The Dark Side of Sleep Paralysis

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Sleep paralysis is something that about 7% of your listeners will have experienced at some point in their lives. For over half of people who experience sleep paralysis, they suddenly realize that someone in the room with them. There's an entity there in the corner that, as you say, very often has this strong sense of a level of sense. Sometimes it will move towards people, sometimes it will feel like it presses down on the chest. It's one of the real, more consistent patterns to these presence experiences and indeed the sleep ones are the most consistently evil.

Shermer and Alderson-Day discuss the psychologist’s journey to understand the phenomenon of sensed-presence: the disturbing feeling that someone or something is there when we are alone. Using contemporary psychology, psychiatry, neuroscience, and philosophy, Alderson-Day attempts to understand how this experience is possible. Is it a hallucination, a change in the brain, or something else? The journey to understand takes us to meet explorers, mediums, and robots, and step through real, imagined, and virtual worlds.

Ben Alderson-Day is an Associate Professor in Psychology and a Fellow of the Wolfson Research Institute for Health and Wellbeing at Durham University. A specialist in atypical cognition and mental health, his work spans cognitive neuroscience, psychiatry, philosophy, and child development. His new book is Presence: The Strange Science and True Stories of the Unseen Other.