Night after night, Helena Adelina would wake up unable to move and convinced that something evil was in her room,
clawing at her inert body or whispering in her ear.
clawing at her inert body or whispering in her ear.
Sometimes she would see a shadowy figure lurking in the darkness next to her. Other times she would sense or hear his presence.
‘He was a slim, tall figure but with no features, like a silhouette,’ says Helena, 24. ‘My sense was that he was terrifying, an ancient being, very dark and pure evil.
Sometimes I would wake and not see him but hear his voice in my ear talking about destruction, war and death. Sometimes he would grab me around the ankles and drag me under the covers. I would be fighting it and be struggling to breathe.’
These were no ordinary dreams. Every time Helena felt that she was fully awake but utterly unable to move and gripped by an ungodly and suffocating fear.
And it wasn’t always a man.
‘Sometimes a woman would enter the scene, laughing and cackling,’ she recalls. ‘She would keep slapping me around the face and laughing and finding it very amusing. And there would be a serious ringing in my ears. When I came out of it my ears would be ringing very badly.
‘At the time it was happening it felt like it was going on for ever; how long it went on for I don’t know.
It’s difficult for those who have never had a night-time ‘visitation’ or waking nightmare to imagine the pure horror of the experience. For Helena, a film student in London at the time, they got so bad she dreaded falling asleep.
Helena’s trauma is far from rare. She is one of tens of thousands of Britons who experience severe ‘sleep paralysis’; a terrifying medical condition that leaves sufferers frozen in the disturbing world that lies between sleeping and waking and which is the focus of a new documentary, The Nightmare.
In its classic form, sufferers wake up frightened, unable to move and convinced someone, or something, malevolent is close by. Often they see a shadowy man or a witch-like figure. Some sense the presence of an evil spirit in the room or feel something oppressive lying on their chest.
It may sound unlikely if you have never experienced it, but the phenomenon has been recorded in almost every culture throughout history and is almost certainly responsible for most of the myths of spirits, demons and ghosts that prey upon the sleeping.
Academics have linked it to the origin of the vampire; a hypnotic figure that visits entranced women at night, and the ‘incubus’, the medieval spirit which assaults women as they sleep
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The condition probably explains the German folk stories of the ‘mare’, a goblin that rides on the chests of people while they sleep, and the Newfoundland Old Hag, a woman who sits on a sleeper’s chest to suffocate them.
The Japanese tell of the ghosts of children who sit on the chests of sleepers, while in St Lucia, sleepers are visited by the ‘kokma’ — the spirit of an unbaptised baby which throttles its victims in bed.
Sleep paralysis could even account for tales of alien abductions. Professor Chris French, psychologist at Goldsmiths, University of London, and one of the UK’s leading experts in sleep paralysis, believes about 30 per cent of the population experience the phenomenon at least once, while five per cent have more frequent episodes.
‘It is a very common experience but typically people haven’t heard of it,’ he says.
‘I have people calling me about it and often they have the same story; they’ve been suffering and never told anyone because others would think they were crazy. In the whistles and bells version, people get a strong sense of a presence and they may also get hallucinations. They may see dark shadows and lights and monstrous figures, or footsteps and mechanical sounds or voices.
‘They may feel as if they are being dragged out of bed. It is absolutely terrifying. There is also intense fear. It doesn’t have a dream-like quality; it feels incredibly real.’
The sufferer’s eyes are open during this state, so to an onlooker they seem fully awake, although they cannot move.
After a time, which can feel interminable for those afflicted, the ability to move returns, which may be a gradual or sudden process.
Thankfully, few are affected as badly as Helena, who began to be afflicted in her first year at university. ‘I started to dread falling asleep and began to suffer from insomnia,’ she says.
‘It had a knock-on effect on my mental health but I didn’t tell anyone how much of a state I was in.’
For a phenomenon so common, few people seem to know about it. After talking to Prof French and Helena, I asked friends and relatives if they had experienced anything similar. A remarkably high number said yes.
One friend recalled how she woke up in bed when living in China to see a man with pointed teeth eating her feet. The vision was vivid and unlike any dream. ‘Even thinking about it now makes my heart skip a beat,’ she said.
Another recalled lying in her boarding school bed, frozen to the spot as a bearded dwarf walked across the dormitory in the dead of night. To this day, she vividly recalls the figure’s terrifying red eyes.
Another told me how she regularly wakes up convinced that a shadowy man is trying to get into her bedroom at night yet she is unable to scream or shout. She finally gets control of her body, gasping and petrified.
Scientists have only a rough idea of what causes sleep paralysis and why some suffer more than others. During a normal night’s sleep you go through 90-minute cycles and within each you go through different stages of sleep,’ says Prof French.
‘One of these is REM, or rapid eye movement, sleep. This is the phase typically associated with vivid dreams and, during REM sleep, it is normal for your muscles to be paralysed to stop you acting out your dreams.’
People are most likely to recall their dreams when they wake during REM sleep. Normally, as our bodies come out of REM sleep, we gain control over our muscles before we wake, but with sleep paralysis something goes wrong. The conscious mind wakes up but the body doesn’t, and in this halfway house between sleeping and waking, images and hallucinations from dreams break into reality.
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