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.28 It is, dare we say, an
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