Quote by Rahul Jandial MD PhD

“An estimate of up to 40 percent of the general population has experienced sleep paralysis at least once in their lifetime... In the Abruzzo region of Italy, east of Rome, an evil witch called a pandafeche was thought to be responsible. In Egypt, it was a vicious spirit creature called a jinn. In China, a visitation by a ghost. Among the Inuit, a shamanistic attack on the dreamer’s vulnerable soul. The eighteenth- century Swiss- born artist Johann Heinrich Füssli depicted sleep paralysis as a goblin-like demon perched on the chest of a sleeping woman. More recently, space aliens bent on abduction have been blamed... The most common element of sleep paralysis, reported across peoples and cultures, is the sensation of a lurking intruder... It seems likely that the shadow figure that is a central aspect of sleep paralysis is the result of some sort of electrical disturbance in this part of the brain, creating a creepy or malevolent “other” at the blurry edge of our imagined body.”

Quote by Rahul Jandial MD PhD