Mistakes Were Made - Carol Tavris [43]
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On August 8, 1983, while he was riding his bike across rural Nebraska, Michael Shermer was abducted by aliens. A large spaceship landed, forcing Shermer to the side of the road. Aliens descended from the ship and abducted him for ninety minutes, after which he had no memory of what had happened. Shermer’s experience was not unusual; millions of Americans believe they have had some kind of encounter with UFOs or aliens. For some it happens while they are driving long, boring miles with little change of scenery, usually at night; they “gray out,” losing track of time and distance, and then wonder what happened during the minutes or hours they were out of it. Some people, professional pilots among them, see mysterious lights they can’t explain hovering in the sky. For most, the experience occurs in the weird mental haze between sleeping and waking, when they wake with a jolt to see ghosts, aliens, shadows, or spirits on their bed. Often they feel physically paralyzed, unable to move.
The bicycle racer, the driver, and the sleeper are at the top of the pyramid: Something mysterious and alarming has happened, but what? You can live with not knowing why you woke up in a grumpy mood today, but you can’t live with not knowing why you woke up with a goblin sitting on your bed. If you are a scientist or other stripe of skeptic, you will make some inquiries and learn that the explanation of this frightening event is reassuring: During the deepest stage of sleep, when dreaming is most likely to occur, a part of the brain shuts down body movements, so you won’t go hurling yourself around the bed as you dream of chasing tigers. If you awaken from this stage before your body does, you will actually be momentarily paralyzed; if your brain is still generating dream images, you will, for a few seconds, have a waking dream. That’s why those figures on the bed are dreamlike, nightmarish—you are dreaming, but with your eyes open. Sleep paralysis, says Richard J. McNally, a Harvard psychological scientist and clinician who studies memory and trauma, is “no more pathological than a hiccup.” It is quite common, he says, “especially for people whose sleep patterns have been disrupted by jet lag, shift work, or fatigue.” About 30 percent of the population has had the sensation of sleep paralysis, but only about 5 percent have had the waking hallucinations as well. Just about everyone who has experienced sleep paralysis plus waking dreams reports that the feeling this combination evokes is terror.26 It is, dare we say, an alien sensation.
Michael Shermer, a skeptic by disposition and profession, understood almost immediately what had happened to him: “My abduction experience was triggered by extreme sleep deprivation and physical exhaustion,” he later wrote.27 “I had just ridden a bicycle 83 straight hours and 1,259 miles in the opening days of the 3,100-mile nonstop transcontinental Race Across America. I was sleepily weaving down the road when my support motor home flashed its high beams and pulled alongside, and my crew entreated me to take a sleep break. At that moment a distant memory of the 1960s television series The Invaders was inculcated into my waking dream….Suddenly the members of my support team were transmogrified into aliens.”
People like Shermer react to this otherworldly experience by saying, in effect, “My, what a weird and scary waking dream; isn’t the brain fascinating?” But Will Andrews, and the more than three million other Americans who believe they have had some kind of encounter with extraterrestrials, step off the pyramid in a different direction. Clinical psychologist Susan Clancy, who interviewed hundreds of believers, found that the process moves along steadily as the possibility of alien abduction comes to seem more and more believable. “All of the subjects I interviewed,” she writes, “followed the same trajectory: once they started to suspect they’d been abducted by aliens, there was no going back….Once the seed