Chapter
Fifteen
Dreaming and beyond
by about half the population, and are usually pleasant
or even joyful. Falling dreams are also common and
sometimes end with a myoclonic jerk – an involuntary
muscle spasm that occurs during the shift from wak-
ing into sleep. Most such dreams are not lucid – that
is, the dreamer rarely thinks ‘Wow, I can’t fly in normal
life, so this must be a dream’ – but they can sometimes
alert people to their state and lead to lucidity.
Another odd dream is the ‘false awakening’, a dream
of having woken up. Sometimes everything looks
quite normal and so the dreamer gets on with
dressing and eating breakfast until he really wakes
up and has to start all over again. A famous example
was described by the French biologist Yves Delage
in 1919. Delage was asleep when he heard a knock
at the door. He got up to find a visitor asking him to
come quickly and attend to a sick friend. He leapt up,
dressed, and started to wash, whereupon the cold
water on his face woke him up and he realised it was
only a dream. Back in bed, he heard the same voice
again and, fearing he must have fallen asleep, leapt
out of bed and repeated the dressing and washing
four times before he really woke up (Green, 1968a).
In other false awakenings, people report greenish
light, glowing objects, eerie feelings, and humming
or buzzing sounds. These are all reminiscent of hyp-
nagogic experiences, and prompt the odd thought
that it may sometimes be impossible to know
whether one is awake and hallucinating, or only
dreaming one is awake. In the first case, the bed-
room is real even if the hallucinations are not, but in
the second, the whole room and everything in it is
dreamed. Experiences like this, in which the whole
environment is replaced by hallucinations, are some-
times called ‘metachoric experiences’ (Green and
McCreery, 1975). This profound doubt can extend
over crisis apparitions, fairy abductions, alien visi-
tations, and even some drug experiences. Without
physiological monitoring we cannot know whether
the person had their eyes open, as often claimed, or
was fast asleep (Blackmore, 2017).
Then a terrible thought occurred to her. What
if this was still a dream? What if she had only
dreamed that she had really woken up? How
could she tell? She pinched herself, hard. She
felt the pinch all right and saw she’d made
a bright red mark on her skin but then she
sLeeP PARALYsIs
the experience described at the end of Chap-
ter 14 is a typical account of sleep paralysis
(sP), derived from hundreds of cases gath-
ered via magazine advertisements (Parker
and Blackmore, 2002). sP is one symptom
of the serious sleep disorder narcolepsy, and
for that reason may be treated as pathologi-
cal, but sP is common in healthy people, with
estimates coming from Canada (21%), Hong
Kong (37%), Japan (40%), nigeria (44%),
england (46%), and newfoundland (62%)
(Parker and Blackmore, 2002). one over-
view of thirty-five previous studies estimated
a lifetime incidence of 8% in the general
population, 28% among students, and 32%
of psychiatric patients (sharpless and Barber,
2011).
sP most commonly occurs during sleep onset
Rem (soRem) and can be thought of as an
intrusion of Rem into either light sleep or
waking (nelson et al., 2006). the person
feels awake but the voluntary muscles are paralysed.
the most common features are fear, the ‘sense of pres-
ence’ (often evil or frightening), humming, buzzing, or
grinding noises, pressure on the chest, vibrations through
the body, touches on the limbs, and sensations of floating
or even out-of-body experiences (Cheyne, newby-Clark,
and Rueffer, 1999; Blackmore, 2017; Denis and Poerio,
2017). many people are terrified because they believe
that the presence is a real ghost or alien, or because they
think they must be going mad. Knowing something about
sP makes it much less frightening.
sP can, with difficulty, be induced in the laboratory by
repeatedly waking people just after they have entered
Rem, keeping them awake for an hour, and then letting
them sleep again (Inugami and ma, 2002). most features
of sP have been independently induced by transcranial
magnetic stimulation, in particular by stimulation of the
temporal lobes (Persinger, 1999). For example, the sense
of presence is thought to be a displaced version of one’s
own body schema and can be induced by stimulation of
the left temporoparietal junction (Arzy et al., 2006; Brug-
ger, 2006).C
on
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t
15.2