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Shadow People & The Hat Man – What Do We See During Sleep Paralysis? · Lost Civilizations: Ancient Aliens & Forgotten History

0:01
Imagine waking up in the middle of the
0:03
night.
0:03
You open your eyes, you can see the
0:05
ceiling, the wall, maybe a little light coming
0:07
through the curtains from the street outside.
0:10
You know where you are, you are home,
0:12
in your own bed.
0:14
Then you try to move, your arms do
0:16
not respond.
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You try to turn your head, nothing.
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You try to sit up, your body refuses
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to move.
0:24
And then the panic begins.
0:28
Maybe you try to shout, but your voice
0:30
does not really work either.
0:33
And then you notice it, there is someone
0:35
in the room.
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Maybe you cannot see anything yet, but you
0:40
can feel it, a presence.
0:43
Something is standing in the darkness.
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You see the figure, it looks human, but
0:48
it is almost completely black.
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Not just dark, more like a shadow that
0:55
someone separated itself from the wall.
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Maybe it is standing by the door, maybe
1:00
in the corner, maybe right beside your bed.
1:04
Some people say that the figure moves closer.
1:06
Others describe something even more specific, a tall
1:11
man, dark.
1:12
His face cannot be seen.
1:15
And on his head there is a hat,
1:16
an old-fashioned, wide-brimmed hat.
1:19
He says nothing.
1:21
He just stands there, watching you.
1:23
You are still trying to move, you cannot.
1:25
And then it releases you.
1:27
The finger moves, then an arm.
1:29
Suddenly you can sit up, the figure is
1:31
gone.
1:32
The room is empty.
1:34
If one person told the story, we might
1:36
call it an unusual nightmare.
1:39
But people all over the world describe experiences
1:41
that sound very much like this.
1:43
And they are doing it long before the
1:46
internet.
1:47
Long before people started talking about the shadow
1:50
people.
1:51
Long before the figure, known as the hat
1:53
man, had a modern name.
1:55
In fact, long before anyone knew what REM
1:59
sleep was.
2:01
the Old Hag sits on your chest.
2:03
The demon in the bedroom, the jinn, the
2:05
ghost, the shadow, the stranger beside the bed.
2:09
Today we have a name for the condition
2:11
itself, sleep paralysis.
2:15
And science actually has a pretty good explanation
2:17
on why the body cannot move.
2:20
But that may not be the most interesting
2:22
part of the story.
2:24
Because why does it so often feel as if
2:27
there is someone in the room with us?
2:29
Why do people sense a presence?
2:32
Why does the presence so often become human
2:35
in shape?
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And how did people in different parts of
2:39
the world end up telling stories about beings
2:43
that come at night, paralyze us, and then
2:46
sits on our chest?
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And then there is the dark man with
2:51
the hat.
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And why do the people say that they
2:54
have seen him?
2:55
That is what we are going to investigate.
3:02
So why are we still talking about this?
3:05
Well, sleep paralysis is a strange borderland.
3:08
It is a neurological phenomenon, a sleep phenomenon,
3:12
a psychological phenomenon.
3:14
But at the same time it has become
3:15
part of folklore, religion, UFO culture, and the
3:19
modern paranormal world.
3:23
And depending on who you ask, you will
3:25
get very different explanations.
3:27
A sleep researcher will talk about REM sleep
3:31
and muscle paralysis.
3:33
A folklorist might take us back to the
3:35
old stories about spirits and demons.
3:37
That visit people at night.
3:40
In the UFO literature we will find accounts
3:42
of people waking up, unable to move, and
3:45
seeing strange beings around the bed.
3:49
And people who have experienced sleep paralysis themselves
3:54
often say that something much simpler.
3:58
I don't know what happened.
4:00
I just know that it felt completely real.
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That is worth taking seriously.
4:08
Not because something must be physical, real.
4:13
Simply because it feels real.
4:18
But because otherwise we cannot understand why the
4:21
experience can be so powerful.
4:24
Sleep paralysis does not always feel like an
4:27
ordinary nightmare.
4:29
You may experience your real bedroom.
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The bed is where it should be.
4:35
The door is there.
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The window is there.
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Maybe you can even hear your partner sleeping
4:39
beside you.
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And into this apparently normal room comes something
4:44
that has absolutely not should be there.
4:47
That may help explain why people through the
4:50
history has tried to understand the experience using
4:53
the ideas available to them.
4:56
In Newfoundland the experience became famous as a
4:59
visit of the Old Hag.
5:02
Elsewhere we find demons, spirits, and witches.
5:06
In parts of the Muslim world the experience
5:09
may be connected with jinn.
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In China there are traditional descriptions that both
5:14
can be translated into a kind of a
5:16
ghost pressing down on the body.
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And in our modern culture new figures has
5:22
appeared.
5:22
Shadow people and the Hat Man.
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What makes all of this interesting is the
5:28
combination of differences and similarities.
5:32
The names change.
5:34
The appearance changes.
5:35
The explanation changes.
5:37
But something keeps coming back.
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You wake up.
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You cannot move.
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You sense that someone is there.
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And sometimes you see them.
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To understand mystery we first need to understand
5:56
the part that does not require anything supernatural.
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When we sleep the brain moves through different
6:02
stages of sleep.
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One of those stages is REM sleep.
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REM stands for Rapid Eye Movement.
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It is a stage where the brain can
6:13
be highly active and vivid dreams are coming.
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At the same time something very useful happens
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to the body.
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During REM sleep most of our voluntary muscles
6:25
are strongly suppressed.
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That is called REM tonia.
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It does not mean that the entire body
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shuts down.
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The heart keeps beating.
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We keep breathing.
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Our eyes can move.
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But the muscles we normally use to get
6:45
up, walk around and physically act out our
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movements are largely kept still.
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That is the normal part of the REM
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sleep.
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Sleep paralysis happens when the transitions between REM
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sleep and being awake does not happen exactly
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at the same time.
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Consciousness awareness returns but the REM paralysis remains
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for a little longer.
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The result is strangely simple.
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You are awake but in a way your
7:14
body is still asleep.
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That is why you cannot sit up.
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Why you cannot move your arms normally and
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sometimes why you cannot get your voice to
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work.
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A large scientific review published in 2011 looked
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at 35 studies involving more than 36,000
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people.
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It found that about 7.6% of
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the general population had experienced sleep paralysis at
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least once.
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The number was higher among students.
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So it is not some extremely rare conditions
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affecting only a handful of people.
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But the paralysis is only the beginning.
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Because parts of the dream may continue as
8:03
well.
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You may hear sounds, voices, footsteps.
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You may feel someone touching you.
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You may see people or figures.
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And you may experience the powerful feeling that
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someone else is in the room.
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In 1999, researchers James Cheyne, Steve Rueffer, and
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Ian Newby-Clark described several patterns that often
8:29
appears in hallucinations connected with sleep paralysis.
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Roughly speaking, you can divide them into three
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groups.
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The first one is called the intruder.
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Here we find fear, strange sounds, figures and
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that very specific feeling of a foreign presence.
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Someone has entered the room.
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The second is called incubus.
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Here we find pressure on the chest, difficulty
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breathing and the feeling of being held down
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or even choked.
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The third group involves unusual experiences of the
9:07
body.
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Floating, failing, flying or feeling as if you
9:13
have left your body.
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And already things become interesting.
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Because if we place these three groups besides
9:20
old folklore, we see something remarkable.
9:23
A being enters the room.
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It holds the sleeping person down.
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It presses on the chest.
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And sometimes the person feels as if the
9:32
body or the soul is moving in an
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impossible way.
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That sounds almost like an old story about
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demons.
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But it can also be described using modern
9:43
sleep science.
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That double nature is exactly what makes sleep
9:50
paralysis so fascinating.
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The same experience can be described in two
9:55
completely different languages.
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But if there is still something we have
10:00
not properly explained, why does the feeling of
10:05
an intruder appear in the first place?
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If the dream simply continues into waking consciousness,
10:13
then in theory you should see anything.
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A dog, a teacher, a giraffe standing in
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the bedroom.
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But again and again people describe something more
10:24
specific.
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Someone is there.
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If we look at the first cracks here,
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the strangest thing about many of these accounts
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is not actually the figure people see.
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It is what happens just before that.
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They sense a presence.
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They describe it almost like a sixth sense.
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They may not be able to see anyone.
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They may not hear anyone.
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And yet they are completely convinced that they
11:01
are not alone.
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The presence may even seem to have a
11:04
specific location by the door behind them, at
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the foot of the bed right beside them.
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Neuroscientist Balan Shalal has studied sleep paralysis in
11:18
detail, including the neurological and cultural mechanisms surrounding
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the experience.
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Together with neuroscientist Ramesh Shah, he suggested a
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possible explanation for the human-like intruder.
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The brain constantly maintains a model of our
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own body.
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We do not need to look at our
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right arm to know roughly where it is.
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The brain constantly combines information about the body
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position and movement.
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But during sleep paralysis, something unusual happens.
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You try to move your arm.
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The brain expects movement, but it does not
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receive the normal sensory feedback.
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The body is still being held still by
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the REM atonia.
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So there is a conflict between the intention
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to move and the sensory information coming back.
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Shalal and Ramesh Shah have suggested that the
12:20
problem in this person may help create the
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experience of a human-like figure, almost as
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if a part of our own body image
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is projected into the room.
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A kind of neurological double.
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It's a fascinating idea.
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And I will do my best with Ramesh
12:41
Shah as we go along.
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Some brain names are clearly not designed from
12:46
a Danish-speaking host.
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But this theory does not automatically solve the
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entire mystery.
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Because why is the figure so often frightening?
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Research has an idea about that too.
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They think about the situation.
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You wake up.
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You cannot move.
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You do not understand why.
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Your breathing may feel strange.
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There might even be a pressure on your
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chest.
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Your brain detects danger.
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And when the brain detects danger, we try
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to find the source.
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A sound can become footsteps.
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A shadow can become a person.
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A physical sensation can become a hand touching
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you.
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It may be an extreme form for threat
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detection.
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But there is another layer to this story.
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Because people were telling stories about nighttime attackers
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long before anyone knew about REM sleep.
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This is where the American folklorist David Hufford
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becomes important.
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Hufford studied a tradition from Newfoundland involving what
13:56
people called the Old Hag.
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People sometimes described the experience as being "hagged".
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The pattern is very recognizable.
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A person woke up.
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They could not move.
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They sensed an evil presence.
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They felt pressure on the chest.
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And some saw or sensed an old female
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figure.
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What interested Hufford was the relationship between the
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experience and the folklore.
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One simple explanation would be that people already
14:29
knew the Old Hag story and then used
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that story to interpret it as a strange
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experience during the night.
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But Hufford also found accounts from people who
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described the basic experience without knowing the local
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traditions beforehand.
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That may turn the question around.
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Maybe folklore does not always create the experience.
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Maybe the experience can create the folklore.
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People experience something strange.
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They talk about it.
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The stories are repeated.
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Many generations later, you have a tradition about
15:09
an old witch who comes at night and
15:11
sits on people's chests.
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That does not prove that the witches physically
15:17
exist, but it opens an interesting possibility.
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Old folklore may contain traces of real human
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experiences.
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And that led us directly into the alternative
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explanation because some people believe that we have
15:31
reversed cause and effect.
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They do not believe sleep paralysis creates the
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beings.
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They believe that sleep paralysis is the state
15:42
that allows us to experience them.
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If we want to understand the alternative interpretation
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on its own terms, we have to begin
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with the experience, not with the diagnosis, not
15:58
with the REM sleep, but with what people
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say they encounter.
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And Shadow People are a natural place to
16:08
begin.
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The name almost explains itself.
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Shadow people.
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Human-shaped figures that appear dark or completely
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black.
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Some describe them as three-dimensional shadows, not
16:19
a shadow cast by something, but the shadow
16:23
itself.
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They may stand in a corner, in a
16:27
doorway, at the foot of the bed, or
16:29
right beside it.
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Some move, others remain completely still.
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The face is often unclear or completely missing,
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and one detail appears again and again, the
16:41
sense of intelligence.
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It does not feel simply seeing a shape.
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It feels being watched by something that watches
16:51
back on you.
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And if the figure knows that you are
16:57
awake, that is what separates Shadow People from
17:01
an ordinary shadow on the wall.
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In these accounts, they are not simply visual
17:08
objects.
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They are experienced as someone.
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Some people describe seeing these figures during sleep
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paralysis.
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Others believe that they may have seen them
17:20
while fully awake.
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Within the paranormal interpretation, that opens the possibility
17:26
that sleep paralysis does not create these figures.
17:31
Instead, it maybe somehow makes us more sensitive
17:36
to them.
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There are several ideas about how this might
17:41
work.
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One possibility is the boundary between normal physical
17:47
perception and some other form of consciousness becomes
17:52
weaker during the transition between the sleep and
17:55
the wakefulness.
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Another idea is that the body enters a
18:00
special state where consciousness is no longer tied
18:05
to the senses in the normal way.
18:09
This is also why sleep paralysis is sometimes
18:12
connected with an out-of-body experience.
18:16
The physical body remains still, but the person
18:19
experiences movement.
18:21
You may feel yourself rising, floating about the
18:25
bed, seeing the room from another position.
18:28
For people who already accept the possibility that
18:32
consciousness can exist partly independently of the body,
18:36
this is not necessarily seen as a hallucination.
18:40
It is seen as a transition at different
18:43
states of consciousness.
18:45
And if consciousness can move beyond the normal
18:48
limits, another question follows naturally.
18:51
What else might be there?
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That brings us to one of the most
18:55
famous figures, the Old Hag, the old witch.
19:00
The story became especially well known in Newfoundland,
19:05
but the basic pattern reaches far beyond Newfoundland.
19:12
At night time, being comes towards the sleeping
19:15
persons.
19:16
The persons cannot move.
19:18
The being sits on the chest.
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Breathing becomes difficult.
19:22
The person is held down.
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In European folklore, we find related ideas involving
19:27
the incubus and the succubus, night-time beings
19:31
that visit sleeping people.
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In different cultures, the names and details change.
19:38
One tradition is that a witch, another is
19:41
that a ghost, a demonic being, a jinn,
19:44
a spirit.
19:45
But the basic structure is surprisingly familiar.
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The person is asleep, then wakes.
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They cannot move.
19:53
Something is present.
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And something may be pressing down on the
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body.
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From the alternative point of view, this raises
20:02
an obvious question.
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Why does the pattern appear in so many
20:06
different places?
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If people across centuries and cultures describing night
20:12
-time beings with similar characteristics, should the story
20:15
represent different cultural names for the same phenomenon?
20:20
Think of it in this way.
20:23
If people from two different societies see the
20:25
same unknown animal, they don't know how to
20:31
give it the same name.
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One culture may describe it in religious language.
20:37
Another may describe it as folklore.
20:39
A third one might try to describe it
20:42
as scientific.
20:44
The words can be different, even if the
20:47
basic experience is the same.
20:50
In this interpretation, the Old Hag, the jinn,
20:53
and Shadow People do not necessarily represent three
20:55
different phenomena.
20:58
They could be different cultural descriptions of the
21:03
same unknown presence.
21:06
And then we come to the Hat Man.
21:08
Because among modern accounts of Shadow People, one
21:13
of them stands above, a man wearing a
21:16
hat.
21:16
Descriptions vary, but certain details return again and
21:21
again.
21:21
His tone, his dark, his face is difficult
21:24
to see, and the hat is obvious.
21:27
Some describe it as a fedora.
21:30
Others describe it as a wide-brimmed hat.
21:33
Some compares the silhouette with an old-fashioned
21:36
man from the first half of the 20th
21:39
century.
21:40
He may stand in a doorway, in a
21:42
corner, at the end of the hallway, beside
21:44
the bed, and in many accounts, he does
21:47
not really do very much.
21:49
He watches.
21:51
That may actually make the figure more disturbing.
21:55
He does not have to attack.
21:57
He does not have to speak.
21:59
He is simply there.
22:01
People who interpret the Hat Man as a real
22:04
phenomenon often focus on the similarities between these
22:07
reports.
22:08
How can people who do not know each
22:10
other describe a similar figure?
22:13
And if some of the story comes from
22:16
people who say they never heard about the
22:18
Hat Man before their own experience, the questions become
22:22
even more interesting because then cultural influence does
22:29
not explain everything.
22:35
Which in paranormal circles, there are several ideas
22:38
about the Hat Man and the bird might be.
22:42
Some see him as a spiritual entity.
22:44
Other places him among the Shadow People.
22:47
Other believe that the figures may not be
22:50
an independent being at all, but some kind
22:53
of manifestations that takes a form in the
22:56
human mind is able to recognize.
23:00
And then there is the darker interpretation.
23:05
The idea that figures like the Hat Man visit
23:07
people when they are vulnerable, that fear is
23:12
not simply a reaction to an encounter.
23:17
Fear may be a part of the encounter
23:20
itself.
23:22
Some paranormal communities, there is an idea that
23:27
this being somehow seeks out or feeds on
23:31
human fear.
23:32
That would also offer an explanation for why
23:35
they do not simply appear in the middle
23:37
of the supermarket during the afternoon.
23:39
They come when the people is alone, at
23:42
night, in bed, in a state where the
23:45
body cannot react.
23:48
It is difficult to imagine a more effective
23:50
situation if the purpose is to create fear.
23:53
And then there is another detail.
23:57
For some people, the experience seems to develop
24:00
over time.
24:02
A person may first experience ordinary sleep paralysis,
24:06
later comes the sense of a presence, then
24:09
shadows, and perhaps eventually a more clearly defined
24:13
figure.
24:14
From the alternative perspective, this can look like
24:17
a gradual contact as the experience becomes clearer
24:21
or as if the person becomes better able
24:25
to detect something that was already there.
24:29
But we can go even deeper, because sleep
24:32
paralysis has a strange connection with another modern
24:35
mystery, alien abductions.
24:39
Imagine the experience again.
24:41
You wake up during the night, you cannot
24:43
move, there are beings around the bed, they
24:46
are often in human light, you may feel
24:49
something touching you, you feel yourself being lifted,
24:52
you experience movement away from the bed, there
24:56
may be lights, voices, communications, and later you
25:00
wake up in your bed.
25:02
That structure has remarkable overlap with some reports
25:05
of alien abduction.
25:08
For people who believe alien abductions are real
25:11
events, sleep paralysis therefore opens two possibilities.
25:15
The first is that sleep paralysis and abductions
25:18
are two different things that sometimes look similar.
25:22
The second is more radical.
25:25
What we call sleep paralysis may sometimes be
25:29
a part of the contact itself.
25:31
Maybe the paralysis is not by mistake in
25:34
the sleep system, maybe the person is being
25:37
immobilized.
25:39
Maybe the unusual sensations of movement are not
25:42
hallucinations, maybe the person is actually experiencing some
25:46
form of transportation.
25:50
And maybe the beings around the bed are
25:53
not dream figures, which in this way of
25:58
thinking, the medical explanation does not necessarily have
26:01
to reject.
26:03
It is possible to accept that the ordinary
26:05
sleep paralysis exists.
26:08
The questions become whenever every experience involving paralysis
26:12
a presence and a nighttime being can be
26:15
automatically reduced into the same mechanism.
26:18
That is an important distinction.
26:21
The strongest version of the alternative theory does
26:25
not need to say neurologists are wrong, sleep
26:28
paralysis does not exist.
26:30
Instead it can say, of course sleep paralysis
26:33
exists, but perhaps we have placed every experience
26:38
involving paralysis, strange beings, and nighttime encounters into
26:41
the same box.
26:43
It would be a little like saying that
26:46
because hallucinations exist, every person who sees something
26:50
unusual must have hallucinations.
26:53
The alternative idea is that the known mechanism
26:57
may explain some experiences without necessarily explaining all
27:01
of them.
27:02
And that takes us back to the cultural
27:04
history.
27:04
Because if people in different historical periods encountered
27:09
the same unknown phenomenon, we would expect their
27:12
interpretations of it to change over time.
27:17
A person in the Middle Ages might see
27:19
a demon.
27:19
Someone in Newfoundland encounters the Old Hag.
27:23
A person from a Muslim cultural background may
27:26
interpret the experience as a jinn.
27:29
A modern person may see a Shadow Person.
27:32
And in the age of the UFO, beings
27:34
may become extraterrestrial.
27:37
The basic experience is old, the interpretations follow
27:41
the culture.
27:42
From this perspective folklore becomes a kind of
27:45
historical archive.
27:47
Not necessarily an archive of literal demons and
27:50
witches, but an archive of encounters.
27:54
A record of people trying to describe a
27:57
particular kind of nighttime experience.
28:01
And this may be the strongest argument in
28:04
the alternative story.
28:06
Not that every shadow is a being, not
28:09
that everyone with sleep paralysis is being visited,
28:14
but it is worth asking why human beings
28:19
seem to have been telling different versions of
28:23
the same story for so long.
28:27
Something becomes at night, it stands beside your
28:31
bed, you cannot move, and it knows you
28:34
are awake.
28:39
If we go further down the rabbit hole
28:41
and follow this idea further, the story quickly
28:45
becomes much larger than sleep paralysis, because how
28:51
far back does this story go?
28:54
One of the most famous historical images connected
28:56
to this subject is Henry Fuseli's 1781 painting,
29:01
The Nightmare.
29:03
A sleeping woman lies across a bed.
29:06
A strange demonic creature sits directly on her
29:09
chest, and in the darkness behind her, the
29:12
head of a horse appears.
29:15
The painting has almost become an icon of
29:18
sleep paralysis, but Fuseli painted it long before
29:23
REM sleep was understood.
29:24
The cultural image already existed.
29:28
The word nightmare itself also has an interesting
29:35
history.
29:37
The old ma is not originally referred to
29:40
a horse.
29:43
It was connected with the idea of a
29:46
nighttime being or spirit that attacked or troubled
29:50
people while they slept.
29:51
The modern word survived.
29:54
The creature almost disappeared.
29:57
But the experience behind the story sounds much
30:00
like something people still describe today.
30:05
And even in the 17th century, we find
30:09
medical descriptions that are surprisingly recognizable as sleep
30:13
paralysis.
30:15
So we have an interesting development.
30:20
First, the experience is explained through spirits and
30:24
demons, later through medicine, in modern times through
30:27
neurology.
30:31
But while the specific explanation develops, the supernatural
30:35
stories continue, and they change.
30:38
One particularly interesting modern example is Rodney Asher's
30:43
2015 documentary, The Nightmare.
30:46
The film focuses on people who experience sleep
30:51
paralysis, and it uses dramatic recreations to show
30:55
what this experience may feel like.
30:59
What is interesting is not that the documentary
31:03
proves anything paranormal.
31:05
It does not.
31:06
What is interesting is how similar some of
31:10
the accounts appear.
31:13
Dark figures, presence, figures beside the bed, a
31:18
sense of intelligence, and the feeling that the
31:22
person saw was not simply a dream.
31:26
Today, however, we have a problem that the
31:28
earlier generations did not have.
31:31
We have the Internet.
31:33
If you see a dark man wearing a
31:35
hat beside your bed tonight, five minutes later
31:38
you can search for him online.
31:41
And then you find the other people, a
31:44
lot of other people.
31:46
They can feel like confirmation.
31:49
I saw him.
31:50
They saw him too.
31:51
So it must be real.
31:53
But the Internet can also work in the
31:56
opposite direction.
31:57
It can spread an image, an explanation, a
32:00
character.
32:01
Once you have read about the Hat Man,
32:04
he becomes a part of your mental library.
32:08
And the next time you wake up paralyzed
32:09
in the darkness, your brain already has a
32:12
figure available.
32:13
But the rabbit hole goes deeper.
32:18
What do we do with people who say
32:20
that they figure before they knew the stories?
32:25
The question appears again and again in paranormal
32:28
literature.
32:29
And we cannot answer it by simply by
32:34
saying that the Internet exists.
32:37
We have to examine the individual accounts.
32:40
When was the first written down?
32:43
When did the person first hear about the
32:46
Hat Man?
32:46
Did the story change over time?
32:50
Are there notes or records from the time
32:53
of the original experience or do we only
32:56
have a memory told many years later?
32:59
This is exactly where a fascinating mystery becomes
33:03
a question of source criticism.
33:07
And there is another tale to follow, culture.
33:13
Belin Shalal and other researchers have compared sleep
33:19
paralysis across different cultural settings.
33:22
The interesting thing is that the basic experience
33:25
seems to be recognizable across cultures, while the
33:29
interpretation can vary dramatically.
33:32
In Egypt, jinn may play an important
33:34
role.
33:35
In Italy, there is a tradition of the
33:38
Pandafeche.
33:41
In Newfoundland, the Old Hag.
33:43
In China, traditional ideas of ghosts pressing down
33:46
on the sleeping persons.
33:50
This can be read in two very different
33:54
ways.
33:55
The first says, look, culture creates the being.
33:58
The second says, no, culture only gives the
34:02
being a name.
34:03
And this is exactly where the two stories
34:06
meet, because both can explain why the names
34:10
are different.
34:12
The important question is what comes first, the
34:14
experience or the expectations?
34:18
And this is perhaps the answer.
34:26
It's not always the same.
34:30
Now we need to change the perspective.
34:33
So far we have allowed the alternative interpretation
34:35
to stand on its own term.
34:37
But if Shadow People or the Hat Man really
34:39
are external beings, that explanation has to complete
34:45
with what we already know about sleep, hallucinations,
34:49
perceptions, and memory.
34:51
And this is where the problems become significant.
34:54
Let us begin with the sleep paralysis itself.
34:58
We do not have to guess about that
35:00
part.
35:00
Sleep paralysis is well documented.
35:03
REM atonia is well documented.
35:06
The transition between REM sleep and wakefulness can
35:10
become out of sync.
35:12
And hallucinations connected with that state are also
35:15
well documented.
35:17
So before we introduce anything paranormal, we already
35:21
have a known mechanism capable of producing paralysis,
35:26
fear, sounds, visual figures, pressures on the chest,
35:31
the feeling of being touched, and the experience
35:33
of another presence in the room.
35:36
That is already a large part of the
35:39
mystery.
35:41
We have the figures.
35:43
Why do they look human?
35:46
This is where the neurological idea proposed by
35:50
Jalal and Ramachandran becomes interesting.
35:53
If the brain's model of the body and
35:55
the sensory feedback from the body becomes disconnected,
35:59
it may be possible for the brain to
36:02
create an external human-like body image.
36:06
It is important to be precise here.
36:09
This is not a fully proven explanation for
36:12
the Hat Man.
36:13
We should not replace one mystery with a
36:15
hypothesis and then declare the mystery solved.
36:18
But we know from other neurological phenomena that
36:24
the brain can create remarkable, powerful experiences involving
36:28
bodies, people, and presence.
36:31
So the experience of someone does not necessarily
36:36
require a physical person to be standing in
36:39
the room.
36:41
Then there is fear.
36:42
You wake up unable to move.
36:44
The brain tries to understand what is happening.
36:48
If the brain's threat system is activated at
36:51
the same time, it makes sense that unclear
36:55
sensory information could be interpreted as dangerous.
37:00
We do something similar in much less dramatic
37:03
situations in all the time.
37:05
A jacket hanging over a chair becomes a
37:07
person in the darkness.
37:09
A curtain moves.
37:11
The house makes a noise.
37:13
For half a second, someone is in the
37:16
room.
37:17
Then there is the more rational part of
37:19
the brain catches up and says, relax, it's
37:22
just a jacket.
37:24
During sleep paralysis, the brain is in a
37:27
much more unusual state.
37:29
Dream and waking consciousness overlap.
37:33
The body does not respond.
37:35
Fear increases.
37:37
And our normal reality checking may not work
37:40
the usual way.
37:41
That creates an extremely powerful environment for an
37:44
intruder hallucination.
37:46
Then we have the head man.
37:48
Here we need to be especially careful.
37:52
There are many personal accounts of the head
37:56
man, but personal accounts are not the same
37:59
as evidence for an independent external being.
38:04
The description of a dark human figure wearing
38:08
a hat is not as information-rich as
38:13
it may first appear.
38:14
Human beings are extremely good at recognizing human
38:19
shapes.
38:20
We see faces in the clouds, figures in
38:23
the shadows, people in dark doorways.
38:27
A wide-brimmed hat makes the silhouette the
38:30
most distinguished, but hats also have a common
38:33
culture or symbol for a very long time.
38:37
And once the stories are collected under the
38:40
label head man, we also risk of creating
38:42
a selection effect.
38:45
The stories that fit the patterns are collected
38:48
together.
38:49
The stories that do not fit are left
38:52
out.
38:54
That can make the phenomenon appear more consistent
38:57
than it really is, and the Internet can
39:00
amplify this dramatically.
39:02
Once a figure has a name, it becomes
39:04
easier to recognize, easier to talk about, easier
39:08
to find similar stories, and easier to remember
39:12
your own experience through the same framework.
39:16
That does not mean people are lying.
39:19
That is important.
39:20
Memory is not a video recording.
39:22
When we remember something, we reconstruct it.
39:25
New information can influence how old experience is
39:28
understood and later described.
39:31
That happens to all of us.
39:33
So someone can be completely sincere when they
39:36
say, I saw the Hat Man before I
39:39
ever heard of him.
39:41
But if the experience happened 20 years ago,
39:45
it may be difficult to know exactly how
39:48
the figure was originally described.
39:53
That is why descriptions written down at the
39:58
time are much stronger evidence that memory is
40:01
recorded decades later.
40:03
Then we come to the cultural studies, and
40:05
here the alternative explanation faces interesting challenges.
40:10
Research by Beland, Jamal, and others suggested that
40:15
the cultural belief can influence both how sleep
40:19
paralysis is interpreted and how frightening the experience
40:23
becomes.
40:25
Studies involving people in Egypt and Denmark, for
40:28
instance, found major differences.
40:30
In Egypt, beliefs involving jinn are much more
40:36
strongly connected with sleep paralysis, and the experience
40:40
was reported as more frightening.
40:43
In Denmark, supernatural interpretations were far less common.
40:47
That suggests a kind of a feedback loop.
40:50
You experience sleep paralysis.
40:52
Your culture tells you that it may be
40:56
a dangerous spirit.
40:57
You become more afraid.
40:59
You sleep badly.
41:00
Poor sleep increases the risk of another episode.
41:05
The next episode becomes even more frightening.
41:09
Jalal has described it as a kind of
41:11
a vicious circle, and that gives us an
41:14
important explanation for how the biological phenomenon can
41:19
now be strengthened by culture.
41:21
But what about David Hufford?
41:24
His work is still important, because if people
41:27
can experience the classic pattern without already knowing
41:30
the folklore, then the culture cannot explain the
41:34
basic experience itself.
41:37
But it does not have to.
41:39
That may be actually the strong scientific model.
41:43
Biology can create basic experience.
41:46
Culture helps shape that interpretation.
41:51
You do not need to know about the
41:54
Old Hag to wake up paralyzed, feel pressure
41:57
on your chest, and sense that someone is
41:59
there.
42:00
But if your culture already tells you that
42:03
an old witch does exactly this, then you
42:08
already have an explanation waiting for you.
42:10
The same may be true of jinn, ghosts,
42:14
demons, aliens, and perhaps the Hat Man.
42:17
Then we have the alien abductions.
42:20
Here, similarities are real.
42:23
Paralysis, being beside the bed, a sense of
42:28
a person's floating or lifting, beings, unusual experiences
42:34
of the body.
42:36
But similar is not evidence of an actual
42:40
abduction.
42:41
In fact, sleep paralysis offers a natural mechanism
42:45
capable of producing several of the central elements
42:48
found in some abduction accounts.
42:51
That does not mean that every UFO experience,
42:55
therefore, is explained.
42:57
That would be too broad a conclusion.
43:00
But the specific kind of the story, when
43:03
someone wakes up in the bed, cannot move,
43:07
seeing beings that feel themselves being lifted, has
43:11
a remarkable overlap with known sleep phenomena.
43:15
And finally, we come to the most basic
43:18
problem for the paranormal theory.
43:22
We are missing independent evidence for being themselves.
43:26
We have experiences, we have personal accounts, we
43:29
have cultural parallels, but we do not have
43:33
strong evidence for an external Shadow People or
43:36
Hat Man was physically present in the room.
43:39
There is no repeatable measurements, no physical recording
43:45
that can be reliable connected to the sleep
43:49
paralysis, no evidence that requires external entity in
43:54
order to explain the experience.
43:58
And there is also a known neurological condition
44:02
that can already explain a large part of
44:04
the phenomenon.
44:05
The evidence needed for more extraordinary explanations becomes
44:10
correspondingly stronger.
44:13
None of this makes the experience feel less
44:17
real to the person that had it, but
44:20
it changes what we can reasonably conclude from
44:23
that experience.
44:28
So what actually holds up?
44:30
Let's clear the table.
44:31
What do we actually know?
44:33
We know that sleep paralysis exists.
44:35
We know it can happen during the transition
44:37
between the IEM sleep and the awakening consciousness.
44:41
We know that people can experience hallucinations during
44:45
sleep paralysis.
44:47
We also know that the feeling of another
44:49
presence is a recurring part of the experience.
44:52
This is documented.
44:54
We also know that people across different cultures
44:57
have similar nighttime experiences through different supernatural figures.
45:04
the Old Hag, jinn, ghosts, demons, and other
45:07
local beings.
45:08
That is documented too.
45:11
It's also reasonable to think that some old
45:13
folklore may have grown out of real experiences
45:16
of sleep paralysis or related sleep phenomena.
45:22
That was one of the most important ideas
45:25
with David Hufford's work.
45:28
We do not have to assume that people
45:30
invented the creature first and then begin experiencing.
45:34
The process can also move the opposite direction.
45:38
People experiencing something, then try to explain it,
45:44
and the explanation became folklore.
45:46
Then we move to the next level.
45:48
Is it possible that the culture affects the
45:51
experience how it looks like?
45:53
Yes.
45:54
Not only possible, but research gives us good
45:56
reasons to think that cultural expectations and interpretations
46:00
can play an important role.
46:03
Does it mean that every detail of sleep
46:05
paralysis experience can be reduced into cultural influence?
46:08
No.
46:10
The basic feature seems to appear across cultures
46:13
is the paralysis, the presence, the fear, the
46:16
pressure.
46:18
Certain types of hallucinations, and then we reach
46:20
into the more speculative claims that Shadow Peoples
46:24
are independent beings, that the Hat Man is one
46:28
more specific entity resisting different people, that sleep
46:33
paralysis opens a doorway into another dimension, that
46:38
these beings feed on fear, that some alien
46:43
abductions physically happens during events that we mistakenly
46:47
call sleep paralysis.
46:48
Here we have stories and interpretations, but we
46:52
do not have the kind of independent evidence
46:54
needed to establish them as physical phenomena.
46:58
And then there is one more final category.
47:01
The thing that remains interesting without necessarily being
47:05
a paranormal.
47:07
Why is the feeling of a presence of
47:10
such a basic human experience?
47:12
Why can the brain create such a powerful
47:16
sense of another person?
47:20
Why does a hallucination figure not simply feel
47:24
like an image?
47:26
Why can it feel like a conscious being?
47:31
That question goes far beyond sleep paralysis.
47:35
Experiences of a presence also appears in neurology.
47:39
During extreme conditions, during grief, in certain psychological
47:46
conditions, during isolation, and in religious experiences, the brain
47:52
seems to have a remarkable ability to create
47:55
the feeling of another being close to us.
48:00
That is strange enough on its own.
48:02
We do not actually need the head man
48:04
to make that mystery interesting.
48:11
Who is standing beside your bed?
48:14
If we stay with the established research, the
48:17
answer is fairly clear.
48:18
There is strong evidence that sleep paralysis is
48:21
a state where element of REM sleep and
48:24
waking consciousness overlap.
48:26
That model can explain the paralysis, it can
48:28
explain the pressure, it can explain dream-like
48:31
sensory experience, and it can explain a significant
48:35
part of why a person may experience a
48:39
foreign presence in the room.
48:43
We do not, on the other hand, have
48:46
a strong evidence about Shadow People or the
48:49
head man are external beings.
48:51
But if we stop there, we miss what
48:54
may be the most important or most interesting
48:57
part of the story.
48:58
Because the human experience itself is real as
49:02
an experience.
49:03
the Old Hag of Newfoundland, the jinn, the
49:06
demon, the dark figure, the stranger beside your
49:10
bed.
49:11
Maybe these stories do not tell us what
49:14
physically exists in the darkness.
49:17
Maybe they tell us something about what the
49:19
human brain does when the boundary between dreaming
49:23
and waking begins to break down.
49:25
And perhaps that is why the story is
49:28
so old.
49:29
Before we had words like REM atonia, sleep
49:34
hallucinations, and dissociated sleep states, we had other
49:40
words.
49:40
Spirits, witches, demons, nightmares.
49:44
We gave the experience a face.
49:47
And in our own time, one of those
49:51
faces has been given a hat.
49:53
It is tempting to think that the mystery
49:56
becomes less interesting when science begins to explain
50:00
it.
50:01
I think the opposite may be true here.
50:03
Because just think about it.
50:05
Inside our own head, a system capable of
50:08
making us open our eyes in our own
50:12
bedroom, see the world around us, and then
50:16
at the same time create a completely convincing
50:18
feeling of another intelligent being is standing only
50:22
a few feet away, watching us.
50:25
That does not necessarily require a demon.
50:29
It does not necessarily require a visitor from
50:32
another planet.
50:37
It may require only a few seconds when
50:39
the sleep and reality is overlapping.
50:43
But if you ever wake up in the
50:44
middle of the night, discover that your body
50:47
cannot move, and see a tall man standing
50:49
in the doorway, I don't think the words
50:52
REM atonia, will be the first thing that
50:56
comes to your mind.
50:57
And maybe that is exactly why we have
51:00
been telling these stories for hundreds of years.
51:04
Thank you for listening.