed United States community of Hmong immigrants, where a phenomenon that came to be called Sudden Unexplained Nocturnal Death Syndrome had begun to proliferate. (The newspaper accounts of this crisis, by the by, inspired filmmaker Wes Craven to create A Nightmare on Elm Street with its iconic villain Freddy Krueger, who kills people in their dreams.) Adler is careful to lay out her philosophical and methodological position in a way that indicates it is richly open to multiple perspectives:

It has only been during the last two decades that the night-mare has begun to reemerge as a significant figure in American culture—one that can also be recognized by biomedicine, when the entity is conceptualized as sleep paralysis with hypnic hallucinations....

The night-mare’s role has been viewed as significant in terms of religion and spirituality for thousands of years. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, knowledge of the science of sleep paralysis coexists with spiritual explanations, often in the same individual. Given that natural and supernatural understandings of the night-mare have endured for millennia, this is not surprising. Neurophysiological findings regarding sleep paralysis simply do not supplant spiritual interpretations. Scientific developments do not preempt supernatural understandings of sleep paralysis; often, scientific information is incorporated into the interpretation by the individual experiencer (hence the explanation that alien abductors use sleep paralysis to restrain their victims). Near-death and out-of-body experiences also do not lose their spiritual significance when their neurological characteristics are explained. For many night-mare sufferers, science and spirituality are simply not mutually exclusive. By considering the stable set of core night-mare phenomena across religious and scientific traditions, different understandings of these experiences can be explored.²

Adler also goes on to note that “night-mare accounts challenge many of our categories of thought and conceptualization of the world,” and that the intrinsic fusion of biology with culture and psychology in the night-mare or sleep paralysis experience produces “a highly interpretable event” that

cannot be categorized using conventional mechanistic models.…[I[t defies traditional categories and the division of academic disciplines. Because the night-mare does not respect the boundaries we have set—between science and religion or body and mind—our thinking must also defy conventional, reductionist models in order to understand the experience as fully as possible.³

For me, these considerations point to a larger concern with the importance of being honest with ourselves: honest about our experiences—all of them, not just dreams and sleep paralysis—and the widely, in fact almost universally ignored set of assumptions and presuppositions that constitute our Peter Bergerian “sacred canopy” of meaning, the interpretive grid that we erect as a figurative sky to cover and reduce the teeming threat of the world and make it comprehensible. This act of cosmic reduction, while understandable in its motivation, actually sets us up for a great deal of trouble and trauma. For when envoys from that wider realm outside our cosmic canopy arrive, as they eventually, inevitably do, and punch through its fabric to enter our world as intrinsic anomalies that exude an aura of mystery and menace because of their sheer unnameability, we are faced with a genuine experience of cosmic horror like the one that I encountered thirty years ago when I woke up to something more awful than I had ever suspected or imagined. Yes, on the other side of that horror is reality, even enlightenment, even the peace that passes understanding. But it is we who determine whether we first have to encounter it as a horror through which we must pass before we can rediscover our reason for being and our rootedness in, in fact our inseparable, indivisible identity with, the ultimate.

Warm regards,

1. Rahul Jandial, This Is Why You Dream: What Your Sleeping Brain Reveals about Your Waking Life (London: Penguin Life, 2024), 31.

2. Shelley R. Adler, Sleep Paralysis: Night-Mares, Nocebos, and the Mind-Body Connection, Studies in Medical Anthropology (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2011), 134, 135–136 (my emphasis).

3. Ibid. 136.