I had a terrifying experience this morning and I'm writing about it as a lesson on how we perceive things. This type of thing has happened to me several times in my life, but since it just happened again this morning, and ghosts seem to be a topic of interest on this board, I thought I'd share it.
I was staying at a friend's house while she was away. This place is an old apartment complex built in the 1920's in San Francisco. Very quaint with hard wood floors and a lot of decorative detail on the walls and ceilings that just isn't done anymore in modern buildings. The hardwood floors are very squeaky and loud when you walk on them.
Well, this morning I woke up before the alarm clock feeling quite refreshed. It was still a bit dark out, but I could see the room quite well. All of a sudden I got this sinking feeling in my chest. The feeling was almost euphoric, but in a bad way. I felt like something bad was going to happen. I felt like I was not alone.
That moment I heard feet scuffing down the hall toward the room. The hardwood floor was creaking and the noise was getting louder as it got nearer. Adrenaline rushed through my body. I was terrified! I tried to move, but I was paralyzed with fear. This added to my panic because I felt like I was helpless as this intruder was coming near. The scuffing and creaking would stop every so often and then start again. There was no question that there was a person in the house. The creaking of the floor and the scuffing started to getting loud enough to where it was just outside of the room door. More scuffing around the door. My heart was pounding with trepidation. One thing I knew for sure: this was no dream. This was real!
Or was it? I tried moving my arms and legs once more. Nothing happened - they wouldn't budge! As soon as I realized that my body was paralyzed, everything clicked. I was still scared as hell, but my brain realized what was happening to me. I knew I was experiencing the terrifying phenomenon of Sleep Paralysis or Night Terrors. Sleep Paralysis is usually accompanied by audio or visual hallucinations and I was experiencing the former. As I realized what was happening I calmed down a bit, but I was still not in control of my body, so I was a bit anxious. I was just hoping that I wouldn't have a visual hallucination of the intruder appearing in my room (as I have had before at other times) to freak me out. Fortunately that didn't happen, but the auditory hallucination of the creaking floor and the scuffing as the intruder came and the overall sense of something being wrong persisted.
I decided to close my eyes and force myself back to sleep until I was rested enough to get out of this altered state of mind. After a few minutes of closing my eyes, I tested my arms and legs to see if they could now move. The test was successful, and I was able to fully wake up. The auditory hallucinations stopped. The funny thing is that even though my brain knew on a rational level what was really happening to me, this feeling of fear and excitement was overwhelming.
The whole experience lasted less than 5 minutes. Maybe it was just seconds and it seemed like a longer time. But it is easy to see how experiences like these can be interpreted as ghost encounters. The experience seems real - not like you are dreaming at all. If I believed in ghosts or alien abductions, this experience would only have solidified my belief. I may have even had a more terrifying experience with visual hallucinations (as I've had before, including shady figures at the foot of my bed).
I guess the point of this is to show that our perceptions are not always reality and that under stressful situations we can interpret an experience incorrectly, especially if our normal senses are not able to get a full picture. Our brain seems to fill in the gaps to create a stable model of reality based on our beliefs. Maybe the creaking in the floor was not a hallucination, but sounds from the person upstairs? If so, then my brain interpreted them as someone coming down the hallway and at that time I could not be convinced of anything different.
If I were still a JW, this would have been a demon story. If I believed in UFO's, it would have been an alien abduction complete with lost time. I think most people in western lands would have interpreted the experience as a ghost living in the scary old building. I have always had a fear of intruders breaking in to my house (I grew up in a high crime area and my dad made us paranoid with burglar alarms and such when we were growing up), so the hallucinations I was having fit my model of reality. My brain was filling in the gaps with my beliefs.
See? Even us skeptics encounter strange, even scary things in our lives. We just all see them in different ways. I am glad that I had knowledge about Sleep Paralysis and Night Terrors because it gave me some control over the situation and allowed me to deal with it rationally. It was still an overwhelming experience, but knowledge is power and can break superstition.
The brain is one weird animal, eh?
rem