14 DAY TRIAL // Investigators at the Pennsylvania State University managed to shed more light on a weird phenomena that occurs precisely before people fall asleep, called sleep paralysis. While it affects nearly 8 percent of the general population, it has greater prevalence among specific groups.
The term is used to describe a condition in which people are just about to fall asleep, and as a result experience inhibited voluntary muscle movement and control. At the same time, ocular and respiratory movements remain unaffected, which gives these individuals the feeling that they are paralyzed.
This time of transition is also renowned among sleep researchers as the most likely time for the appearance of hallucinations. Penn State experts, together with colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania, decided to investigate sleep paralysis in detail, in order to determine its causes.
Previous studies have already demonstrated that students and psychiatric patients are more likely to experience this type of occurrence than other population subgroups. This knowledge has helped psychiatrist understand mentally-ill patients a lot better.
Sleep paralysis is now believed to be the main reason why people “experience” out-of-this-world events such as alien abductions and meeting demons. Having the distinct impression that a malevolent presence is in the room may also be explained through this phenomenon.
“I realized that there were no real sleep paralysis prevalence rates available that were based on large and diverse samples. So I combined data from my previous study with 34 other studies in order to determine how common it was in different groups,” Dr. Brian A. Sharpless explains.
The expert, a psychologist and researcher at Penn State, was also the author of the new meta-analysis. He explains that the database he and his team put together covered more than 50 years of data, while surveying about 36,533 people.
It was discovered that some people experience sleep paralysis only once in their lives, whereas others may experience it every night. Some were found to be terrified of such an occurrence – and to avoid going to sleep as a direct result – while other seemed to enjoy it.
“I want to better understand how sleep paralysis affects people, as opposed to simply knowing that they experience it. I want to see how it impacts their lives,” Sharpless says of the reasons that informed the new study, PsychCentral reports.