Recently I saw the film “Insidious” which is about a boy who can astrally project into a supernatural realm called “The Further”. I am rarely affected by horror movies. I usually just find them boring. However this film really disturbed me, I think, because some of the things they depicted so accurately reflects my own experiences. It hit a bit too close to home. Mostly when I was a child I would see and hear things which weren‘t really there. One time when I was about six I saw a boy running around the garden. My sister couldn’t see him but to me he seemed as real as my own hand. Then he disappeared. One scene in Insidious reminded me of this - anyone who has seen the film will know the one I am talking about. Another time when I was getting ready for school I saw a person in white walking up the stairs to me. I would also just see strange activity such as chords swinging back and forth and stopping abruptly, doors swinging open and shut, figures and apparitions in the mirror or tv screen. Even as a gullible child, I didn’t think much of this and attributed it to tricks of the eye or some such. In both of the houses I lived in as a child I would often hear what I can only describe as a “groaning” and I could never rationalize the source of it. I would also just hear random voices from time to time. At night time I still hear “scratching” coming from the walls, though this has been happening less frequently over time. I’ve been told that this is mice scrambling around inside the walls. More recently I have experienced sleep paralysis or “hag phenomenon”. Unlike any nightmare I've ever had, it felt absolutely real. At first I couldn't tell whether I was dreaming or not but then it started to feel like I was totally awake. Someone (I could sense them) was dragging me down my bed by my foot. I couldn't move, I couldn't make a sound and I damn nearly felt I couldn't breathe. I could just physically feel myself being dragged down the bed by this force. Then I felt another presence in my room. I turned my eyeballs (couldn’t move my head) and could make out the bleary outline of a dark figure in the doorway. I thought it might have been my mother but since I could neither move nor scream I had no way of knowing. I felt conscious, but totally paralyzed. It was an awful, terrifying experience. Seeing Insidious really brought that back for me. I was totally freaked out by the incident for weeks until the topic of sleep paralysis and "night terrors" came up in my RE class. It said in the book that someone experiencing a night terror wakes suddenly from a slow-wave sleep and often feels a presence in the room. The description was so familiar that I relaxed and stopped being bothered by it. A while ago my boyfriend told me of a similar experience that he had when he was a child, except he saw a dark red demon at the end of his bed. It is uncanny how similar his description was to a scene in Insidious. I am not a spiritual person by any means. However I am interested in finding out more about this phenomenon - scientific explanations and such. What is it about our psychology and our physiology that makes us have these so-called “paranormal“ experiences? And why is it that we see these things in particular (ghosts, dark figures, demons, etc)? I have read of people seeing these things throughout history and in cultures where the Christian angel/demon mythology was hardly prevalent. Why would a child in particular, who has no knowledge of demons, dream about them? Basic oneirology states that dreams can only reflect your living experience, i.e. you cannot dream about that which you have no knowledge of. My knowledge of this is basically limited to a few wikipedia articles. Any more nuanced input would be appreciated.
I'm very sorry to say that you can dream of many things that you don't know about. I have talked to others that have told me about there dreams of "other worlds" and other strange phenomenon which they didn't know about before they had their dream. This is also where imagination is sometimes found.
I think you may have a misunderstanding. As I understand it, your brain can take disparate bits of “known” information and imagine things based off of them, and that can manifest in your dreams. But it is simply impossible to think about something which you have no knowledge of.
Really is that why no one has ever developed any original ideas outside of everyday experiences like special and general relativity or quantum mechanics? Oh wait these are very original ideas that are so far outside of normal experiences as to seem almost like SF.
I think almost everyone has had a strange experience. The interesting thing about weird things that happened when we were young, is that our memory of the experiences changes overtime and the memory can make the experience seem stranger or less strange. We tend to think of our memories like a video, but it is actually more like an unfinished picture and everytime we bring out the memory we slightly change it. If you think that is wrong - bring up a shared experiences with family members and you will invariably find a memory that will be different depending who is recounting it. An even more interesting aspects is that if there is consensus on what happened and it is different from your memory you might 'remember' that the event was just as they recounted it. Human memeory and eye witness accounts are notoriously innaccurate. As far as sleep paralysis - hate it! It only happens to me when I am way overtired. It is an extremely uncomfortable experience. What is happening is that you start to dream while not fully asleep but your bodies natural defense of freezing your muscles is in effect. Your body freezes because walking around while dreaming is very good way to get hurt. There use to be fairy and demon abductions. More recently there have been alien abductions. With the current crop of good (scary!) demon films I expect to here more demon abductions. It is just the scary sleep paralysis and our great imaginations. I have it on good authority that there is no such thing as munsters. Except of course for really bad people - which are worse than any munster we can dream up.
You are conflating my words. I never said that brains cannot process new information / learn new things. That would of course be absurd. What I am saying is that it is impossible to imagine something based off of information you don’t have. You need an input of information. Accordingly, it is impossible to dream about something you have no knowledge of. When you are dreaming, you don’t have that input. It is true that people colour their past memories with knowledge they have acquired over the years. My memories of seeing the boy and the white person are pretty vivid in my mind, though, and at the time I did have knowledge of ghosts and stuff. It is possible that I am colouring those memories, yes. I have never heard of “munsters”. If you mean monsters, well, yes I know that they do not exist lol. That’s not what I was asking. Thank you for the information on hag phenomenon, though…
My son use to call monsters, munsters and I like that term it makes them seem friendlier.... I disagree; we can imagine anything...
Consider the (regrettably) classic example of a toddler who has no knowledge of sex, but dreams about being raped. When the child describes the experience to us, we can assume that it was not a dream but that it actually happened in the child’s waking life. Why would a naïve and innocent toddler dream about being raped? They can’t, because they have no knowledge of it.
