The short, seemingly paradoxical, explanation is that she could have been awake and she could have been dreaming. Setting aside the Pokemon for a moment, let’s first consider her report of waking up, unable to move, with a crushing presence on top of her. The technical term that might apply here is ‘sleep paralysis,’ a subtype of parasomnia, or sleep disturbance. Beyond the inability to move, these periods of wakeful paralysis are often accompanied with vivid multisensory hallucinations. Effectively, imagery from your dreams can actually intrude into your waking reality.

The content of hallucinations can often be thematically linked to the feeling of paralysis – manifesting as visions of an intruder in the bed who is physically holding the sleeper down. Records of incidents attributable to sleep paralysis can actually be found throughout history and across cultures with records dating back at least as far as 400 BC. This first reference has been traced to the Zhou Li/Chun Guan, an ancient Chinese book on sleep and dreaming. The text includes a taxonomy of different types of dreaming and researchers have identified E-meng (‘dreams of surprise’) as sharing many of the characteristics that are now associated with sleep paralysis. Depending on the time period and cultural context, these nightmare visions can be interpreted in different ways.

Sleep paralysis researchers Brian Sharpless and Karl Dograhmji have collected 118 different terms from around the world that describe sleep paralysis-like experiences: Germans have terms for hexendrücken – witch pressing – and alpdrücken – elf pressing. Norwegian folktales include svartalfar – evil elves that shoot people with paralysing arrows before perching on their chests. The Japanese have a term, kanashibari, in reference to being magically bound by invisible metal. In parts of Switzerland people speak of tchutch-muton, an evil nightmare fairy that disguises itself as a black sheep. Kurds refer to mottaka, an evil spirit that suffocates people in the night. The Iranians have a term called bakhtak, which refers to a type of jinn that sits on the sleeper’s chest. Scientists have theorised that sleep paralysis experiences might be result in some modern accounts of alien abductions. So I don’t feel it’s a huge logical leap to include Pokemon assaults.

If it weighs as much as a duck…

For comparison’s sake, consider this account by Jon Louder, who gave ‘evidence’ during the infamous Salem Witch Trials in 1692:

“… I going well to bed, about the dead of the night felt a great weight upon my breast, and awakening, looked, and it being bright moonlight, did clearly see Bridget Bishop, or her likeness, sitting upon my stomach. And putting my arms off of the bed to free myself from that great oppression, she presently laid hold of my throat and almost choked me. And I had no strength or power in my hands to resist or help myself. And in this condition she held me to almost day.”