Here's Why

Night Terrors

MP3

I went to an Australian Skeptics dinner night where Lynne Kelly performed a magic act where she challenged the audience to consider the emotional as well as the intellectual reasons for people’s supernatural beliefs. She published a book last year called "A Skeptics Guide to the Paranormal".

Lynne went on to explain about her experience of Night Terrors, a kind of vivid hallucination that some people experience just before falling asleep or just after waking. Its a very real experience, and not anything at all like a dream. In fact its almost more vivid than real life. When you dream normally, your body is paralysed so that you don't act out your dreams. If you wake up while your body is still paralysed, its a frightening experience called "sleep paralysis". People experiencing "sleep paralysis", often have a strong feeling that there somebody or something in the room that shouldn't be there. Researchers believe that a combination of Night Terrors and Sleep Paralysis may be the cause of people's experiences of alien abduction, and visits by night-time demons and ghosts. Lynne explained that she had experienced large spiders jumping onto the bed, and she has taken that frightening experience and embraced it; by studying spiders and using spider decorations and jewelery. She's now a "friend of the spider".

She explained that people who experience Night Terrors are labelled in psychology as a “fantasy prone personality” - FPP and make up about five percent of the population. She asked everyone who had ever experienced the Night Terror halluncinations to stand up, and I was one of them.

Apparently Lynne expected a number of us to stand up, but I’m the first person she has met who has also seen the big spider that she's been "visited" by, and knows exactly how real the experience feels.
The textbooks say that the ‘fantasy prone personality,’ represent a diverse group of naturally imaginative and visionary individuals.
Josephine Hilgard and other researchers have found that some people have particularly rich inner fantasy lives and cultivate a lifetime of vivid imagery experience corresponding to an openness to unusual experience, extraordinary memory in many cases, capacity for intense concentration, sharp sensory acuity, and unusually strong somatic or bodily responses to mental imagery -such as response to placebos.

Thats me. I discovered at an early age that I could hypnotise myself and others fairly easily.

I use mental imagery to provoke bodily responses all the time, to deal with all the symptoms my illnesses have thrown up at me. I have a limited ability to affect pain and itching and other unpleasant symptoms in my body, using mental imagery as a kind of “graphic user interface” of the autonomic nervous system. I’ve been able to help other people’s pains to improve, by sharing my imagery and a form of strong hypnotic suggestion when pain-relieving drugs weren’t to hand.
I also use mental imagery to help me remember things by imagining a glow around something hot, or dangerous, or dirty in the building. I don’t hallucinate and see things as real as a Night Terror, but I can see enough of my imaginary “tag”, to constantly be reminded.
On the “Big Brother” reality TV show last year, one of the men in the house chopped up some chilli peppers, and then later touched his genitals without remembering to wash his hands first. He was punished with an intensely painful burning sensation from the remains of the chilli juice on his hands. I was really surprized that he would forget and make that mistake. As Fantasy Prone Person, I would have visualized a “tag” of a red glow to remind me, and even if I suffered his absent-minded moment and forgot, when I next went to use my hands, the pretend “red glow” would still be there to remind me.
This kind of deliberate mental imagery gives you the gift of easy rehearsal. This gives Fantasy Prone People an uncanny “beginner’s luck” because they have already rehearsed and internalised a new skill before they try it.

I caught the end of a documentary once that suggested that shamans and story-tellers from the earliest times of human pre-history were “fantasy-prone personalities” who were able to hypnotise themselves to induce a trance. With the skill of entrancing oneself comes the ability to entrance others. The documentary showed a shaman in Africa who the anthropologist speculated was performing in a close way to the shamans of our ancestors. They pointed out that ancient cave painting from around the world accord with the dot and grid pattern of “tiny sparks in everything” that the shamans describe. This pattern also matches the physical structure, they suggest, of the visual cortex itself. Therefore the shamans were experiencing the visual cortex of their brains more directly than most humans.
Fran Stalling is part of the Healing Story alliance, a group dedicated to the therapeutic use of storytelling. She says: “Both hypnosis and storytelling require a setting which fosters good concentration. People must be comfortable enough to relax, and there should be a minimum of distractions. However, even when the audience sits on creaky bleachers in the hot sun and jackhammers pound across the street, as happened at one unlucky outdoor festival, certain powerful stories can still conjure a wall of silence within which the magic happens.”

"Neuro-linguistic programming” is a story telling and visualisation method of hypnosis. The idea is that you can apply light suggestions in a light trance by capturing and leading the imagination, as you tell a story rich in metaphor.

Ten percent of people are resistant to the trance state and are not able to learn to be hypnotised easily.

I've experienced full-on blood-running-down-the-walls ghost haunting, but I was secure in my knowledge that because I was in bed, and I'd turned out the light to sleep, that I was probably just having a Night Terror. I decided I felt lucky, and sat back and enjoyed the special effects.

My way of coping with Night Terrors when they do produce anxiety, is to immediately switch on a bedside light. This breaks the trance, and restores you to normal waking consciousness. The hallucinations usually vanish. From EEG sleep research, Night Terrors seem to be a combination of waking and dreaming brainwaves, overlapping. Light entering your eyes immediately changes your brainwaves. This is the basis of the UTS Mindswitch, which allows you to switch electronic equipment on and off by opening and closing your eyes, and then just by thinking. With Night Terror hallucinations, pointing your finger at them and making a shooting gesture, can also dispell the illusory demons, in my experience. And, because I've suggested it, this should also now work, for you!

About the author: Ian Woolf lives in Sydney, has a degree in Applied Science, worked as a solar astronomer, software engineer, systems programmer, webmaster, research assistant, Cisco CCNA tutor, Physics laboratory demonstrator, Computational Theory lecturer, and subject coordinator; while changing his career to freelance writing and broadcasting. Listen to Ian on the Diffusion radio science show on radio 2SER 107.3FM Monday at 6:30pm in Sydney or streaming audio on www.2ser.com, or listen to the Diffusion podcasts. You should follow me on twitter, here