Ever find yourself briefly paralyzed as you’re falling asleep or just waking up? It’s a phenomenon is called sleep paralysis, and it’s often accompanied by mysterious experiences, which can include unable to move, unable to speak, sensing presence of someone, frustration and intense fear. For some people, sleep paralysis maybe a once-in-a-lifetime experience; for others, it can be a frequent, even nightly, experience. This is a phenomenon which happens to almost everyone and most people who have suffered from this don’t know about it and how to deal with it. It seldom affects a person emotionally and mentally. Many people don’t believe in it and call it superstitious and fake. This research is important for awareness of this phenomenon and how to deal with it and help others. Our objective was to find out how sleep paralysis affects Human psychology so as to help people, who face sleep paralysis to control their fear of facing sleep paralysis.
THEORETICAL AND CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK
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LITERATURE REVIEW
Most people considered this superstitious and fake. Hufford (March,2005) has reported on the results of his work, which spans more than a decade. His original isolated sleep paralysis work began with a study of the college student population in Newfoundland. He surveyed 93 students and found that 23% had experienced sleep paralysis, known as the "Old Hag" in Newfoundland. Hufford's research asserts that the phenomenon is found in a variety of cultural settings. Wilson (1925) first used what has become the most accepted term for this state of consciousness: sleep paralysis. He noted that it was a "transient physiologic disorder, a physiological cataplexy".
In Interpretation of Dreams2 Freud mentions hallucinations citing Johannes Muller's (1826) term for this experience, "imaginative visual phenomena”. There is strong evidence that some claims of alien abduction may actually describe episodes of sleep paralysis. In a study by Spanos (1993) and a paper by Holden & French (2002) it is shown that 60% of intense UFO experiences are associated with sleep. In a study, French et al (2008) found that people who claim to have been abducted by aliens report more incidences of sleep paralysis than a control group. Descriptions of alien abduction often bear strong resemblance to accounts of sleep paralysis.
A pilot study by Carl C. Bell, MD, Carolyn J. Hildreth, MD, Esther J. Jenkins, PhD, and Cynthia Carter (1988) which consists of 31 patients with elevated blood pressure revealed that 41.9 percent had isolated sleep paralysis, 35.5 percent had panic attacks, and 9.7 percent had panic disorder. These proposed hyper adrenergic phenomena may be related to the development of hypertension in certain individuals. The study of Carl C. Bell, MD, Bambade Shakoor, MS, Belinda Thompson, PhD, Donald Dew, MSW, Eugene Hughley, MS, MSW, Raymond Mays, RN, and Kumea Shorter-Gooden (1984) represents the first survey to measure the incidence of this disorder in a black population of healthy subjects and psychiatric patients. In a study of J. A. CHEYNE (2004) the basic form and patterning of hallucinatory experiences is a result of intrinsic processes, independent of prior experience, likely associated with underlying REM neurophysiology.
The study of Kazuhiko Fukuda, Robert D. Ogilvie and Tomoka Takeuchi (2000) stated that there were no differences between Canada and Japan in the prevalence and symptoms of sleep paralysis (SP), but many more Canadians considered SP to be a dream. The difference was considered to be derived from the fact that there is a common expression for SP in Japan but there is not one in Canada. Then, we investigated why there are individuals who consider SP to be a dream and others who do not, and found that many Japanese who regarded it as a dream did not report the symptom of ‘unable to move’, while in Canada, self-evaluation of spirituality was different between the two groups.
HYPOTHESIS
Based on the stated theoretical and conceptual framework, following hypotheses are developed and tested in the research paper:
“Sleep paralysis has a long-term effects on a person’s psychology, imposing negativity and anxiety in people which includes panic attacks and emotional stress”.