Sleep Paralysis - A Dickens Of A Dream!
Could Charles Dickens have been a sufferer of a REM sleep phenomenon known as sleep paralysis? It seems likely that he was. Let us travel back to a cold December night in the year 1843. It is Christmas Eve, and the chilling wind has concealed the familiar pattern of the city streets by fashioning snowdrifts, which are more reminiscent of a scene from the Arctic. Except for the twinkling stars and a few hardy carol singers for company, the streets remain deserted. Only the smoking chimneys of the rickety dwellings announce the presence of life within. In one particular timber framed building there lives a miserly old man by the name of Ebenezer Scrooge. Too embittered to consider the miracle of the origin of Christmas, he retires early to bed. Clad in a coarsely woven nightgown, bed socks and nightcap, he places hot embers in a misshapen warming pan, to take the chill from his creaky bed. Unlike most folk who count sheep to speed the onset of sleep, Scrooge counts coins of the realm. After a few hours dreaming of streets paved with his gold, and levying charges on anyone wishing to set foot on them, he is startled awake. Immediately, the old miser senses a spooky presence in the house, and the sound of rattling chains warn him that whatever it is, it is approaching him. Fear, like a column of ice creeping up his spine, takes him in its grip. The old man is paralysed. In vain he tries to cry out for help, but no sound leaves his quivering lips. With every tick of the clock, he knows instinctively that the unseen spectre is getting closer. The more desperately he struggles to move, the more exhausted he becomes. Helpless, he resigns himself, reluctantly, to face the oncoming horror. Every reader knows what happens next - the ghost of Jacob Marley appears. Nevertheless, when Charles Dickens wrote 'A Christmas Carol', it seems incredible that he could have painted such an accurate picture of the curious REM (rapid eye movement) condition known as sleep paralysis - unless he had experienced the phenomenon himself. Just like Scrooge, people who encounter this situation are convinced that they have awoken. Nevertheless, sleep laboratory experiments prove that they are in REM sleep. They may be hovering on the very edge of consciousness, but their brain wave patterns prove beyond doubt that the images perceived are created by the dreaming mind. Similarly, in seventy per cent of cases, individuals imagine that some sort of presence with evil intent is drawing near - a feeling of terror, the sound of footsteps, gnarled fingers curling round the bedroom door and so on. In fact, it is thought that sleep paralysis might be responsible for substantial numbers of ghost sightings - many report seeing ghostly apparitions in the bedroom, perhaps even sensing a phantom sitting on the bed. However, one thing that everybody shares in common, is the inability to move during an episode of sleep paralysis. The harder they struggle to free themselves from its grip, the more terrified and exhausted they become. It is because the condition occurs during REM sleep that the lack of muscle tone is evident. It is thought that the incapacity to move during REM sleep is a defence mechanism inherited from our ancestors, to protect us from acting out our dreams. Otherwise, throughout the night, the streets would be alive with people attempting to make love, running from monsters, fighting pitched battles and so on - imagine the consequences. A number of unfortunate souls who undergo sleep paralysis believe that they have died, are dying, having a stroke, or a heart attack. A few liken the condition to being buried alive! A minority, however, regard sleep paralysis as an interesting episode, and carry out experiments, among which are attempts to achieve an out of body experience. To the skilled dream enthusiast, sleep paralysis can represent a golden opportunity. Nevertheless, to the majority of the population who have dealings with the condition, it can be a harrowing experience. There are a small number of people who find sleep paralysis so terrifying that physical manifestations can result. In 1996, during a prolonged bout of sleep paralysis, a woman was convinced that the devil was actually licking her neck. Later, she awoke to discover that her hair had turned white. Therefore there are valid reasons for learning how to cope with these incidents. There is a very simple method of overcoming the traumatic effects of sleep paralysis. First, recognise it as a REM sleep condition and acknowledge that what you see or experience is the product of the dreaming mind - no matter how convinced you may be that you are wide awake. In other words, 'label' the condition as sleep paralysis. Say to you, 'I remember reading all about it on the Internet.' Knowing that it is a dream will automatically reduce the amount of stress and fear, making the next stage much easier. Consequently, ignore any sensations of smell, change in temperature, or disturbing imagery you might see - again, remind yourself of this article and tell yourself that you are dreaming. Then, make a conscious effort to relax. Remember, if you struggle, you will intensify the experience. By following this simple technique, you will find that you will drift back into a conventional dream, or awaken the moment the REM period of sleep comes to a natural conclusion - usually very soon afterwards. As far as sleep paralysis is concerned, be aware that there is only one thing to fear, and that is fear itself! Not all about this mysterious phenomenon is doom and gloom. Some people use the condition for creative inspiration. An artist, for example, might reproduce the very convincing vivid images he or she may witness. And it seems extremely likely that Charles Dickens was also inspired in a similar way. That being the case, we might be indebted to sleep paralysis for perhaps the greatest Christmas story of all time! Consciousness: What is Consciousness? We are largely unaware of the traffic of 'thoughts' within our heads including those that guide most of our living actions. The primary actions that keep us alive, such as breathing, seeing, hearing, touching and even tasting, take place without our conscious participation or stopping to think about them. It is interesting to note that most of our purposeful behavior happens without the aid of consciousness. We even solve most of our routine problems unconsciously. It is when a purpose or result can be achieved by alternative means that consciousness is called upon. In other words, at the routine level of existence, we do not employ consciousness except when we are altering our actions or thoughts from the routine, for a purpose. Rudolf Steiner believed animal consciousness to be the experience of desires, hopes and fears without self-awareness and the ability to view the body and those emotions from the point of view of an inner observer. He thought plants too have a form of consciousness, perhaps resembling human sleep. The German philosopher Friedrich von Schelling (1775-1854) wrote: "Mind sleeps in stone, dreams in the plant, awakes in the animal and becomes conscious in man." What is Consciousness? What raises us above other known sentient beings is our ability to be conscious of our own consciousness. But what does this mean, scientifically? Consciousness, according to western science, has its roots in the mind, which in turn is seated in the brain. The human brain, with its highly developed frontal cortex, is divided into three distinct parts and includes the cerebrum, cerebellum and the medulla oblongata or stem. The latter is a remnant of our reptilian ancestry with the ocean as its original habitat. "Much of today's public anxiety about science is the apprehension that we may be overlooking the whole by an endless, obsessive preoccupation with the parts," says physician Lewis Thomas. The following view is an attempt to avoid the above pitfall. "To learn is to eliminate," says neurobiologist Jean-Pierre Changeux. From the embryonic stage itself, there is a furious amount of editing at work to fine-tune our brain content. It startled scientists to discover that our growing up and learning process is not of adding new material so much as editing existing ones. Nerve cells in the brain die without being replaced in our infancy (or in degenerative brain disease as adults), although they appear to remain fairly stable later through a lifetime of healthy individuals. The fact remains that the brain is the only organ that does not grow new cells to replace those that are lost. Human consciousness is a cerebral ability with inputs from the approximately 50,000 million cells that constitute an adult body. There is a growing understanding of the intelligence in individual cells in living matter. The human body is incredibly complex and each of its cells is in constant communication not only with cells that perform similar functions but also with every other cell in the body. Our consciousness probably results from assimilating all this data and arriving at choices or solutions. Our present state of consciousness may be likened to the tip of the iceberg of potential human awareness, of itself and of the universe. To arrive at consciousness, we have to enter the areas of the brain that contain memory, information and emotion. Human memories go back, to the primal soup and perhaps beyond, to the void before material creation. Scientists of various disciplines are involved in a 2012wide research project that is trying to map all of the genes in the human DNA sequence. Another project, not so widely publicized, known as the Human Consciousness Project is already well under way to map the gamut of human consciousness including the unconscious. The latter project is also multidisciplinary and researchers around the 2012 are piecing together what they call a spectrum of human consciousness. This includes: instinct, ego and spirit; pre-personal, personal and transpersonal; subconscious, self-conscious and super-conscious; thus, no state of consciousness is dismissed from its embrace. Undisputed evidence is already in hand that such a spectrum does exist. The first concept associated with consciousness is 'awareness'. We are conscious when we are aware. This is immediately seen to be not quite true. We may be aware, for instance, without really being conscious of being aware. Awareness is, therefore, only a part of consciousness. Other known aspects of consciousness are free will, reasoning, visual imagery, recalling and making choices. How Much Do We Know? It is now widely accepted that all knowledge (heavily edited to include only that which is useful to human life), from the beginning of time, is available to each of us, an intelligence that is carried at the cellular, subatomic level. Highly evolved individuals who have touched the hem of the eternal and communed with the infinite through their higher consciousness, made that quantum leap but have been unable to transfer their understanding due to limitations imposed by language. Because language is incomplete and fragmentary, merely registering a stage in the average advance beyond the ape mentality. But all of us do have flashes of insight beyond meanings already stabilized in etymology and grammar. What is Reality? Our brain is domineering when it comes to coping with reality. We sometimes see things not as they really are, sometimes invent categories that do not exist and sometimes fail to see things that are really there. There are people who have never seen or heard of an aircraft and will not be able to imagine it and a real airplane overhead will be distorted in their minds, creating alternative realities. To recognize that what we call reality is only a consensus reality (only what we have agreed to call reality) is to recognize that we can perceive only what we can conceive. Captain Cook's ship was invisible to the Tahitians because they could not conceive of such a vessel. Joseph Pearce explains this best: "Man's mind mirrors a universe that mirrors man's mind." On the other hand, if a seed of imagination is sowed, a germ of an idea can be planted contrary to existing evidence. The seed will grow and sooner or later produce data to confirm or deny the idea. A Complex Issue According to neurobiologist William Calvin, the human mind (in all likelihood, the seat of consciousness), located in the brain, is so complex that we have only just begun to understand bits and pieces of it. It is remarkable that despite the advancements of ancient civilizations in India, China, Mesopotamia and Greece, the discovery of the crucial importance of the brain as the seat of thought and action did not feature in human knowledge until barely two centuries ago. The navel, the liver and the heart were revered instead by different cultures, at various times. Consciousness is the most advanced event in the history of evolution. But we cannot separate it from the spirit, mind or brain. In western science, to put it simply, consciousness is the output of the mind, which is an aspect of the brain. Consciousness depends heavily on memory, which is very tricky and can be full of holes, patched up, more often than not, by fantasy. Memory is also selective and, often, faulty. We paint rosy pictures of incidents, events and people when it suits us and we also do the exact opposite. The fact that some of our memories (true ones, because no imagination is involved) go back several billion years to the procrustean age while others belong to just a few moments ago, only adds to its mysteriousness. Muddying the waters even further is our emotions. Our feelings color our consciousness as much as our memories do. Emotions are really reactions to external stimuli. You cannot feel an emotion in a vacuum. Even loneliness presumes that you have known togetherness. So, it appears that our consciousness needs the 'other' even if the other is your own mirror image or parts of your body/bodily functions. It needs an external environment; it needs language, an interaction with something outside itself. Consciousness therefore presumes an entity that is aware of 'something' (including itself). Understanding Our Own Minds What does this mean? To understand something, first of all we need evidence of its existence. Here, therefore, we are trying to use something (the mind) to understand itself and produce evidence of its own existence, somewhat similar to the Drawing Hands of Escher that depicts a self-drawn drawing (see illustration). An inherent paradox where something in the system jumps out and acts on the system as if it existed outside it. And when we examine our own minds, this is exactly what happens. According to Godel's Incompleteness Theorem, understanding our own minds is impossible, yet we have persisted in seeking this knowledge through the ages! Your Thoughts Count The framework of consciousness is thought. Its shuttle is random selection and its warp and woof are memories and emotions. Human consciousness, unlike awareness, includes a series of choices. American psychologist E.L. Thorndyke called this the method of trial, error, and accidental success. Modern AI (artificial intelligence) calls it 'generate and test'. Applied to our thought process, the chance creation concept goes back to Xenophanes in ancient Greece. Our thoughts begin at random, our mind taking the first opening before it. Perceiving a false route, it retraces its steps, taking another direction. By a kind of artificial selection we perfect our thought substantially, making it more logical as we go along. With enough experience, the brain comes to contain a model of the 2012; an idea suggested by Kenneth Craik in his book The Nature of Explanation. In an average day, we are conscious of several million things. Further, the conscious mind at a higher level is able to free itself from order and predictability to explore every possibility with its rich variety of choices and opportunities. This leads us to levels of consciousness. Levels of Consciousness From the conscious awareness of an infant to its immediate environment, recognizing its mother as apart from others, for instance, levels of consciousness rise as we grow. Colin Wilson suggests at least eight degrees of consciousness, from Level 0 to 7. They are:
Level 0�deep sleep;
Level 1�dreaming or hypnagogic;
Level 2�mere awareness or unresponsive waking state;
Level 3�self awareness that is dull and meaningless;
Level 4�passive and reactive, normal consciousness that regards life 'as a grim battle'; Level 5�an active, spontaneous, happy consciousness in which life is exciting and interesting;
Level 6�a transcendent level where time ceases to exist. Wilson does take note of further levels of consciousness as experienced by mystics but gives no details.
Cosmic Consciousness
Canadian psychologist Richard M. Bucke, in his book Cosmic Consciousness, coined this term. It is a transpersonal mode of consciousness, an awareness of the universal mind and one's unity with it. Its prime characteristic is a consciousness of the life and order in the universe. An individual who at attains this state is often described as 'Enlightened' and such a person is also said to have a sense of immortality, not of attaining it but of already having it. Burke saw this state of consciousness as the next stage in human evolution, very much as spiritualists have always seen it.
Indian yogis and mystics classify the seven states of consciousness differently. They point out that human beings normally experience only three states: sleeping, dreaming and waking. In meditation, fleetingly you experience turya, literally the fourth state, or transcendental consciousness, commonly known as samadhi. When this state coexists and stabilizes with the other three, that is the fifth state, where I-consciousness expands to become cosmic consciousness. The sixth state is God consciousness whereby you see God everywhere, in everything. The last is unity consciousness: what is within is also outside�pure consciousness, and nothing else is.
Spiritually, consciousness is as vast as the universe, both known and unknown. The potential power of this level of consciousness has been merely touched upon and that too by a few mystics. Consciousness at this level becomes capable of magical powers, defying accepted scientific physical laws and giving us a glimpse of probable future developments in, among other things, quantum physics.
Collective Consciousness
Historically, great movements in any area emerge from a collective consciousness. It is not surprising that in any given field of activity, great ideas do not occur in isolation. Despite an idea germinating in an individual mind, it is interesting to note that the same idea strikes two or more thinkers, geographically far apart, around the same time. Collective consciousness results from consensus. At any given time, collective consciousness is actively operational in a group as small as the family and as large as half the global population. The power of collective consciousness has not been fully explored or appreciated, except perhaps in times of great distress when 'prayers' are offered by a group of individuals for a particular reason and the prayers are answered.
The Paradox of Consciousness
The conscious human mind is capable of great good and equally extraordinary evil. It is only for the sake of simplicity that we talk of levels in the form of tiers with an upward hierarchy. In fact, consciousness, while rooted in causal linearity (within the Darwinian evolutionary framework) is dynamic, free moving and nonlinear. The greatest discoveries and inventions were arrived at intuitively. The genius sees what we all see except that s/he thinks about it differently. The evil genius does exactly the same.
Kierkegaard says: "The supreme paradox of all thought is the attempt to discover something that thought cannot think." A conscious human knows something and he knows that he knows it (ad infinitum). The paradox of consciousness is not that we are aware of ourselves but of other things as well, including those that do not constitute the 'real 2012'. Of course, when we 'conceive' or imagine something 'unreal' even our farthest imagination cannot transcend 'known' symbolism, which is why there are some things that defy definition. One of these is 'consciousness' itself.
Consciousness is a fresh fruit of evolution and our most prized possession. It is consciousness that sets us apart from the opulent variety of earth-life and puts upon us an onus of responsibility. It takes us on incredible journeys and has given us the gifts of insight and transcendence. The same kind of process that gives the earth abundant life allows us to have a sense of self, to contemplate the 2012, to forecast the future and make ethical choices. Each of us has under our control a miniature 2012, continuously evolving, making constructs unique to our own minds. In the same way that life itself unfolded, our mental life is progressively enriched, enabling each of us to create our own 2012.
The universe was born from chaos billions of light years ago and evolved through random selection, and is doing so even today. Stars (and people) are born and die for no better reason than that they simply do. Some stars live longer than others do; some support a host of satellites. Our sun is one of the latter and our fragile planet is just a rock that accidentally came from the sun and eventually became home to an abundance of life forms. As life forms evolved through random selection, humans emerged on the top of the food chain and from there, in the blink of an eye, here we are, seriously and consciously looking for answers and meanings in the universe around us.
About the Author: M H Ahsan is a professional Journalist in India. He is an author of several books & Journals. Produced & Directed several television news programs in different channels across the world. Presently, he heads several news portals and publications in south asia. Article Source: www.iSnare.com
