If only they knew back then, huh?

So many innocent people, believed to a witch, were burned at the stake and hung. Sleep paralysis is defined as “a discrete period of time during which voluntary muscle movement is inhibited, yet ocular and respiratory movements are intact.”

So, you can imagine why the townspeople of Salem in 1692, with little scientific knowledge, believed these people were possessed by demons or were practiced witchcraft.

Psychologists at the University of Pennsylvania say that less than 8 percent of the general population experiences sleep paralysis although two groups experience a greater prevalence — students and psychiatric patients.

Hallucination are also a common part of sleep paralysis. People experience three basic types of hallucinations during sleep paralysis: the presence of an intruder, pressure on the chest sometimes accompanied by physical and/or sexual assault experiences and levitation or out-of-body experiences.

Alien abductions and demons that attack while people are asleep, are implicated as different cultural interpretations of sleep paralysis.

I think it’s safe to say that sleep paralysis has probably been the cause of many alien abduction stories that people swear have happened. If sleep paralysis caused people to burn other human beings to death at the stake, I’m pretty sure it could convince someone they have been visited by aliens.

I’m not saying I don’t believe in life outside of earth, because I do, but I am very skeptical about alien visitation.

Do the math, the two groups that are most likely to suffer from sleep paralysis are students and psychiatric patients + the fact that alien abductions and demon hauntings are a common part of sleep paralysis. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure that one out.

It’s amazing to see the evolution in human knowledge. In 1692 witches were an actual fear for a lot of people and now in 2011 we are learning that there was an actual answer to why these people were considered demons. So often society has a perception of a certain thing and than later learns that their lack of knowledge on that thing has caused them to have a twisted perception and is causing more negativity than positivity. It’s part of the evolution of consciousness, knowledge is power.